bestia arcana

There’s only so much you can get to in a given year. So many albums, so many bands, so many genres and sub genres and niche genres and one-offs and splits and reunions and supergroups and…you get the drift. It’s easy to have a few albums slip through the cracks for whatever reason, but it’s doubly weird when those same albums you missed appear on the very site you write for on another contributor’s list. I swear: we talk ALL THE TIME – sometimes even about music!

Anyway, one of my favorite things about Nine Circles is catching up on what my fellow 9C knuckleheads are banging their craniums to. So here’s nine selections I should have listened to, but didn’t in 2017. Continue reading →

Some people—demons, Satan, Naas Alcameth, etc.—just don’t need to sleep. As if being a founding member and multi-instrumentalist in seminal American black metal band Nightbringer wasn’t enough—to say nothing of his work in the trio Bestia Arcana—Alcameth decided to form yet another band, called Akhlys. The name derives from Achlys—the “eternal night” in Greek mythology—which falls over the eyes just before death, and personifies in goddess form both misery and sadness. By his own admission, Alcameth has some truly horrifying dreams, and founded Akhlys as an outlet for those nightmares—an act to “serve as a voice for the muse that arises from the dark lands between death and dreams.” And on the debut LP, The Dreaming I—from the ambient opening to the full sound of his vomitous black metal—he has absolutely achieved that goal.
Continue reading →