Noir Noir – Black Curtain / Divine Swelling LP

For almost twenty years Spain's recluse visual master, composer and death fetishist Noir Noir has dredged the most forlorn depths of death industrial, dark wave, and raw black metal to uncover an auditory death ritual of unprecedented wretchedness and magnificence. The project's two crowning achievements, 2016's mini album "Black Curtain" (originally released on cassette by Fallow Field), and 2022's "Divine Swelling" (originally released by Hedonic Reversal as side one of the split cassette with Vesakh), now finally see their righteous enshrinement, remastered (courtesy of death-industrial master Grant Richardson) and released for the first time ever on vinyl and CD formats as due solemnization for one of underground industrial's most defiant, enigmatic, and transformative entities.

While the band's sparse but enduring output has touched upon various digressions in the realms of dark ambient, noise and power electronics, these two releases in particular are the ones which showcase the band's most coherent, focused, and visionary output, being the foremost two releases in Noir Noir's discography which most define and consecrate the project's monumental morbid triumph. By far the band's two most pervasive and straightforward releases, "Black Curtain" and "Divine Swelling" unfold a prodigious death-scarred voidscape of oppressive ritualistic rhythms, glacial sequences and tortured proclamations that condemn the listener to an all-consuming auditory punishment. Obviously influenced by, or convergently evolved from, the darkened explorations of acts like Brighter Death Now, Lurker of Chalice, Mütilation, Trepaneringsritualen, Skinny Puppy, Throbbing Gristle and Dead Can Dance, these crowning forty minutes of Noir Noir's discography represent an inestimable underground hidden jewel of perverse and grandiose necro-indutrial that are a must for any enthusiast of hermetic and cult-like auditory digressions into the depths of occultism, ritualism and sadism.