Black Aleph (AUS)

Black Aleph are a Sydney/Melbourne based experimental ensemble featuring Lachlan Dale (guitar/effects), Peter Hollo (cello/effects) and Timothy Johannessen (percussion). On their debut album, the trio draw inspiration from diverse sources ranging from post-metal to middle-eastern modal music. Apsides features both composed and improvised pieces that involve the players layering live-loops, ritualistic-beats and doom-metal style musical variations that progressively unfold and build in intensity throughout the performance. Black Aleph’s style has been compared to Justin Broderick, Neurosis, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor - though there is a borderline spiritual quality to the music that comes from the unique instrumentation: guitar, cello, and Iranian daf drum. The sound is tectonic - apt for a record centred around concepts of orbital mechanics, like the notion of ‘apsis’, which is the points of extreme and least distance between a celestial and a primary body (sun-earth-moon) in an elliptical orbit. A second theme concerns the relationship between light and dark, or more specifically the difference between bodies that emit versus those that merely reflect light - and in-between those that obstruct it.