Vast Chains by Jute Gyte
Notes:
"Semen Dried Into the Silence of Rock and Mineral" is a line from Anaïs Nin's House of Incest. "The Inexpressible Loneliness of Thinking" is a line from the essay "On Poetic Truth" by H.D. Lewis, sometimes mistakenly attributed to Wallace Stevens; I confess that I haven't read the essay and got the line from Marshall Boswell's Understanding David Foster Wallace. I regard this song title as the best I'm likely to come across and I sometimes lament having used it already. "Refusing a Heavenly Mansion" is a line from Yeats. "What in our lives is burnt/in the fire of this?" is a line from "August 1914" by Isaac Rosenberg. Several lines on this album are appropriated from the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith.
"One-man Missouri avant-garde black-metal project Jute Gyte uses guitars retrofitted to play 24-tone equal-tempered scales—meaning he's got twice as many notes in an octave as an ordinary guitarist. His songs teem with unearthly clusters of seasick dissonance, so that they sometimes sound like early Sonic Youth with blastbeats and shrieking. Unfamiliar microtonal intervals create intricate acoustic interference patterns, so that tones shimmer and dislocate. Ears accustomed to Western 12-tone polyphony can barely process these sounds—they sink into your skull like red-hot stones into ice. It's like you're listening to a tape at the wrong speed, or to music warped by a black hole's gravitational lens on its way here from several galaxies away." - Chicago Reader
"You'll recognize the use of microtonal riffing if you've experienced last year's Discontinuities, only rather than repeating that album, he's interpreted the technique into a more unpredictable, angular geometry that throws you curve balls in almost every track on the album. Songs are divided into harsher passages of insectoid, bristling dissonance, or springier and cleaner riffs set off against distorted dementia, with the tempos fluxed between the faster black metallic rushes of his prior works and a slower, creepier miasma of impenetrable doom that is compounded by the fresh intervals being picked and strummed. I couldn't even begin to accurately compare this to anything outside of Jute Gyte's own body of work, but strange word puzzles like 'Philip Glass being filtered through the unwashed demos of the stranger LLN bands' seem to pop into my imagination as I'm listening." - From the Dust Returned
"Kalmbach plays a microtonal guitar, which allows him to lever unbelievable amounts of dissonance into his compositions — so much that it’s easy to forget that he’s playing a guitar at all. And yet his songs are weirdly compelling, thanks in part to his awesome vocals and lyrics. This is seriously some of the most insane-sounding metal I’ve ever heard." - Stereogum
"Vast Chains takes all the tropes of black metal and transforms them into something super psychedelic and avant, the tunings, the arrangements, the melodies, fans of groups like Deathspell Omega, Blut Aus Nord, who traffic in woozy, slippery riffage, and blurred blackness, Jute Gyte takes that experimentalism a step further... the guitar parts and riffs are so odd, so damaged and atonal, sometimes they conjure utter beauty, lush lovely sonic swells, other times, they're so warped they almost make your eyes water. Opener "Semen Dried Into The Silence Of Rock And Mineral", lays it all out, sounding a bit like a slow motion Mesuhuggah, or a super spare, 20th century Deathspell, the sound chugging and churning, creeping and slithering, the vibe more doomy really than black, the arrangement confoundingly mathy, intricate and constantly shifting, and the guitars, holy shit, even when the heaviness is peeled back, leaving just some haunting clean guitar shimmer, those parts somehow sound even MORE strange and alien." - Aquarius Records
Tracklist
Credits
Created Summer 2011 - Summer 2012
Thanks to A. Nin, C.A. Smith
