“Doom” (Used 9 times)

Crawl is a one-man experimental sludge project from San Antonio. With his vocal mic shrouded in a parastacoidean mask, Emperor Crawl plays drum with one hand while controlling a bass string instrument made out of actual bones. He likes to build things, he says, and to run this sound through a wall of amps. The result is eloquently blackened doom with nods to Khanate's Things Viral and Sunn O)))'s Black One.

I was fortunate to witness Crawl's incredible live performance at Sux by SuxWest, Austin's second-annual anti-sxsw noise festival. I'd originally biked to way out Bernadette's for Rat Bastard and the supremely funky Olneyville Sound System, who were at the top of their game in duo form. Crawl's set was an unexpected highlight of my time in Austin, and left the entire room stunned. After our applause faded into an uncomfortable silence (yo where's the DJ?), Emperor Crawl removed his mask to let us know that he does not have any merch— but! There is this demo recorded in 2010 that you can download for free on bandcamp. After the show ended, I asked where to find it, and learned that Crawl is a bit of a free music advocate. Even once he gets to doing physical releases, we'll always be able to download and share Crawl mp3s. So I told him about the FMA, and of course it's with his belessing that the Crawl Demo is online under a CC Music Sharing license. Go forth and spread the word of Crawl!

A photo of Crawl's bass string instrument and video of an earlier Crawl performance after the jump...

As one of the grand finales for this year’s fantastic Unsound Festival (making it’s first appearance in NYC), the excellent Canadian experimental-drone-ambient-shoegazer-doom-metal duo Nadja -- Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff – conjured an absolutely massive soundworld of near-impenetrable density at ISSUE. Nadja design jagged, skyscraping architectures out of scalding and charred streams of noise and distortion, abstracting gestures of drone and doom into complex, infinitely detailed structures of intense beauty. Amidst sprawling ambient landscapes that are at turns placid, quivering, frightening, and impassable, Baker and Buckareff erect looming, spiraling towers that jut, writhe, and twist into the boundless vertical dimension before culminating into screaming spires of searing energy.  Be braced to emerge/escape in a collapsed crawl – drained, soaked, cleansed, and exorcised.