Taped ‘n Draped: A Fiadh Productions Roundup
Doot Tape in the Deck…
Look, I get it. I’m not Megachiles. I’m not Reliquary Tower. What I know of the synth world, in all its variations, is limited, shallow, superficial. I had, a deep aversion to all things dungeon synth until I figured out stuff like comfy synth or cozy synth or even a lot of medieval dungeon synth is basically just nerdy ambient. No label has been more central to me embracing the world of underground dweeb synth more than Fiadh Productions. I’ve waxed poetic about the purveyor of limited-run cassettes in the past, and I feel even more strongly about them today. Of course, Fiadh trades in more than synth-based projects, spending a lot of time in the world of black metal while also venturing out to other genres. Today, we’re going to run through 5 recent releases that demonstrate the breadth and depth of Fiadh’s vision. And we’re takin’ it back to the old school: 100 words each! (Except for one. Stay tuned.)
Termagant – Demo 2024
July 5, 2024 | Pink-shelled cassette | Digital version
From Lust Hag‘s Eleanor Harper comes a gaseous, pugnacious three-track demo of grimy and slimy death metal for all those shrews, scolds, harridans, viragos, and violent and brawling women in your life. Imagine an Andy Capp cartoon: he’s gettin’ his stupid-ass whooped by his rightfully belligerent wife, but the cloud of ruckus that erupts from their marital spat is also a giant fart cloud. That’s how I’d describe this delightful Odorous Smelly Death Metal demo in all its gory glory. Something nasty is brewing in Big Sky Country, and it’s ready to munch and squish its way through your innards.
Snawfluss – The Six-Petal Rosette
July 5, 2024 | Navy blue-shelled cassette | Digital version
There’s something about this Virginia-based fantasy synth project that just clicks for me. Last year’s Four Dimensions was so soft, so alluring, so inviting, so calming. It was salvific and whimsical. This year’s Six-Petal Rosette raises the stakes, showcasing a mythic melodrama that ebbs and flows passionately throughout the album. “Flower of Life” goes so far as to unleash a post-black finale that is, frankly, shocking both in its audacity and in its narrative cohesion. And thus the whole album unfolds adorned in wonder. You simply believe that this album is suffused with ancient wisdom and the philosophy of interconnectedness.
Partholón – The Ocean Pours In
July 5, 2024 | Frosted blue-shelled cassette | Digital version
Though the name “Partholón” might recall Medieval Irish history, we are not crawling in the dungeons. Partholón, hailing from coastal southern Ireland, play the kind of atmospheric sludge/post-metal that calls to mind that moment in the careers of Isis and Neurosis when the bands were still heavy but not quite as heavy but also still plenty heavy. Partholón find themselves most comfortable in that liminal space of a Cult of Luna or Nomadic Rituals or Black Sleep of Kali song where what is graceful and fragile turns malicious and world-crumbling. This is an imaginative blending of cosmos, humus, and oceania.
Galvanist/Ulm – Hollowtop
June 28, 2024 |Black-shelled cassette | Digital verison
What is going on in Bozangeles? Hollowtop sees two Montana-based bands break out of the Bozone, fearless and relentless in their distinct capacities to twist listeners into a Gordian knot of infinite complexity. Galvanist play a charred-to-the-crisp progressive doom that seems to take just a sliver of the earliest Mastodon and tortures it into something almost unrecognizable. On the other side of the split, Ulm spit out a caustic, distempered, atonal black metal for fans of Yellow Eyes, Krallice, or Scarcity. “Alpine Death Cult Master” in particular will have you clenching your teeth as the band almost blasts itself apart.
Gladekeeper – Yearntale: The Tale of a Hedgehog’s Journey Following a Tumultuous Winter
June 21, 2024 | Forest floor-shelled cassette | Digital version
Perhaps because you are a hedgehog in the Olde Fox Den—having had your afternoon tea, still grateful for berry and warmth—you begin to wonder about what the hedgehog knows and what the fox knows. Perhaps infamously, it has been claimed a hedgehog knows one thing while a fox knows many. Perhaps you spend some time wondering if you, a hedgehog, are a hedgehog in this regard, or if you are a fox. Is the fox a fox or a hedgehog? Where does your capaciousness lie? Is it in understanding one thing fully, wholly, entirely—so much so that you sometimes forget how much you do know about it? Or is yours a heterodoxic temperament? Is the capaciousness you carry through woods, through the grotto, through the willow, through the glade, one that permits to see vastly, to unite disparate ideas and theories and philosophies under, to survey the endless arena of life and learn and then know a polyglottal amount? Or, you then must wonder: what would it mean to be a vulpine hedgehog? To be something in between. To be neither one nor the other. You are a traveler and a survivor. What you know and do not know and are yet to know will not fit suitably into a parlour game. And so the brooks and the creeks everflow around you, safe in your garden, knowing that you are both and neither, that you are spectacularly undetermined. Let us rest.
And yet! You also know that you’re totally miffed (and maybe peeved!) that the cassette version of your journey is only available to Subscribers. All you want to do is pay $10 (plus shipping) for that forest floor-shelled cassette. It’s forest floor-shelled! Ah, so be it. This might find its way to my year-end list. It is exactly what I want out of my comfy forest synth: the opportunity to wander and wonder.
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