La Torture des Ténèbres – V / The Lost Colony of Altar Vista [Things You Might Have Missed 2024]

The breed of noise that courses through Ottawa one-woman act La Torture des Ténèbres is truly disorienting and off-putting,1 but it takes on a hypnotizing and triumphant quality when its curious blend of caustic and decadent settles into your bones. While 2016 debuts Acadian Nights and Choirs of Emptiness captured a predictable blend of raw black and spacefaring dark ambient, Civilization is the Tomb of Our Noble Gods found mastermind J.K. taking influence from classic science fiction and decopunk: raw black played as an accompaniment to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, perhaps. With this breed of raw punishment, discernment is a spiritual gift – V praises a grand civilization, The Lost Colony of Altar Vista laments it. Viciously raw, relentlessly noisy, and painfully discordant, while also beautifully grandiose and subtly tragic, La Torture des Ténèbres offers decadence and venom as few can.

V by La Torture Des Ténèbres

April’s V is the more straightforward of the 2024 releases, reflecting its grainy album art basking in a birds-eye view of the grand metropolis.2 There’s a robotic quality about V that pairs neatly with its predecessor IV – Memoirs of a Machine Girl, as La Torture des Ténèbres saturates the palette of relentless blasting, dense and raw tremolo tinnitus, and tortured wails and harrowing shrieks with grimy feedback, noise, industrial ambiance, and the act’s trademark flaying melodic sensibilities. Reverb-laden melodic interludes would seem to offer reprieve during the punishment, but their blaring distortion and clipping only drive the knife deeper with a shrill and warped quality, like ringing sirens during the calm before the storm. Inspired by the shimmering deceptively utopian and futuristic civilizations, the juxtaposition of the grandiosity of tomorrow (“Accelerated Degeneration Descent,” “Valley of the Unclean”) and the horrors of today (“Descent into Suburban Hellscape,” “Catalyst of Tomb Reconfiguration”) only heightens J.K.’s themes. Lyrics detail paranoia, sexual oppression, obsession, and horror, idolizing beautiful cities built atop the broken backs of the ugly. And despite its triumphant ambiance, V is one of the ugliest black metal albums of the year.

October’s The Lost Colony of Altar Vista is a more lonely and contemplative affair,3 reflected in its artwork of the same city at a grimmer low angle and in a filthier light. La Torture des Ténèbres’ punishing palette and caustic rawness remain largely the same, but the empty tinny melodies contrast to the decadent gloss of V. Paired with experimental samples stuttered from audio clipping and perverted by distortion,4 the tremolo-picked melodies atop subtle ambiance and silence are more abundant and dwell more in somber countenance (i.e. “The Reflection of the Moon in Her Skyline Eyes”), with more complete collapses of noise (“Allison”) and doomed piano (“The Axis of the Exaltation and the Fall of Venus”). The Lost Colony of Altar Vista basks in its forlornness, its relentless rawness a jagged and jaded vessel for fragile pain.

The Lost Colony Of Altar Vista by La Torture Des Ténèbres

V and The Lost Colony of Altar Vista showcase both sides of La Torture des Ténèbres, streamlined with a propensity for vicious noise and flaying rawness. It’s completely unforgiving, painfully harsh, and alienating to even the most hardened black metal fans. It’s jaggedly pieced, tracks cutting off abruptly and samples seeming to have no relevance to the sound, but every element adds to the themes of dissociation of both the beautiful glimmer and filthy underbelly of this metropolis. Truly a thin glossy mask atop a horrific face.

Tracks to Check Out: ”Descent Into Suburban Hellscape,” “Phantoms Over Altar Vista,” “Allison,” “Spectres Over Altar Vista”



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