We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

x​-​ray five: The Sparrow 12"

by Jute Gyte

/
  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Side A is The Sparrow
    Side B is screenprinted
    Monadanom comes as exclusive download

    Includes unlimited streaming of x-ray five: The Sparrow 12" via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 7 days

      £14 GBP or more 

     

1.
The Sparrow 19:57
2.
Monadanom 17:30

about

The post-genre sounds Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records has mined and curated over the past couple of years might not immediately code as metal, but as early as our home-dubbed tape days we were exploring death metal’s potential as vocal-only music with blue ten: EyeSea.

Jute Gyte is unambiguously metal music and I genuinely believe that Adam Kalmbach, the sole musician and producer behind the project, is the most important musician in metal since Death’s Chuck Schuldiner, himself the most important metal musician since Tony Iommi, the man whose fingers created metal.

As a teenager into the Mortal Kombat soundtrack and Nine Inch Nails, Adam learnt metal guitar. Later, he studied composition at university, and had his brain nuked by early and baroque music, serialism and Sibelius, and the universes of potentials opening like wormholes in his head created Jute Gyte.

Jute Gyte applies microtonality and modernist compositional approaches to black metal. This isn’t in itself what makes Jute Gyte’s music great, though it does explode one thing that has slowly narrowed into a conservative musical tradition out into something new, that no one has heard before. New sounds and new feelings.

This is not dry, academic music. It is scientific, exploratory, but as physical as the most brutal splatters of 1991-era death metal, which - despite using gore as a convenient if slightly-knuckleheaded shorthand for the abstract, lurching new riff forms of the genre - had a transdimensional element even then.

Jute Gyte’s orchestra of microtonal guitars sounds as though it is vomiting blackholes. But maybe what initially scans as occult horror in Jute Gyte’s music is just seasickness caused by the unfamiliarity of this new terrain.

“I understand how stuff I've done sounds ugly to people,” Adam concedes, “but it doesn't sound ugly to me. Or, it doesn't sound exclusively ugly. It's just a different kind of language. If you haven't internalised that language, then you're going to hear a lot of things that sound like 'wrong' notes. I hear little musical jokes, I hear happy parts and sad parts, and I hear a lot of parts that don't seem to have any emotive content at all. It's not just uniformly ugly, just as Schoenberg's work is not intended to be uniformly ugly.”

For x-ray five, Adam has crafted two side-long pieces. The first of these, The Sparrow, is a kind of modernist black metal symphony that might share some signifiers with the despair-loaded blizzard hymns familiar to fans of Norwegian BM. But those beautiful flocks of guitars - sometimes they sound like they’re hovering, or scrolling back and forth, rather than ‘riffing’. A dazzling murmuration. And it wasn’t some grimoire that provided the lyrical inspiration for the piece, but Stoner author John Edward Williams’ 1965 poetry collection, The Necessary Lie.

The second piece, Monadanom, is from a suite of ambient microtonal guitar pieces that Adam began developing for us in early 2014. It is oceanic, not in the usual new age-y sense most often applied to ambient music, but in that it is raging with life and detail; unfathomable.

Self-released Jute Gyte albums like Perdurance, Ship of Theseus and Ressentiment are acknowledged as modern classics not only of metal or experimental music, but of any genre.

Adam doesn’t self-promote or use social media, play live or collaborate with other artists, but a fiercely loyal fanbase has already swarmed around him. This is his first full release with a label and I consider it to be one of the most important releases for Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records.

This is a metal record, but for me, it makes total sense that Jute Gyte would be on the same label as Katie Gately and Tashi Dorji, rather than Roadrunner or even Relapse. These humans are his peers - artists who are changing people’s perceptions of the possibilities of modern music at a cellular level.

Adam Kalmbach is influenced by Harry Partch, Xenakis, Penderecki, Gloria Coates, Mahler and Brahms; he regards Jute Gyte as belonging to a continuum of ‘late Romantic’ music.

Jute Gyte will appeal to any fans of Stockhausen, Morbid Angel, Sonic Youth, Gojira, Autechre, Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega, Slayer, Tim Hecker, Daniel Lopatin, Khanate, Ulver, Anaal Nathrakh, Liturgy, Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson or Godflesh.


A FEW WORDS FROM JOHN DORAN, EDITOR OF THE QUIETUS:

"A house sparrow beats its elliptical wings up to fifteen times per second. This may seem paltry compared to the ruby-throated hummingbird which can flap 200 times per second but it simply isn’t. The beats are just slow enough for us to be able to discern the highly focussed power of passer domesticus - the most widespread wild bird in the world. No floating gracefully by on an invisible blur of feathers for the common sparrow just the powerful little upstroke, the powerful little downstroke and all of the other (half and quarter) positions that join them. One sparrow takes wing; then another; then another. Common, ungainly birds? Spiteful little pests? Not a bit of it. If you spent your life watching them perhaps you could frame the astonishing lattice of a meinie of these tiny creatures. Perhaps you could figure the calculus of a tribe of sparrows taking flight. A host that breaks apart on the ground and reassembles on the wing.

"The music of Jute Gyte, made by the visionary musician Adam Kalmbach, makes me feel sick. I hope there has been a distant civilisation somewhere along the way who have paid emetic tribute to their most revered cultural producers, as I do mean this as the highest of compliments to the chef. Because while the harsh, fiercely avant garde, black metal of microtonal progressions and complex time signatures he produces does genuinely make me feel quite queasy, I’d like to think any genuine regurgitation suffered by me would be the kind that precedes the ayahuasca vision or the state of satori triggered by a pure dose of MDMA. The churning thunder of albums such as Ship Of Theseus and Perdurance - and now this genuinely awesome 12”, The Sparrow, on X-Ray Records - is equally matched by a nagging aesthetic of pessimism. While this may well by umami to a depressive realist’s palate, as with The Silence Of Animals by John Gray, this music contains the very real possibility of transcendence. (This being the rare transformative state often promised by modern black metal, yet the most conspicuous by its absence.)

"There is a bird sanctuary on the West Lancashire Coastal Plain, near Burscough, called Martin Mere. In the foyer of the visitor centre there is a charity coin spinner, a large money collection device, sometimes also known as a coin vortex donation box. The device is essentially a large, smooth, downward-curving funnel, protected by a semi-spherical clear plastic dome. There is a slot into which you press a coin. Now sometimes, but not often, the coins don’t take and they slide, flat side down straight into the funnel and immediately out of sight into the collection box. Mostly however they circle. This happens slowly at first; a large graceful loop of the shallower edge of the funnel but because of gravity they never make a complete circumference, instead they always travel in a concentric circle, down the funnel, picking up speed as the spiral shrinks inwards. Each pass round the funnel becomes shorter and shorter until it essentially becomes a tube, round which the coin travels horizontally at great speed. It moves so quickly it is hard to tell what is happening.

"Whump, whump, whump, whump. The coin becomes more absence than presence. And then, just for a fraction of a second before disappearing into the dark for good, the coin is no longer touching the funnel wall.

"And at that moment, there is take-off. "


PRAISE FOR JUTE GYTE:

"The two tracks that comprise Jute Gyte's first vinyl release are fearsome in ambition and uncompromising in their delivery... The Sparrow winds up far outside of conventional black metal paradigms. But Kalmbach is too accomplished and too exacting to be considered an outsider, and this feels like a challenge to genre orthodoxy, a set of possibilities for those who dare follow." - The Wire

"Musically The Sparrow sounds like someone trying to drill through the twelve-foot thick, concrete wall that surrounds a nuclear reactor whilst listening to Slayer on a speaker large enough to affect the gravitational power of the moon." - Collective Zine

"Jute Gyte’s The Sparrow threatens to consume all in its path. Unrelentingly brutal the experimentation of the sound is profound with a wall of sound approach that feels akin to Glenn Branca’s approach to rock given a metallic tinge." - Beach Sloth

"Lurching, ascending, descending – ever moving in a time that doesn’t seem to resemble time at all. Sometimes the music of Jute Gyte sounds as though it is crawling around inside you, threatening to escape. Whether it is slowing up or speeding down sometimes seems not only subjective, but actually kind of irrelevant. This is genuinely transdimensional music. It obeys the rules of little other sound in our universe. In an era where the ‘psychedelic’ is much fetishized, but oft-misunderstood, Jute Gyte is making music that is beyond cosmic. It looks where space rock has taken us and laughs. Why waste time on sailing a backdraft of flanger up to the moon when you can wrench open reality itself and slide a rotten tentacle through the cracks? This isn’t for people who find black metal cute. And it isn’t for people who find black metal extreme. Microtonal metal might never inspire memeworthy fandom, but right now it sounds like the future. And the past. And the whole ugly present – all knotted together in a vipers nest of ouroboros." - 20 Jazz Funk Greats

"Jute Gyte's Perdurance is a modern classical black metal masterwork" - Noisey

"It's tempting to focus on this album's otherworldly guitar sound and various other unusual technical components, but its emotional charge is its most compelling feature. Many black metal acts address the idea that we're on our own in a blind, hostile cosmos, but rarely does the horror feel so real." - Stereogum

"If you can sit through it, you will be rewarded by relentlessly entertaining cacophony shot through with a warped sense of humour. If you don’t believe me, take my roommate’s word for it: 'Could you never play that skronk album again? I really hate it.' So fire up the coals, put some brews on ice, then lock yourself in the basement and twitch to the summer sounds of Jute Gyte." - The Quietus

"Few recent artists have made such inimitable music as Missourian Adam Kalmbach, architect behind the protean madness of Jute Gyte" - Metal Sucks

"Adam Kalmbach has produced vast quantities of what is hands down the most forward-thinking and complex music metal has to offer" - Angry Metal Guy

"Jute Gyte is music for people who don’t necessarily want what they take in to make them feel better, or even good." - Heavy Blog Is Heavy

"Though not a 'pretty' or 'pleasant' album by any means, Kalmbach’s genuinely alien approach to harmony and composition coupled with a greater emotional weight than much of his previous work makes Ressentiment one of his best albums yet, and one of the best this year." - Toilet ov Hell

"We are hearing a truly original artist completely at ease with his medium" - Heathen Harvest

"Swirling, chaotic, virulent, black and maddening" - Cvlt Nation

"The guitar sounds like it’s being played by an alien" - Nine Circles

"Robin Thicke is a human. Jute Gyte could eat him." - Decoder Magazine

"The music Kalmbach writes is now top notch covering all the bases of brittle, spiteful black metal, creepy atmospherics and a contrasting, unique style that makes his music stand out above much of the like minded one man black metal out there today." - Teeth of the Divine

"Jute Gyte remains one of our most creative and challenging American black metal extracts." - From the Dust Returned

"Jute Gyte’s now signature hyperdissonance meets the ever-shifting polyrhythms of IDM, Gamelan’s chiming bells, and the shifting dread of early electronic music. Perdurance is a strange album whose penchant for the impenetrable verges on Dadaism" - Invisible Oranges

"Ears accustomed to Western 12-tone polyphony can barely process these sounds—they sink into your skull like red-hot stones into ice. It's like you're listening to a tape at the wrong speed, or to music warped by a black hole's gravitational lens on its way here from several galaxies away." - Chicago Reader

"Cracked decrepit guitar tones creak against the maelstrom of drone swelling and spilling in harmonious fury, with buried drum machine marching through the void and anguished vocals recounting an ancient war of mass slaughter. electronics and treatments figure more prominently than on other BM projects, sure to piss off purists and blurring the divide between metal and noise: overwhelming buzzing distortion and delay" - KFJCpress

credits

released December 13, 2016

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Blue Tapes UK

For more than 10 years, Blue Tapes has curated a numbered series of releases emphasising different aspects of minimal music - from grime to gugak, American primitivism to Japanese ambient - presented with appropriately minimal and often abstract cyanotype artwork. ... more

contact / help

Contact Blue Tapes

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

Blue Tapes recommends:

If you like x-ray five: The Sparrow 12", you may also like: