En Nihil – Pyres C40

Maniacal Hatred

En Nihil is a death industrial project that’s been around since the mid-nineties. When I first received this tape I did a double-take, finding myself curious to see if this was the project of old. With Pyres En Nihil shows that the passage of time has not dulled his skills but rather sharpened them to a hallowed point.

With 20 minutes per side there is a wealth of material and a variety of textures and passages are presented as well, yet at the same time keeping a thick core of frequencies and qualities that tie the recording together very effectively. Kicking off with a throbbing wall of industrial noise eventually things lead into a huge electronic kick drum with overdriven reverb tails and audio artifacts colliding into one another. The transitions are often very smooth which really morphs things together in an interesting fashion and makes me hear new things every time I listen to the record. Finally when you think things are dying down a blast of white-hot harsh noise and blurred spoken samples buried in the mix is the bulk of the following track. The ebb and flow of Pyres is very well developed.

En Nihil also is able to maximize the listening space here with blasts of bass that just reach ultimate levels of heaviness while still allowing distorted highs to bleed through. The use of distortion and overdrive here is something that few noise artists are able to achieve and En Nihil flaunts it. Another great thing is that En Nihil really allows himself to explore his sound and different elements to the fullest. Moments feel themselves out and then change at just the right times. This tape truly presents a blackened crust of death industrial music with an uncompromising aesthetic and heavy sound, Pyres is everything I want to hear in a noise release.

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