Aveilut

Description

There is a real sense of loss on Aveilut, the debut album by Scarcity, an experimental black metal band from Brooklyn, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca's passing) wrote Aveilut while facing the sudden death of two loved ones, recorded it while caught in the first lockdown in Beijing in 2020, and completed it while surrounded by the overwhelming images of the early COVID peak in New York. Back in Brooklyn, singer Doug Moore (Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) quickly found himself in the midst of an equally dark lockdown experience, living next to a funeral home as New York became the epicenter of COVID in the United States. The result of such proximity to death is this grief-laden record, named after the Hebrew word for mourning. Octaves of 72 notes, alternative chords, psychoacoustic phenomena, and macro-phrases embody the vastness of loss, the inexplicable space of the void of death that Randall-Myers faced both personally and existentially. Comprising a 45-minute composition, the album features black metal in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Enhare, with heavy doses of post-Branca microtonal guitars and a cinematic scope inspired by Randall-Myers' orchestral work. The mathematical abstraction of Aveilut and the lyrical emphasis on the grandeur of the void evoke raw emotion, attempting to represent a catastrophe, the vastness and inevitability of things beyond our control, as well as a direct expression of grief, a kind of requiem. For fans of Krallice, Mizmor, Liturgy.