CULT OF RUINS: Silvester Anfang - Echte vlaamse Geiten

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Silvester Anfang - Echte vlaamse Geiten

Silvester Anfang is the Funeral Folk collective gathered in a free folk droneband. The band started as a three-piece of Per, Edgar and Hellvete, but now the line-up depends on who’s available to record/perform. Together with Ignatius Van Kempenhof and PI666 (who now became a vulcanologist in Switzerland) Silvester Anfang started searching for a sound that might be something called Pagan Belgopsych. The compositions are mostly non-musical offertories to worship their almighty overlord Brohll, but every now and then things just work out as free psychedelic improvisations.

Latest release from these purveyors of funeral folk avant ambient doom, Silvester Anfang. You may remember their last lp because of the very striking cover image, a sort of Mentors meets the Ku Klux Klan, shirtless men wearing hoods with goats in the middle of a forest. Very fucked up and creepy, which perfectly matched the music inside. Not too much has changed sonically, if anything, they seem to have gotten even more abstract, a sound with definite nods to the Finnish folk contingent, trashcan percussion, lots of shakers and rattles, a distant keening buzz, far off swells of minor key rumble, creepy tin whistle melodies, bits of guitar, obtuse and angular. The sound is very heavily rhythm based, with various other instruments and sounds ebbing and flowing around the primal percussive chaos at Silvester Anfang's core. Every once in a while the group locks into simple rhythmic folk jams with buzzing guitar and insistent propulsive percussion, but it always seems to dissipate into blissed out clouds of drone and clatter, but the drums and shakers never waver, always there, often in the foreground but just as often lurking mysteriously below the surface. Side two is a much rockier proposition, the band falling into some almost groovy krautrock territory, heavy fuzz bass unfurling a propulsive riff, beneath warbly seasick guitar and tons of swirly lo-fi fuzz. The disc winds down with a bit of traditional folkiness, almost like a jig, but looped into a repetitive groove, mesmerizing and hypnotic, buzzy and almost raga like, and like the rest of the record, beautiful, haunting and creepy.

Time to introduce you to one of my favorite bands out there. Silvester Anfang's music is hard to describe. Best thing to get into their stuff is to lay down in bed when it's dark, play the tunes on a decent volume and sink completely into this weird, sick and so great atmosphere this collective provides. If you don't know them yet grab it, maybe I'll put more from them on.