One-man Missouri project Jute Gyte is one of the more prolific black metal artists around these days, as well as one of the most woefully underrated. Adam Kalmbach, the man behind Jute Gyte, could have had a remarkable year with only the cassette he made for Black Horizons and the electronic record Dialectics. Instead, he decided to return to his roots and release one of his best works yet, Ship of Theseus, which mixes his personal brand of microtonal black metal with noise, doom and death. 

Jute Gyte is also one of the strangest black metal projects around, best known for using a microtonal guitar. If you’re like me and put your hands over your ears and started yelling when your childhood piano teacher tried to explain music theory, you probably had to look up microtones on Wikipedia, which defines them as steps between notes that are smaller than the semitone (i.e. smaller than the step from C to C-sharp). The result of this is that Jute Gyte’s music sounds like it’s emanating from a broken hellscape where everything seems just slightly wrong, like looking into a broken fun-house mirror.

Records of microtonal music in the West have been found dating back to Ancient Greece, so it’s fitting that the album’s title references the ship of Theseus, which the legendary founder of Athens used to return to his home city. Over hundreds of years, Athenians kept replacing wood on the ship as it rotted, prompting Plutarch to ask if the ship with all its parts replaced was still the Ship of Theseus or not. Similarly, Ship of Theseus rebuilds black metal out of new material. The structure is still there but now its riffs are built out of dissonance, atmosphere comes from sickly drones gathering like flies. Take the ending of the title track “Ship of Theseus,” where twin vocals are layered over a repeating motif—a common structure, except the guitar sounds like it’s being played by an alien.

Ship of Theseus, however, isn’t a full-on churning assault like fellow black metal weirdo Mastery’s Valis. There are substantial ambient/incidental noise sections on “Grief of New Desire” and “Ship of Theseus.” The death metal ending of “Lugubrious Games” and the doom riff at the beginning of “Grief of New Desire” are small breaks where the listener is given something familiar to hold on to, before being thrown back into the abyss. It’s these breaks, these nods toward peace and the outside, that underscore what a knotty mindfuck the bulk of this album is.

Ship of Theseus is available now on Jeshimoth Entertainment. For more information on Jute Gyte, visit the band’s Metal-Archives page.