If Bay Area avant-metal noiselords Sutekh Hexen just aren’t prolific enough to satisfy your insatiable deathlust, I bid you cast your eye over the great plains to Utech Records. Milwaukee’s finest doom emporium, whose catalog has featured the likes of Locrian, Suzuki Junzo, and Fushitsusha (!!) throughout its ten year existence, has issued a piece of solo music by Sutekh Hexen member/album art guru Kevin Gan Yuen, entitled The Emerald, on 8-inch lathe cut record.
If the piece starts in legible six-string territory, with effected field recordings and ominous drones draped over pinprick arpeggios, the decayed remains of your sanity really hit the fan when Yuen begins to conjure quavering swathes of granular synth-like dark energy from his guitar. “The Emerald” drifts through a remarkably diverse palette of sounds and concisely encapsulates Sutekh Hexen’s mind-fuck strategies into six minutes of static-seared aggression, mastered to speaker-splitting clarity by the mighty Rashad Becker. Like spiritual forefathers Coil or modern-era Ulver, Yuen maximizes the deliberate pace of his studio practice to dial in finely detailed tones before layering them into the overarching composition, distilling hours of patient manipulation into a single burst of cinematic terror.
The Emerald is available only as a promo item from Utech Records, and will be included randomly in orders from the label while supplies last.
• Kevin Gan Yuen: http://www.viraloptic.com
• Sutekh Hexen: http://www.sutekhhexen.org
• Utech Records: http://www.utechrecords.com
More about: Kevin Gan Yuen
