STREAMING: Formloff “Spyhorelandet”

It ain’t often the Deciblog gets its dirty paws on black metal. It’s even rarer that when we do get black metal to unfurl to the masses like some plague-wielding flag of hate and disgust, it’s of the weird, wait-is-this-real variety. Well, folks, today is your lucky day if you A) worship Varg’s made-in-Norway booties and B) surrealist painters who happen to call the tippie tips of mountains home. Not that we’ve met or seen the work of the latter, but Formloff, a homegrown duo in the form of Bernt Karsatan Sannerud and Marius Blekspetl Sjøli, remind of the nascent stages of Norwegian oddballness, when bands like Solefald, Ved Buens Ende, Fleurety, and Beyond Dawn helped occupy the nether regions of acceptable-practice black metal.

But for you newbs, well, the track definitely sounds refreshing, as if gulping down fresh glacial streams after a half-decade of parched post-whatever, atavistic too true for school black, or the floating-on-toilet bowl-water bullshit employed by the high-lo mind/musically daft of Liturgy, et al.

So, it is with great pleasure to be able to present Formloff’s “Spyhorelandet”. The duo aren’t the most prolific set of Norges — debut album Adjø Silo was punted into obscurity by obscurity in 2006 — but what we get out of the track is something that, well, hasn’t been heard since The Linear Scaffold was Solefald’s first and only tolerable record.

** Check out Formloff’s Spyhorelandet full-length on Germany’s Eisenwald Records. Their Teutonic shop is HERE, with all kinds of monochromatic goodies on labels small and smaller.