Stillmother by United Rust

United Rust is a collaboration between Italian electronic musicians Nicola Zolin (vise.) and Alexander Comana (Miedo Total). The project emerged after the pair met while carrying out a master in Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths University, London. They found common ground in black metal theory, ecology and sound design, and sought to create work which incorporates these elements.

The result of this collaboration is Stillmother, initially conceived as a multimedia project involving performance, live sound, and dance. Reconfigured due to the global pandemic, the 8-track EP is an assemblage of pieces that mine elements from black metal and club culture, both of which are simultaneously embedded in notions of collectiveness and separation. The opposing forces of these elements interact, developing into viscous distortion and low-frequency kick blasts, side-chaining gabber percussions with raw and obscure guitar riffs, driving cruel metallic clashes with acidic and digital textures.

Stillmother is inspired in part by the concept of dépense, coined by Georges Bataille, a term that describes the surplus of offerings made by ancient populations to their deities; an excess that is left to rot or burn. Stillmother combines this idea with the theory of Flat Ontology by Manuel DeLanda, as well as the notion of Deep Ecology. By charging each element in the piece with excessive processing, their musical context is flattened and remodelled; the individual components become more relevant than their totality: the final result is metal from a flattened perspective. Music under pressure from the excessive force of its individual parts.

Stillmother is a study of excess: the ferocious, machinegun-like blast beat of drums that surges to the forefront, pushing everything else into the background, the overwhelming wall of distorted noise that smothers every object, even itself, like black smoke billowing from an industrial chimney, in the full range of the frequency spectrum; a blind space surrounded by an inhuman blackness.

Record Label run by Aleksandar Vucenovic, based in Vienna, Austria.

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