Liturgy

LITURGY Radio Stream Posted; Will Play New Yorker Fest This Weekend

NYC's transcendental black metallers LITURGY played live on Jersey City's WFMU radio station last night! The show is posted online and can be accessed here:http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/33284.

LITURGY will also be appearing at the New Yorker Festival with the Dirty Projectors tomorrow (Friday, October 16th) in Brooklyn. Other upcoming gigs for the NYC-based outfit include hometown brethren Krallice's record release party, a trip out to Rhode Island to play the record release party for labelmates The White Mice, the New York city date of one of only three US Shrinebuilder shows planned as of now, and more.

10/16/2009 Bell House - Brooklyn, NY - New Yorker Festival w/ Dirty Projectors, House of Ladosha, Jubilee

10/19/2009 The Dark Lady - Providence, RI w/ White Mice, Child Abuse, Hardontron

10/31/2009 Market Hotel - Brooklyn, NY w/ Mount Eerie, Malkuth, Tara Jane O’Neil

11/13/2009 Union Pool - Brooklyn, NY w/ Krallice, Orphan, Malkuth

11/15/2009 Le Poisson Rouge - New York, NY w/ Shrinebuilder, Rwake

12/12/2009 Public Assembly - Brooklyn, NY *Hideous Gnosis Black Metal Symposium (presentation)

Renihilation is LITURGY's debut LP, following two demo tapes and a 12 inch. The album weaves intricate waves of dissonant dual guitar riffing and complex blackened harmonics between main songwriter Hunter Hunt-Hendrix and second guitarist Bernard Gann. The strange tonalities they seamlessly create providing layers of eerie dimension over which Hendrix’s tortured howls battle to be heard. The ultra-chaotic yet superbly minimalist drumming of Greg Fox (also of Dan Deacon and Teeth Mountain), utilizing only a kick, snare and crash symbols, adds a dose of old, raw punk/grind to the mix.

Renihilation was recorded and mastered at the Thousands Caves Of Menegroth with Colin Marston of Krallice at the helm. The LP version of the album became available via 20 Buck Spin this week.

"If it weren't for the relentless drums and the growling and screaming, these cyclical guitar riffs could easily be music for meditation." - All Music Guide

"Liturgy are the first black metal band that truly embodies the ghosts of New York. They play metal like it's a minimalist downtown art/life/religion project in the tradition of dronemasters Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young's Dream Syndicate." - The Village Voice

"...perhaps it's no coincidence that I get that same feeling from Weakling, Wolves In the Throne Room, Krallice and now Liturgy. All of these bands make majestic, tension-filled black metal, unafraid of combining violence with trembling beauty..." - Cerebral Metalhead

LITURGYBlack Metal Brooklyn, New York Estados Unidos USA Glasslands 9/3/2008

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: guitar, vocals

Bernard Gann: guitar

Tyler Dusenbury: bass

Greg Fox: drums

Vlad Tepes, Gerard Grisey, Angelo Badalamenti, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Smithson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Deleuze, Scriabin, The Cloud of Unknowing, Perotin, Xenakis, Glenn Branca, Swans

Liturgy are the first black metal band that truly embodies the ghosts of New York. They play metal like it's a minimalist downtown art/life/religion project in the tradition of dronemasters Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young's Dream Syndicate. Through their own brand of growling, gnarling, lightning-fast black grind, Liturgy try to find euphoria through dissonance, repetition and volume--turning metal nightmares into something ready for the Dream House.

-Village Voice

[T]hese jams almost sound like modern classical compositions, like Arvo Part composing for black metal band, when a song ends, you feel exhausted, and drained, like at the end of a long journey, but before you can even catch your breath, the band explode into action once again. And before you know it, they're locked into another high end blast of extreme tension, no let up, no slipping into acoustic interludes, it's almost like the musical version holding your breath, soaring as high and for as long as (in)humanly possible, so when the band does pause briefly, it knocks you on your ass, of when they switch gears and get all spacious and dynamic, it nearly blows your mind. 
When we first got this, we only listened to it a couple times, and thought it was pretty cool, but on repeated listens it is proving itself to be truly transcendental, and unlike almost all of the other black metal out there, and is quickly becoming a contender for black metal record of the year.

-Aquarius

[E]ven though Liturgy describes their music as "transcendental black metal", this music is so much more proggy and avant-garde than you'd expect. The album is the band's first release as a four piece, with Hunt-Hendrix teaming up with a second guitar player to whip out fierce walls of trebly, hyperfast tremelo picking that build into soaring melodic shapes. The drums blast relentlessly, but drummer Greg Fox combines his hectic blastbeats with cascading tom/snare rolls that gives this a fiery, jazzy feel and makes the music sound even more frenzied than if he was just playing straightforward blasts. The vocals are high pitched, washed-out howls, and the songs race along furiously, but behind the shredding trebly guitars and blurry black metal screams and chaotic drumming, Liturgy also craft amazingly beautiful harmonies that take over the sound, the guitars weaving themselves into ecstatic swarms of cyclical melody that feel like the guitar army compositions of Branca and Chatham transposed over blistering machine gun clatter. Liturgy's music is beautiful and mesmerizing, and quite unlike any black metal band I've ever heard. Highly recommended.

-Crucial Blast

There are so many brilliant contradictions inside Liturgy's first studio full-length that it's almost headache-inducing to try and pull the whole thing apart. Every aspect of the album is an inverse of itself; a wondrous balancing act of triumph and desperation that throws the listener head first into a state of dark ecstasy. Such is the process of Renihilation, a term coined by band founder and guitarist/frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix to refer to the end product of a dissension against dissension, creating something entirely new and clear in the face of destruction. Renihilation begins with a multi-layered vocal track, one of four musical interludes, all simply titled "-." It sounds almost like Animal Collective, if the animals were ancient and mythological, covered in corpse paint. And all the sudden, a drumroll brings on "Pagan Dawn," a fiery blast of painfully uplifting black metal. Tremolo guitars move transparently through major and minor vamps, with Hunt-Hendrix's prophetic death screams somehow escaping to the top in a courageous blaze of raw emotion. [...] And somewhere between drummer Greg Fox's excavating blast beats and Hunt-Hendrix and guitarist Bernard Gann's dueling guitar arpeggios, a conflicting feeling of fear and admittance will make you realize this is the black metal album of the decade.

-CMJ

Releases:

2009 Renihilation

CD released by 20 Buck Spin

LP out in October on 20 Buck Spin

2008 Immortal Life

12" released by INFL

2006 Eternal Void

self-released cassette (OOP)

2005 The Paranoiac Miracle

self-released cassette

http://www.myspace.com/liturgynybm

Earsplit PR
Dave Brenner
PO Box 142, Congers NY 10920