Entry 1600 - Oerheks - Landschapsanachronismen

Style: atmospheric black metal

Thoughts: Oerheks is a band that I only started listening to in the past year or so. Frequent readers will know that I'm very hard to please when it comes to new black metal. There is so much redundancy in the black metal genre that it's hard for me to find stuff that I truly enjoy anymore... at least that's new. Of course I'll always be able to go back to my favorite albums, but a new band... that's something pretty rare.

Landschapsanachronismen is a two song EP. Both songs are around twelve to thirteen minutes long and are veiled by a pretty obscure production. There are all sorts of black metal productions in this world. The one that graces this album sounds like the band recorded the music normally then took a loud speaker into a well. They played the album at the bottom of the well and placed a single microphone above the well to catch the audio. This is the context in which Landschapsanachronismen exists. 

For most of the album the guitars dominate. They create layer upon layer of murky notes and riffs that get muddled by the production. On top of this you have keyboards intertwining from time to time to create a truly dense sound. The drums and bass are obscured by the production so much that they are barely audible. The bass drums barely create a sound and the snare just sounds like a clap that happens from time to time. This would normally bother me but the fact that neither of these instruments is audible is not truly a concern with the album as the main focus is clearly the atmosphere.

Are the individual moments of this album memorable? Probably not as much as I would like them to be. The thing is though that this is again not the main focus. The primary concern of the band is to create an atmosphere, a deep, unsettling, yet somehow beautiful atmosphere. In this aspect Landschapsanachronismen succeeds immensely.

Oerheks has been a curiosity of mine for a while now. I'm still trying to figure out why I enjoy their music to the extent that I do. It's obviously the atmosphere that draws me in. The songs are like archeological digs that require patience and effort to uncover. Sometimes this happens and there is no reward, however with Oerheks the payoff is real. 

I believe there are few more releases from this band that I can add to my collection. I'm going to be investigating these to see if that is a possibility based on my experience with the band so far.