VERFÜHRERVERGELTER - From the Void​:​Silicon Signals to a Dead Brain

 Released: June 8

Following up from last year's full length album, VERFÜHRERVERGELTER bring us a heavy extended EP filled with all sorts of nightmarish noises to get a good night's sleep to, if sleeping is your thing. From the Void​:​Silicon Signals to a Dead Brain largely follows in the footsteps of [gelöscht] in terms of sound design, but the arrangements feel much tighter overall. The best way I can put it is where [gelöscht] had a more free-form and improvisational quality, this album feels much more directed, with a sense of intentionality behind everything. Both are great, but this certainly caught my ear as I listened on. 

The opener, "Aschewüste" is a slow industrial grind that resembles something more ambient than anything else, at first. The track slowly simmers along as it approaches the end, slowly gathering more sounds in its atmosphere until we get to the last minute and the pulse of the track is at its peak, nearly bludgeoning the listener with a rhythmic surge that hits like forceful waves. "Deathpile" follows this by starting out with a similar surging but it fades away shortly and then it is pretty back and forth on whether it chooses to be rhythmic or not. Near the end, we get some metallic percussion that gives some sense of rhythm but allows the madness to continue behind it. 

In a fun twist, the shortest track "Silicium sale" is the most like a true industrial track out of all. That distorted bass is fun and chugs along for the duration and the drums form a kind of call and response dynamic to the bass riff slamming along. This is probably my favorite track on here as I couldn't quite get enough of that chugging sound and I had to play it back several times after I had finished the whole EP. We get something similar on the bonus track at the very end with a rapid fire but rather subdued bit of a percussive arrangement. No chug-a-lugging here but instead we get some long and stretched out noise palattes that make a nice contrast to the steady and quick percussion holding the soundscape together. But what's really most enjoyable about this album is that has managed to put a lot of different ideas together in a small and succinct package that doesn't feel too short.