I’ve spent over twenty hours with Ontology of Nought, trying to learn the German Ingurgitating Oblivion’s method in the madness. I’m still lost. I’m still stumbling blindly through the dead ends, the hairpin turns, the ominous spires, and the high walls that enclose its labyrinth, attempting to discover its light but knowing that it will only be by chance if I do. I cannot find a pattern, a clue, or an architectural basis anywhere. It’s blind memorization and utter void of context, and I have never been so baffled and intrigued by something calling itself death metal.
The lack of reference makes Ontology of Nought such a difficult album to score. Laced dissonance, choppy rhythms, blackened death intensity, and technical arpeggios, tied together with spoken word, a haunting atmosphere, and vicious noise, avant-garde veterans Ingurgitating Oblivion1 somehow avoids sounding like the trademarks of any of the bands who use them. Their first album in seven years consists of five tracks spanning nearly an hour and fifteen minutes, the eighteen-minute closer divided into three movements. It shifts patiently, organically, but with the intention and direction of the blind leading the blind. Ingurgitating Oblivion constructs Ontology of Nought not as a collection of highlights and riffs, but as a sonic labyrinth composed of mile-high walls, experimental twists, jagged spires, and brutal nihilism.
Ontology of Nought by Ingurgitating_Oblivion
Disjointedly, Ingurgitating Oblivion recalls acts like Serocs, Coma Cluster Void, and Flourishing, a fusion of dissonant, blackened, and avant-garde death metal, sprawled together with ambiance and murky songwriting – however, Ontology of Nought is a free jazz expedition a la Sun Ra or Peter Brötzmann at heart. Opener “Uncreation’s Whirring Loom You Ply with Crippled Fingers” sets the tone with a haunting ambiance, interspersed by nearly mathcore-inspired marbled rhythms and manic drumming and featuring wild jazzy solos. The suffocating sprawl of noise and dissonance gives “To Weave the Tapestry of Nought” a dangerous grin atop its cantankerous rhythms, and the crescendos of lush ambiance, cumbersome keys, and clean vocals are downright haunting and strangely infectious. The women’s choir of “Lest I Should Perish with Travel, Effete and Weary, as My Knees Refuse to Bear Me Thither” shines through this tapestry of noise, interspersed by blackened death bomb explosions. Closer “The Barren Earth Oozes Blood, and Shakes and Moans, To Drink Her Children’s Gore” is a tour-de-force of spidery keys, unhinged drumming and sick riffs, epic solos, crawling leads, scathing noise, and crystalline ambiance, an eighteen-minute behemoth with which Ingurgitating Oblivion will test your patience and your sanity in some of the best ways, the patience of prior tracks stricken to the bone.
It’s easy to draw comparisons to Midnight Odyssey or Swallow the Sun in Ontology of Nought’s challenging runtime, but at least those atmoblack and melodeath/doom legends have shreds of consistency. Ingurgitating Oblivion shifts dramatically across each song’s ten-to-nineteen-minute track-lengths in ways that rob distinctiveness in favor of an ever-changing amorphousness, leaving memorability by the wayside. Most damning is centerpiece “The Blossoms of Your Tomorrow Shall Unfold in My Heart,” which lacks the oomph or highlight to stand out amid the crushing sea of experimentalisms and jarring shifts, compared to the haunting “To Weave…” and the actualized clarity of “Lest I Should Perish…” It’s ultimately small potatoes, however, because despite the myriad spins, I still cannot seem to wrap my head around Ontology’s shifting sands of jarring tonal and musical changes. This makes Ingurgitating Oblivion almost entirely inaccessible, requiring an obscene amount of concentration – in an inherently difficult style – for an asinine amount of time. In the spirit of free jazz, Ontology of Nought feels nearly entirely improvised, so it’s difficult to tell if its insanity is a puzzle worth solving or an empty pretentious pursuit.
When I started listening to Ingurgitating Oblivion, I was reading “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges – and the comparisons fit. While the short story about infinite numbers of identically structured hexagons and books clashes with the insane apparent randomness coursing through Ontology of Nought, the lesson remains the same: the choice of purpose in the minute or despair in the infinite. How each listener approaches this album will differ, as the experimentalism is maddening and the runtime is extravagant. The sounds contained herein are unlike any others, with intensity, experimentalism, and organicity playing an infinite sonic game of chess worthy of both shudder and intrigue. Listen to it once – replay mileage will vary.
Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Willowtip Records
Websites: ingurgitatingoblivion1.bandcamp.com | ingurgitating-oblivion.de | facebook.com/IngurgitatingOblivionOfficial
Releases Worldwide: September 27th, 2024
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