Giveaway - A Fortnight Spent Beneath Ashen Skies t-shirt by Christian Degn

[Welcome to the second Metal Bandcamp giveaway! Recently I fell in love with a t-shirt featuring the gorgeous drawing A Fortnight Spent Beneath Ashen Skies by Christian Degn. After procuring it a thought entered my mind: more people should know about this shirt

The giveaway is over. See who won at the bottom of the post.

[Welcome to the second Metal Bandcamp giveaway! Recently I fell in love with a t-shirt featuring the gorgeous drawing A Fortnight Spent Beneath Ashen Skies by Christian Degn. After procuring it a thought entered my mind: more people should know about this shirt, so they can love it like I do. Hence this giveaway, enter it and you may win the t-shirt for yourself to wear.

Besides the giveaway we have music as well. Christian was kind enough to send me a Bandcamp playlist of albums that kept him company while creating the drawing. Enjoy, and check out his store for prints (and the t-shirt if you do not win it here).]


The title of the drawing on this shirt is "A Fortnight Spent Beneath Ashen Skies, an Eternity Under the Eyes of Our Lord” which was a phrase that kept repeating in my head as I was drawing it. This is usually how I name pieces, if they do end up getting a name. The only symbolism that I intentionally put into this image was the hour glass, and it’s meaning is actually not terribly deep, simply representing mortality. I suppose this whole illustration could be dedicated to this idea. Everything else is just there because I liked how it looked. I have plans to make more shirts with other illustrations I’ve done, but I figured I would start out with one of my older drawings. In total I probably spent around 20 or so hours on this piece, possibly more or less. It was on my desk for about a month while I worked on other drawings and school work, picking away at it slowly. Of course I had plenty of music keeping me company through this process, here are a few of the albums I recall playing regularly around the time of working on it.


This album was playing as I started this drawing. Originally I was only planning to draw the left half of the image. I had started it a couple of weeks before my birthday and was drawing it as as a sort of gift for myself, and with another year passing, an hourglass seems fitting. Xothist has a interesting songwriting style that really lets my mind wander with their meandering compositions, but it still has a rawness that keeps it very mysterious and menacing while demanding attention. I also had the Dwarfer cassette playing a lot as well around this time, though I’m not sure if the band has a stream anywhere. Either way, this stuff deserves way more praise than I see it getting. Really top notch stuff!

I’ve always been infatuated with Locrian’s music since I was first introduced to them, but this album really caught me off guard from track one. All their releases have a really long shelf life for me as well, if that’s the right way to put it? I mean I had this album in rotation regularly up until Infinite Dissolution which followed this release (and it’s kinda been the same story with that album!) My routine during this summer was to go for an evening run and come home and sit by the fan and blast this record while playing an hour or so of Metroid 2 on gameboy before working on art stuff. It makes for the perfect soundtrack to a lonely space exploration game! Locrian’s musical sensibility and aesthetic always has the feeling of intrigue and haziness, like seeing a mysterious door in a dream that you know you want to approach, but are apprehensive about. But the band shows you inside the door and it’s usually nothing to be afraid of, but something to find wonder in. I also always love seeing Terence Hannum’s collage pieces using cassette tape and design elements from labels. As a generally line-oriented artist, I’ve always taken a lot away from seeing his work. I hope I can see some in person eventually, I’m sure the light interacting with the tape provides a whole new level to the viewing experience. I’ll quit fawning now ha!

I always have to listen to a Krallice album at some point during a drawing. There’s something about hearing the way these dudes account for every detail in their songs that really lends itself to falling into that sort of zen state, where inking monotonous lines becomes more meditative than tedious. The word I always see people throw around to describe Krallice is dizzying, which really is probably the best way to describe any Krallice riff. The other thing I love about how detail-oriented this band’s discography tends to be, is that I can almost always find something new on every listen. Not a lot of bands do that for me! This was another album I was playing on cassette a lot, and hearing that extra layer of fuzz really makes you aware of how much influence these guys drew from that raw black metal sound. If you can find a copy I recommend you snagging it! (if only for the alternate cover art on the j-card, which has grade-A layout!)

I believe I may have actually stumbled across this album through this very site! I probably played it at least once during every drawing I did between 2014 and 2015. I really love how spacey this album feels, despite a pretty grind-y backbone. For me it feels a lot like Vektor meets Gridlink but a little bit more blackened? I think the thing that really kept me coming back to this release the most was actually the vocal mix. It has those sort of DSBM howls and it fits with the song writing excellently. I usually pay attention to guitars and drums more than anything so it’s rare for me to find vocals done in a way that actually make them the highlight. These make me feel like a little kid hearing heavy metal for the first time and being kind of scared but still transfixed. Also just like.. the riffs, man!

This might be my favorite album ever. It’s almost always in rotation, but I was listening to this more than usual right as I was finishing up on this drawing because, if I remember correctly, The Unnatural World had just come out earlier in the year. I thought about including that album instead, since it was as significant around that time for me, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it above this record which always really messes me up in the best way on every listen. I don’t know what I could say about Deathconsciousness that hasn’t already been said and said more eloquently than I’m capable of, but there’s no way I couldn’t give it a mention. Also I believe the Flenser just announced another pressing recently so I suggest jumping on that if you get the chance! The sleeve and zine included are absolutely stunning! A detail I love is that the Flenser pressing uses the Jaques-Louis David cover, and then uses the original LP cover for the zine. This album definitely demands your attention the first handful of listens. I suggest turning it up very loud and turning off all the lights! Repeat until you’ve gained enough immunity that you can actually draw to this album without sobbing all over your paper!

[The giveaway is over. Thanks to all who entered, and for all the nice comments. The randomly selected winners are:

Brad Sanders29 - bradscottsand AT gmail DOT com
AM30 - merschat AT gmail DOT com

The t-shirts have now been sent to Brad from New York and Artie from Texas. Congratulations to both of you!]

Krallice - Ygg huur

By Justin C. It feels weird to categorize Krallice as black metal at this point, given their latest album, Ygg hurr. Granted, they were never dyed-in-the-wool second-wave worshipers, so the shift in sound on their latest album isn't quite as abrupt as it might seem at first. To be honest, my first thought was, "Krallice made a Gorguts album!"

By Justin C.


It feels weird to categorize Krallice as black metal at this point, given their latest album, Ygg hurr. Granted, they were never dyed-in-the-wool second-wave worshipers, so the shift in sound on their latest album isn't quite as abrupt as it might seem at first. To be honest, my first thought was, "Krallice made a Gorguts album!" But listening to it back to back with Colored Sands, I realized that wasn't quite the full story. There's as much of Dysrhythmia's torturous prog goodness here as their is Gorguts, but given that all of these acts share members, it's not surprising that a lot of influence would bleed through them all.

Krallice at Incubate Festival 2014. Photo by Jostijn Ligtvoet

There's still a hefty dose of the Krallice's patented, extra-dissonant tremolo riffing, but those riffs butt heads with plenty of much stranger fare. Check out the first minute or so of "Over Spirit." The intro sounds like some kind of demented wind-up toy losing steam, but then it runs headlong into a truly righteous tremolo riff. The switch from chugging aggression to an airy, suspended guitar line in "Bitter Meditation"? Utterly beautiful.

The album opener, "Idols," has what might be one of my favorite riffs so far this year. It's a snaky single-note line, complete with counterpoint, that at times sound almost like a canon. (And I mean the musical type of canon here, not the artillery type of cannon.) You know how shredders in the 80s were always going on about their classical influences, which meant that they'd occasionally throw in a Bach line or a trill in a solo? Yeah, this riff puts all of that wankery to shame.

Krallice at Incubate Festival 2014. Photo by Jostijn Ligtvoet

What else is there to like here? Plenty. The bass is up in the mix and hard driving. The percussion is fascinating in its own right, but as with the best rhythm sections, it blends in with the rest of the music rather than trying to stomp all over it.

All that said, I did find this a hard album to warm up to. It took a while for my initial disappointment over this being "not a Krallice album" to fade. But once I learned to stop trying to dissect how much Krallice vs. Gorguts vs. whatever it is, I liked it a little bit more each time I listened to it.

Krallice - Years Past Matter

By Andy Osborn. Brooklyn’s finest proto black metallers are back with a new full length, Years Past Matter. The indefinable quartet has been confounding fans for the past four years with their insane virtuosic approach to avant-garde extreme music

By Andy Osborn.


Brooklyn’s finest proto black metallers are back with a new full length, Years Past Matter. The indefinable quartet has been confounding fans for the past four years with their insane virtuosic approach to avant-garde extreme music. This album, arriving just 16 months after their previous full-length, is as esoteric and mind-bending as one can expect from such a group. Arranged in six pieces, the tracks are inexplicable titled "IIIIIII", "IIIIIIII", "IIIIIIIII" and so on. But these aren’t songs, they’re slabs of metallic calculus concocted and condensed into auditory journeys.

Everything from the album art to the song names reeks of existential musings that the common listener can only begin to identify. The extremely long passages are contortions of sound seemingly guided by some long-dead sentient being, with Krallice’s signature nonstop algebraic-like tremolo remaining as the centerpiece. Nicholas McMaster and Mick Barr’s vocals rarely appear over the course of the hour-long cosmic exploration, but Colin Marston’s huge production and Lev Weinstein’s crushing skinsmanship hit so hard that you’ll never for a second think anything is missing.

Like all Krallice releases, Years Past Matter is not something that can be digested easily. It’s insanely complex, layered and multifaceted in every way imaginable, requiring dozens of listens before even the most tertiary layer is scratched. And while it’s stylistically similar to 2011's Diotima in many ways, that’s a good thing. For a band like this to progress their sound even more would not only be practically impossible, it’s something our tiny mortal brains wouldn’t be able to comprehend anyway.

Krallice - Diotima

Krallice's Diotima was added to the Profound Lore Bandcamp. Progressive black metal may be an oxymoron, but Krallice pulls it off so very nicely. Serpentine, intertwining melodies with hyper fast tremolo picking coupled with massive death metal growls.

Artwork by Max Hooper Schneider, Nick McMaster and Karlynn Holland

Krallice's Diotima was added to the Profound Lore Bandcamp. Progressive black metal may be an oxymoron, but Krallice pulls it off so very nicely. Serpentine, intertwining melodies with hyper fast tremolo picking coupled with massive death metal growls. The production is natural, and heavy sounding, it captures the feel of a band making music together. Here is a great indepth review by BadWolf from No Clean Singing.

Krallice also have their own Bandcamp. Here you can find a free download of Orphan of Sickness, a new EP of Orphan covers.