With its roots tied to black metal, French one man project OWL CAVE comes as a very singular project, evolving in the experimental sphere through its six instrumental tracks gathered on a single that clocks around forty minutes, providing us with a dark, overwhleming journey of many influences. Featuring shades of extreme metal, post metal, but also industrial and tribal music, th record defines its own vector of intensity and darkness.
Broken Speech has been available digitally since the beginning of June, but today it goes live on a CD and vinyl format, available HERE via Time Tombs Productions!
The record features an amazing dark art by graphic deisgner Dehn Sora, who joined us to share his thoughts on this bleak, yer beautiful new project.
For fans of Zhrine, Blut Aus Nord or Svartidauรฐi.
Asked about the concept of having 6 tracks combined in one, OWL CAVE comments: “Although there are indeed six tracks on this album, they have always seemed to me to be linked to each other and part of an indissociable whole. This album is an inner journey in six steps, and the fact of gathering them in one track aims at forcing the listener to respect this will, at the antipodes of the current mode of music consumption in which I have a lot of trouble to find myself.”
Broken Speech was named partly after the absence of vocal and lyrics. “It’s more precisely the characterization of the limit of language, and its incapacity to translate thought or feeling in certain situations.”
By embedding all the tribal elements, OWL CAVE had this impulse to do something very organic. “A sort of controlled savagery as best I could.” – he comments. “I think it was around this stage of the composition that I discovered Heilung’s Ofnir album, which had a huge impact on me and certainly played a part in the shape of this track.”
For top 5 inspirational albums he names: Throane – Plus une Main ร Mordre, Aosoth – IV, Ulver – Perdition City, Arkhon Infaustus – Orthodoxyn, and Deathspell Omega – Drought.
We asked Dehn Sora for his thoughts about this amazing artwork and graphic design and here’s what he got.
“The mind behind Owl Cave, had a pretty clear idea of something like a chasm, dazzling light, giving me the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks as a reference. The idea was to work hand in hand, to find a common vision, of something that would emerge from recurring images in style. Finding the luminous approach, but filling the sticky and oppressive environment in which I found myself while listening to the album, was the real challenge.”
“Having been able to work with Owl Cave on other projects, I was beginning to understand his personality.” – he continues. “And I humbly tried to find this side close to the earth, to nature, to inject this mud into it, without being in something frontally dirty. A crown of light made to illuminate the viscera.”
