Challenger + DIY EP (2023 Remaster)

Description

Side A:
Whacked Out - [remaster 2023]
Repressed - [remaster 2023]
El Niño - [remaster 2023]
Bite the Bullet - [remaster 2023]
Side B:
Neon Guide - [remaster 2023]
H
armless - [remaster 2023]
58.788 - [remaster 2023]
Ice Will - [remaster 2023]
Side C:
March - [remaster 2023]
Dissolve - [DIY EP - remaster 2023]
Side D:
Aim at the Sun - [DIY EP - remaster 2023]
The Will to Please - [DIY EP - remaster 2023]
When Didier Séverin abruptly left Earth in March 2022, he left a gaping hole. But he left us a considerable legacy, including this album Challenger, released in March 2002 on the Hydra Head Records label (USA). A cathartic album, a combustion point in an upward trajectory that began eight years earlier when Didier Séverin (vocals), Philippe Hess (guitar), Roderic Mounir (drums), and Thierry van Osselt (bass) – later replaced by Jeremy Tavernier – embarked on the Knut adventure. At the time, Geneva, along with Copenhagen, was one of Europe's squat culture capitals and a stopover for international tours. Community and DIY ideals deeply infused Knut's operations, its ability to create a network, and a label: Snuff Records, contributing to the rise of the local scene (Nostromo, Brazen, Shora, Fragment, Grace).
After a self-released mini-album (Leftovers, 1997) and a first full-length (Bastardiser, 1998), Knut's uniqueness asserted itself at the turn of the millennium, attracting the attention of a label whose activism was making waves across the Atlantic: Hydra Head Records released records by Cave In, Botch, Converge, Isis, Keelhaul, Craw, Discordance Axis, Khanate, Dälek, Jesu, Oxbow, and many others, bridging extreme music inspired by hardcore
metal with noise-rock, experimental music, ambient, etc. Free and adventurous spirits were destined to meet across oceans. In 2000, Knut tied its fate to Hydra Head Records and set course for its most ambitious recording, which would definitively launch the band into orbit.
On Challenger, an album as wild as it is cerebral, where vehemence coexists with reflective or almost psychedelic repetitive passages, Didier found his voice, delivering through his cryptic lyrics his share of chaos and his quest for transcendence. What did he have in mind when titling this album Challenger? An ironic comment on Knut's status in the post-hardcore-metal-noise galaxy – this path traced by Neurosis, Today is the Day, Converge, Bloodlet, Botch, Coalesce, Breach, to which Knut adds more or less obscure influences (Godflesh, Zeni Geva, Eisenvater, Dazzling Killmen, Merzbow)? Undoubtedly, with his own sense of irony, he was also giving a nod to the fatal ascent of NASA's eponymous shuttle, whose combustion occurred at second 58.788, giving its title to one of the album's instrumental tracks.
Challenger marked a break, an affirmation, and an existential cry whose eco