Vinyl

 Originally released on April 14th, 2014, IMPALED NAZARENE 12th studio album VIGOROUS AND LIBERATING DEATH is now re-issue properly. Recorded at City Lights and S/Mental studios, mixed at Studio Fungus by Max Kostermaa who also did the band's previous album Road To The Octagon.

Vigorous And Liberating Death continues the band´s brutal legacy, featuring 13 brand new songs.

Cover artwork was done by Impaled Nazarene´s former bass player Taneli Jarva (who is known as a tattoo artist). Vigorous And Liberating Death was mastered at Finnvox Studio by Mika Jussila (Nightwish, Children Of Bodom).

Reprint, 200 x grimace purple 12" (180g) in a microtene innerbag, printed innersleeve full-color on 220g, download card, A1 poster full-color on 150g art paper, gatefold jacket full-color on 350g, all assembled in a PVC overbag.

Dormant for over a decade, Beyond Man has been awakened like an ancient curse from an old and sandy burial ground. In an epoch of records in which resounds the dull embellished atmosphere of a cozy bedroom, Beyond Man‘s self-titled album smells of old amplifiers drenched in rotten blood, ash and whisky, the reek of a cave I dare you to enter, where the frustrations of a group of Satanic cowboys take sonic form together with their zealot visions and nightmares, veiled by a truly ferocious and sinister aura.

Call it black metal if you wish, or envision Morbid Angel sitting down with Black Sabbath and listening to Norwegian black metal while sharing a bottle of red wine followed by straight shots of heavy smoked whisky.

Nidrosian Black Metal at its very finest, straight from the source with MARE, ONE TAIL ONE HEAD etc. members

Debut demo of this young Dutch horde - limited to 300 handnumbered copies.

Very interesting and quite unique Black Metal with certain Folk-vibe but definitely without any hippie and happy modern melodies. No clean singing here! Eerie vocals add the right atmosphere to keep the music grim and sinister.

Black heavy-weight 12 "(180g) vinyl.
 

marble/galaxy effect in grimace purple with pink

Anyone with the slightest interest in darkwave music and the goth counterculture is familiar with Lycia. Born in Tempe, AZ, in 1988 from the creative mind of Mike VanPortfleet, Lycia is as seminal and influential as a band can get. Devoted to cold, somber and synthetic sounds, these pioneers of the ethereal are responsible for some of the most acclaimed underground albums of the ‘90s. 

The current lineup of the band is John Fair, David Galas, Tara Vanflower and Mike VanPortfleet, who has been the only constant member since the band’s formation. Although only achieving minor cult success, the band is notable for being one of the groundbreaking groups in the darkwave and ethereal styles. Their 1995 album The Burning Circle And Then Dust "remains a high point of American dark rock" according to AllMusic, and 1996’s Cold has been cited as one of the genre’s best by Post-Punk.com and Alternative Press. Lycia's sound is characterized by rich soundscapes and layers of heavily effected guitars, dark atmospheric keyboards, heavy reverb drenched drum machines, VanPortfleet's somber raspy vocals and Vanflower's vivid melodic voice. 

Avantgarde Music had the pleasure to bring the 1991 debut full-length Ionia to a vinyl edition for the first time in early 2021, and this brought along the chance to cooperate on new music. This turned out to be a rich studio EP, Casa Luna. We reached out to Mike VanPortfleet, who describes Casa Luna as a followup to 2018’s In Flickers, with a more varied approach, stylistically and thematically. “In Flickers and Casa Luna are Lycia’s purest releases. Originally planned as a split 7” with the song “A Quiet Way to Go”, as more songs were written they evolved to an EP”.

Black vinyl - etched D side

It has been 17 years, but finally the time has come for the reaper to wield his scythe once again. Ancient Wisdom is the musical alter ego of Marcus E. Norman, veteran of the Swedish black metal scene and member of Naglfar and Bewitched. To us, not only he means one of the best cult acts of the ’90s and early ’00s, but also one of the first artists to find a home under the Avantgarde Music banner, back in 1993.

Formed by Norman in Umeå, Sweden, under the name Ancient in 1992 as a full band, Ancient recorded their demo tape In the Eye of the Serpent. In 1993 the name was changed into Ancient Wisdom, and in December the second demo tape Through Rivers of the Eternal Blackness was recorded, after which the band signed a record deal with Avantgarde Music. In December 1994 the debut album For Snow Covered the Northland was recorded, but due to some technical errors it was not released until 1996, and during this time Marcus decided to continue the project on his own.

From 1997 to 2004 Ancient Wisdom recorded and released three other albums: The Calling (1997), ...and the Physical Shape of Light Bled (2000) and Cometh Doom, Cometh Death (2004), before entering a hiatus seventeen-year long.

A Celebration in Honor of Death, the fifth full length album from Ancient Wisdom and their comeback after such a long time, displays a dismal and more sinister side of this Swedish entity that has been spreading its darkness since 1992. 7 tracks of the purest death worship, draped in haunting melodies and an atmosphere reeking of broken coffins and graveyard dust.

Colored vinyl LTD - etched D side

It has been 17 years, but finally the time has come for the reaper to wield his scythe once again. Ancient Wisdom is the musical alter ego of Marcus E. Norman, veteran of the Swedish black metal scene and member of Naglfar and Bewitched. To us, not only he means one of the best cult acts of the ’90s and early ’00s, but also one of the first artists to find a home under the Avantgarde Music banner, back in 1993.

Formed by Norman in Umeå, Sweden, under the name Ancient in 1992 as a full band, Ancient recorded their demo tape In the Eye of the Serpent. In 1993 the name was changed into Ancient Wisdom, and in December the second demo tape Through Rivers of the Eternal Blackness was recorded, after which the band signed a record deal with Avantgarde Music. In December 1994 the debut album For Snow Covered the Northland was recorded, but due to some technical errors it was not released until 1996, and during this time Marcus decided to continue the project on his own.

From 1997 to 2004 Ancient Wisdom recorded and released three other albums: The Calling (1997), ...and the Physical Shape of Light Bled (2000) and Cometh Doom, Cometh Death (2004), before entering a hiatus seventeen-year long.

A Celebration in Honor of Death, the fifth full length album from Ancient Wisdom and their comeback after such a long time, displays a dismal and more sinister side of this Swedish entity that has been spreading its darkness since 1992. 7 tracks of the purest death worship, draped in haunting melodies and an atmosphere reeking of broken coffins and graveyard dust.

Russian blackgaze duo Olhava is back with their new studio album. Frozen Blooom is the natural follow-up to self-titled Olhava (2019) and Ladoga (2020), and integrates some dronescapes the band experimented on Never Leave Me Alone (2020), the drone version of their debut.

Multi-instrumentalist Andrey Novozhilov and drummer Timur Yusupov describe their new journey with words of thoughtful contemplation: “When winter is just starting to fade and give some space to the first steps of spring… When life starts to reappear and the very early flowers peek through the thawing soil, a sudden drop of the temperature can leave them petrified and frozen back again, punished by the “Queen of Fields”. This statuesque dead beauty, being infinitely alive and dead at the same time is the main metaphor of this album. Frozen Bloom is about unfulfilled dreams. About how we sacrifice everything today for some abstract “tomorrow”, which may never come. But tomorrow and yesterday don’t exist – only this very moment of static contemplation is real”.

Frozen Bloom is Olhava’s fourth opus in three years, and here the duo took some different routes compositionally. Two of the four tracks are traditionally storm-like blackgaze passages, while the other two are leaning towards a more meditative drone experience. The album also features A. Lunn, who kindly agreed to record an electric guitar solo as well as acoustic parts and choral parts on “Frozen Bloom I”.

Frozen Bloom was recorded at Olhava home studios, as well as at the local rehearsal space. Mikhail Kurochkin took care of mixing and mastering.

MORK’S FIFTH STUDIO ALBUM OF BLACK METAL SUPREMACY, INCLUDING GUEST APPEARANCES FROM MEMBERS OF DARKTHRONE, KAMPFAR & SKEPTICISM.
 

Black Vinyl

SERPENTS OATH is a new creature comprised of 3 Belgian scene’s adepts.

Their rebellious debut album 'Nihil' is set to take the world by storm with its relentless and unforgiving mix of nihilistic black metal. Witness the unleashing of the beast on December 4th through Soulseller Records!

Alternate cover art compared to cd version! Wonderful vinyl edition housed in outer sleeve on 350gsm w-w carton, coated paper with silver lamination and matt machine varnish; double sided printed inner sleeve on 220gsm w-w carton & double sided insert on 250gsm art paper with matt machine varnish.

Something dark, melancholic, and at times even sinister is haunting each of the eight tracks collected on NOÊTA's sophomore full-length, "Elm", which is lyrically based loosely on emotions connected to the eponymous poem by the celebrated American writer Sylvia Plath. The music of the Swedish duo comes with an inherent ethereal beauty, which is carried by Êlea's both lucent and lucid voice. The focus on the singer's bewitching vocals is further underlined by a subtle and nearly minimalistic instrumentation by her long-time collaborator Andris, who masterly captures and enhances the musical moods.

Taking their name from the ancient Greek philosophical notion of universal thoughts or ideas that exist independently of any agent having them, NOÊTA embark on their musical journey into the otherworld with the highly praised 2015 EP "psykhē", which also refers to classical Greek philosophy where it denotes the wholeness of a person. This was followed by the equally acclaimed debut album "Beyond Life and Death" in 2017, which added more depth and audible confidence to the duo's compositions.

With the recording, production and mix again firmly controlled by NOÊTA, mastering of "Elm" was for the first time left to the expert hands of Tore Stjerna at Necromorbus Studio (MAYHEM, WATAIN). Guest contributions by KNOKKELKLANG and P.Stille of STILLA and BERGRAVEN also hint to Êlea's roots in black metal that remain present although her darkness takes a different stylistic direction.

"Elm" witnesses NOÊTA charting their very own left hand course through the rising tide of unique female artists such as CHELSEA WOLFE, ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF or EMMA RUTH RUNDLE to name but a few of the highly individual female voices claiming their territory in the world of dark music.