By Owen Coggins
Weird drone two-piece Nyogtha from Reading send back their notes from The Black Void Between the Stars.
Having recently seen the likes of Ghold, Eagle Twin, Pombagira and Bismuth demonstrate that sticking at just two noise-making band members can somehow vastly increase the cosmos-bending heaviness potential (and looking forward to Ommadon doing the same on tour with Horse Latitudes), I’ve been looking forward to checking out Nyogtha after they were recommended on a similar basis. It turns out that this cult doom duo is reporting back from territories a little further out from the various strains of pummeling doom of the bands just mentioned, and while they’ve certainly spent some consideration chiselling out their particular slow, low heavy droning, the overall effect is a fair bit more ethereal.
I love the opening of the first of four long tracks, 'The Wailing Woman:' a really distinctive sound in the low end tones, like sombre ink blots billowing slowly out through dark, watery atmospheres. After this all reverberates around for a bit, the eponymous wailing woman enters in a moaning indecipherable tenor, sporadically supplemented by a sort of monkish chanting in the background… lost in a dream, an underwater forest, a haze of painkillers and faint lights...
This is extended with minimal variation around these sonic tropes for 16 minutes, and actually, for the rest of the other three tracks too, two of which trek out beyond the 20-minute mark. This isn’t to say there aren’t moments of differentiation which stick out from the drifting morass: such as the more hissing, then screeching vocals not far into 'This Ceaseless Devouring;' or some subtly creative guitar swirls that nag at the sides of your attention in the first track. But the relentless consistency of the sonic palette, over such long tracks, combines to evoke some sort of lament, somewhere between grief and utter loss of memory.
It’s often said that droning music 'doesn’t go anywhere,' I generally disagree, and think it’s instead more about the way that only very subtle, patient development can open up certain wide vistas for reflection. But here it does feel that where you might expect some kind of minimalist journey, instead there’s a vague, reverberating stasis. At first listen I was reminded of Menace Ruine’s folk-noise drones, and admit that Nyogtha came off slightly the worse, since despite a similar set up (evocative vocals over a kind of blank, noisy drone) Nyogtha attempt their hauntings through other echoes than the kind of fragile, archaic-sounding melodies and lysergic summonings that make Menace Ruine so unique and unparalleled.
Instead, a more resonant comparison would be the self-proclaimed 'space drone ambient' of Nebula VII and Saturn Form Essence, sonic emanations meandering through unknown solar systems, then accidentally picked up and channelled through hazy synthy keyboards and photocopied pictures of galaxies wrapped around cassette tapes that then arrive in the mail from Eastern Europe.
As with these couple of projects, Nyogtha feel like they can be a bit hit or miss, but considering their slightly unnerving way of stopping time with such a distinctive and unchanging sound, it makes you wonder whether it’s just your reception of the remote signal that’s fading in and out.
