It’s the weekend! What better way to get it started than with the latest installment of “Funeral Doom Fridays”. This weekly column looks to shed some light onto some of the darkest, most depressing, and discordant metal out there. Funeral Doom stems from the deepest depths of death-doom and dirge music. Each week, my goal is to highlight some of the newest music or rediscover classic works from some of the earliest bands and originators such as Australia’s Mournful Congregation, United States’s Evoken, UK’s Esoteric and the Finnish Thergothon. Feel free to share your opinions and suggestions in the comments!
Bremen, Germany's Imperceptum is a one-man wave of devastation. An enigma to the world thus far, little is known outside of the fact that Imperceptum has created a crushing and disparaging combination of funeral doom and atmospheric black metal. This black hole of a debut is called Collapse of Existence, and it swallows anything that remotely resembles light. The album contains almost an hour's worth of music fleshed out over four immersive tracks and wanders back and forth between an ambient, somewhat cosmic aura and downright crippling dirge.
Collapse of Existence's opening song, "Entity of Extramental Chaos" serves to establish the ambient nature that lays beneath most of the album before plummeting into blast beats and a deep, gut-wrenching growl. This album sets such an early and thunderous tone in its first quarter, that it keeps you enthralled throughout the remainder of its entirety. "Severe Disturbance of the Interdimensional Equilibrium" carries a much greater atmospheric black metal feel and even has shades of post-metal in it. The second half of Collapse of Existence is much more of a funeral doom album. "Vast Fields of Emptiness" carries an almost Lycus semblance (if we were to compare to recent contemporaries) and the title-track finale, in true doom metal fashion, brings the album to a monstrous and emotionally charged conclusion. This ode to the black hole mirrors much of what is known about the spacetime phenomenon. Once crossing into its early event horizon, Collapse of Existence's gravity engrosses the listener and exposes them to a crushing inversion of typical genre norms.
Collapse of Existence came out at the tail end of January this year as an independent release. You can purchase this album on Imperceptum's BandCamp for only 2 euros ($2.26 in case you were curious) and like them on Facebook.
