Artist: Voidcraeft
Release: Scorn
Year: 2013
Country: Germany

Track listing:
1. Blind to the Earth
2. Without Voice
3. As If Amongst Animals



Description from the website:

Voidcraeft is my latest one-man musical endeavour.
Instrumentally and vocally it is somewhat atypical black metal, flirting with blackened death metal.
The lyrical themes deal with emptiness, alienation, suffering, violence and the human condition in a rather abstract way.

In my early days I was primarily influenced by raw black metal like Darkthrone (primarily Under a Funeral Moon and perhaps Transilvanian Hunger, they haven't made anything resembling black metal in close to a decade now, though) and Katharsis (of Norma Evangelium Diaboli fame).
In the past ten years the two artists I consumed the most and returned to over and over again are avant-garde black metal legends Deathspell Omega and Australian experimental (blackened) death metal pioneers Portal.
Other bands worth mentioning are Nightbringer, Black Witchery, Diocletian and Antediluvian.

I have been accused of trying to gain publicity by dropping some big names but mind you, I never claimed that my music would appeal to people who are fond of some of the aforementioned artists.
In fact, I feel largely unable to imitate the style of the artists I admire the most (i.e. Deathspell Omega and Portal).
I just think it helps with putting the music into context and gives you some insight into what motivated and inspired an artist in their creative process.

Ideologically and lyrically I would like to distance myself from themes that embrace theism, satanism or other supernatural beliefs in an affirmative way.
As a firm atheist, I disapprove of such content and I will not make my music a vessel for anything like it, despite their prevalence and popularity within the black metal scene.

This was a radical deviation from the previous vocal techniques.
In the previous releases and also in my older projects I almost exclusively employed high-pitched growls.
I have always had a hard time with that approach because I felt that my performance was rather inconsistent and I kept on heavily using vocal filters to "fix it up".
It is possible that my technique just sucks and that I have failed to adjust.
Technique includes proper use of the vestibular folds, good breathing and also microphone training.

However, with this release I pretty much just gave up on that and started using low-pitched growls, sometimes in combination with high-pitched growls for vocal highlights.
The output seems far more consistent to me and I am quite pleased with this release overall.
Instrumentally it is largely a continuation of my previous approaches.

I did change the sound of the drums a lot, though.
The extremely stereoesque default configuration of the panning and the high frequencies just made the drums feel totally out of place for me.
I tried to make them blend in more with the other sources by reducing drum stereo and heavily cutting into higher frequencies.
I believe I have succeeded at that but the whole sound is more lo-fi now, too, and some of the complexity was lost.

The result is far more to my liking than Derision and I believe I will keep on going down this path that has lead me somewhat closer to blackened death metal.

Also, I just realised that it has been only nine days since the previous release.
However, Blind to the Earth had already been recorded when Derision was released so it was really only two new tracks I was working on and I had already partially recorded them back then, too.