Review by Sandre the Giant
Centipede Abyss have been a label that I’ve really followed this year where possible, putting out some of the year’s weirdest and most avantgarde takes on extreme music. Such as the new record from international jazz-influenced death metallers Zvylpwkua (still no idea what that says), ‘The Outlying Entities’, which is out now.
The increasingly unsettling dark ambient of ‘Dimension Walker’ that opens this record is merely a taste of what is to come. Scattered hi hat chitters across the drone before the wild, abyssal belch of ‘Vanished Vibrations’ appears, shredded by unruly soloing and almost mathcore structures. Freeform jazz in the death metal canon is rare, but Zvylpwkua have that precise feel in mind. Like the thrashing of some Chthonian beast, guitar riffs pulled into dimensional wounds and time signatures from beyond our cosmos, there is much risk that ‘The Outlying Entities’ may disintegrate into gibbering madness at any moment. ‘Opposition’ keeps it hanging on, ugly death metal riffs carving a bloody path towards the chaotic spiral galaxy of Zvylpwkua’s work. Each track feels like a stage of meditative transcendence, but Nirvana will not be your final location. It is going to be the Warp. The quietly frenzied, galaxial spin sounds of ‘The Things That Devour and Dissolve’ adds into the album’s feel as a cosmic horror made flesh, as terrifying when quiet as when loud.
Ugly, twisted and dissonant but utterly compelling, ‘The Outlying Entities’ is an album that you spend most of it wondering what the fuck is going on, and then at the end you feel elation. You made it. The journey is over and you have arrived at the chaotic, interdimensional rift where this has been spat into the universe. You’re about to go insane as satisfyingly as possible. A wild release for patient travellers.
https://www.facebook.com/zvylpwkua
https://zvylpwkua.bandcamp.com/
https://centipedeabyss.bandcamp.com/
The Killchain 