What or who are Cultus Sabbati?

They’re a group from Australia, who maintain closely-guarded anonymity and are practitioners of magick rituals involving vocals, guitars, home-made electronics, and massive amplification.

The rituals are recorded and then edited into compositions of quite terrifying density and sonic extremes. Whatever these rituals may or may not involve, they’re certainly not good for the hearing of anyone concerned.

Regardless, whether or not you buy into the occult schtick is largely irrelevant. The Garden of Forking Ways is simply a masterful drone/power electronics album.

It’s also got a mangled foot in the black metal camp, but this isn’t black metal as we know it. The vocal style reminds me both of Xasthur and of the Crypsis/Eurostopodus Argus 10″/7″ double-pack by fellow Aussie(s?) Grief No Absolution  - the harsher, rasping vocals are heavily-processed, possibly even subjected to massive bitcrushing, whereas more chant-like vocals are buried deep in the mix with loads of reverb and very little treble. It’s all brilliantly unsettling, and unsettlingly brilliant. But it might send you running back to Merzbow for some easy listening.

If you can get hold of the vinyl release, it’s doubly great – it’s on thick blood-red marbled vinyl in a beautifully-produced sleeve, and sounds incredible. The digital version simply doesn’t do this unholy squall of noise proper justice. There are just 333 copies – obviously they couldn’t afford a complete beast – and I have one of them.

I can’t recommend this highly enough if you like drone/noise stuff.

Aficionados of black metal, drone metal, doom metal, “griefcore” and whatever other metal genres have sprung up in the last fifteen minutes might like to investigate Vasculum. The group/artist’s page has a few songs for download – I like it very much, but then I would.

The Vasculum manifesto is, apparently,

no audience engagement – no promotional engagement – no performance – no collaboration – no photographs – identity of no significance – location/eating habits of no significance – to be listened to at massive volume or not at all

It’s safe to assume that it’s music in the best tradition of one-man lo-fi black metal projects, I think, and puts me in mind of the likes of Xasthur and Leviathan. If anything Vasculum is (are?) a lot less refined and a lot more brutal. Listen here: http://vasculum.co.uk

Seeing Bavouzet perform Ravel’s Concerto pour la main gauche at the Proms last Friday was an immensely inspiring experience. His technical assurance was such that he made the flashier, more mercurial runs and fiendish final cadenza seem like a spontaneous outpouring.

I had some serious goose-bumps several times during Bavouzet’s performance, which more than made up for the lacklustre première of Arvo Part’s fourth symphony, which I’d be inclined to describe (at best) as inoffensive.

It’s only recently that I’ve seen other pianists perform works for the left hand in concert. The other was James Rhodes, in recital at the Guardian Hay Festival. There, James played the Blumenfeld Étude pour la main gauche in A flat – and, as was the case with Bavouzet, one really wouldn’t aware of it being a single-handed performance, were it not for the fact that both pianists at various points used their right arms to brace themselves against the side of the piano.

This element of posture interests me – I’m not sure (and perhaps James will be kind enough to comment on this if I prod him on Twitter) whether it’s deliberate or almost unconscious. You see, when I play pieces for the left hand alone, I tend to keep my right hand rather demurely anchored on my right knee.

Now, I’ve never noticed any extraordinary aches or pains while playing, for example, the Bach-Brahms Chaconne, but when I work on the Ravel – particularly the evil (for me)  jumps up and down the keyboard at the end of the first cadenza – I come away feeling a bit the worse for wear, particularly in my back muscles. It’s early days – I don’t have to have the piece learned until next spring – but I’d be interested if any of you who play pieces for left hand alone have any thoughts on the matter… does a gentle lean into the piano with the right arm help matters?

I’ve been playing about with Spotify Premium and for the first time I’m starting to think that it’s a potential life-changer, even for an inveterate record collector like me. The joy of trying stuff out at high resolution with the off-line feature of the iPhone application is great.

Yesterday’s listening:

• Boulez – Le Marteau sans Maitre
• Can – Delay 1968
• Can – Monster Movie
• Neu! – Neu!2
• Burzum – Belus
• Boulez – Pli Selon Pli/Livre pour Cordes
• Billy Jenkins – First Aural Art Exhibition

The great thing is that I really didn’t like the Malcolm Mooney-era Can material, which I hadn’t heard before, nor Neu!2. And I didn’t have to pay for the individual discs in order to find that out. And it was legal (I never really got into the whole downloading thing).

Today:

• Burzum – Belus
• Billy Jenkins – First Aural Art Exhibition
• Wild Man Fischer – Pronounced Normal

The Burzum album is on heavy rotation. It’s possibly the best thing he’s recorded, and it utterly relentless.

In the month since I last posted, I’ve discovered that I can just about make sense of Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum (as a listener rather than a player!) and both the new Bunnymen and Raveonettes albums have turned up. Both are rather good, if you can get past the extremely poppy production of the former and the rather crass “Boys Who Rape” on the latter.

So, anyway, today’s listening:

• Bach – Partitas 1, 5, 6 (Murray Perahia)
• Mussorgsky – Pictures at an Exhibition arranged for accordion duo
• Mozart – early symphony chosen at random (don’t recall which)
• Echo & The Bunnymen – The Fountain
• Haydn – Cello Concertos 1 & 2 (Rostropovich)
• Eels – Hombre Lobo

If anything else gets played, it’ll probably be a randomly-selected disc from the Altarus Opus Clavicembalisticum set. I’m assimilating that piece gradually.

Excuse the lack of commentary for this list. It was a long day at the chocolate teapot factory. Needless to say, the Bunnymen single continues to be magnificent.

At home, I found that the new BBC Music magazine had arrived, and so I cooked the dinner while not really paying attention to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (in fact I was so busy reading the reviews section that I didn’t really pay attention to what was bubbling away on the hob either, with the result that my pasta boiled over). I can’t offer anything by way of intelligent comment on the BBC disc. I’ll listen to it properly tomorrow.

This evening it’s been a “jazz curiosities” session:

• Christof Lauer – Fragile Network
• Michel Godard – Castel del Monte II

And, finally, the new Echo & The Bunnymen single, Think I Need It Too. I wasn’t going to buy it, as both tracks are on the album. But that meant depriving myself of hearing them for a fortnight, and that simply wouldn’t do. Needless to say, it’s perfect – classic Bunnymen, with a Krautrocky motoric rhythm, two chords and the sort of chorus that none of today’s mummy’s boys can manage. And Mac is in particularly fine voice.

• Soler – Fandango (Aapo Hakkinen)
• Neil Young – Zuma (several times, again)
• Haydn – assorted piano sonatas (Marc-André Hamelin, thanks to a recommendation by James Rhodes)
• Honegger – Symphony no. 2

That be it.

• Zuma (almost four times)
• Tonight’s The Night
• Mirrorball

I’ve now got a little pre-bedtime post-rock on, in the form of the magnificent self-titled album by This Will Destroy You. They make me very nostalgic for the time when it was still possible to anticipate a new release by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.