LURKER OF CHALICE

LURKER OF CHALICE to release demos collection through NUCLEAR WAR NOW!, reveals first track

Today, Nuclear War Now! Productions sets March 1st, 2020 as the international release date for a special demos collection/reimagining from the enigmatic Lurker of Chalice. Titled Tellurian Slaked Furnace, it shall be released on CD, vinyl LP, and cassette tape formats.

Active from 2001-2005, the highly revered side-project of Leviathan’s Jef Whitehead, Lurker of Chalice, is mostly known for the 2005 self-titled full-length. Prior to that album, however, Wrest recorded two CD-R demos under the Lurker of Chalice name, each of which was limited to approximately 50 copies or less and sold at a single record store in San Francisco, near where he was living at the time. Like the full-length, both demos were eponymous, though the first demo was identified only by the initials “L.O.C.” written in runes. While a few of the songs from the demo era bear indicia of black metal, the material from that period is generally far more experimental, defying any effort to be neatly categorized.

For Tellurian Slaked Furnace, Wrest has distilled the best material from the early period of the project and edited, collaged, and compiled it, weaving together something more coherent and album-like. In this way, there seems to be something of his current artistic sensibility projected onto these recordings from nearly two decades earlier.

In keeping with the confusing taxonomy of the project, the tracks on this LP are unnamed. The album opens with a song previously called “Lurker of Chalice” on the 2002 demo but is untitled on this release. The song showcases the haunting minimalism of Lurker of Chalice as slow acoustic guitars revolve around one another, arpeggiated chords ringing out above percussive accents. With the second track, a more sinister energy emerges, advanced by the first and only appearance of Wrest’s seething vocals.

Over the full, 70-minute duration of this album, the music, almost completely instrumental, expands and contracts, evolves and disintegrates. Delicate ambient passages and labyrinthine excursions give way to electronic dirges of lumbering percussion with guitar shimmering transcendent above a melancholic lake of atmospheric sound and cascading sheets of electronics dissolving into lush acoustic melodies. Only very rarely do heavy riffs emerge; compared with Wrest’s work in Leviathan, or even the Lurker of Chalice album, the metal elements are far less direct and overt. Instead, this album conjures a bleak, unsettling mood without resorting to the compositional trappings of black metal. The music, which strangely seems both intensely personal, yet also detached and cinematic, evokes a palpable sense of solitude—the disconsolate reckoning of the self in the absence of others.

The release of Tellurian Slaked Furnace marks the first time any of the Lurker of Chalice demo recordings have been reissued and also offers a substantial amount of previously unheard material.

Hear “IV,” one of those previously unheard tracks, here:
Cover and tracklisting are as follows:
Tracklisting for Lurker of Chalice’s Tellurian Slaked Furnace
1. I
2. II
3. III
4. IV
5. V
6. VI
7. VII
8. VIII
9. IX
10. X
11. XI
12. XII
www.nwnprod.com
www.facebook.com/pages/Nuclear-War-Now-Productions/114864651994141

NUCLEAR WAR NOW! to reissue seminal LURKER OF CHALICE album

Nuclear War Now! Productions sets February 15th, 2018 as the international release date for the double-LP vinyl reissue of Lurker of Chalice’s lone and long-out-of-print album, Lurker of Chalice.

Like Leviathan, Lurker of Chalice is a project conceived of and executed by multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Jef Whitehead, who is generally referred to as Wrest in the context of his music. For nearly 20 years, through his work with Leviathan, Lurker of Chalice, and many other projects, Whitehead has consistently recorded and released music that has unquestionably left permanent scars on the face of the USBM scene.

To call Lurker of Chalice a Leviathan side-project would be inaccurate. Though Leviathan is far more prolific and widely known, Wrest’s recordings under the Lurker of Chalice banner are just as earnest and extraordinary. Indeed, to many, the Lurker of Chalice material represents the zenith of Wrest’s vast and superb body of work.

The self-titled Lurker of Chalice album, which came out in 2005, was the only widely circulated recording associated with the project, the two previous demos only being released in very limited quantities. The album garnered massive praise before swiftly going out of print, practically ensuring its stature as a cult masterpiece.

It would be too simplistic to categorize this album as mere black metal because it sweeps so broadly across the musical spectrum; however, even when Wrest strays farthest from black metal in a stylistic sense, the sensations and emotions the music conjures are every bit as visceral. Born of true despair, the oppressive weight of anguish looms over the album. A genuine sense of oblivion permeates the atmosphere created by this collection of songs that, taken together, chart a course through the bleakest stations of the soul.

Following a comparatively brief introductory track, the album opens with “Piercing Where They Might,” one of two songs on the album that were featured on the Lurker of Chalice demo released in 2002. The song begins with what might be the brightest passage on the album, featuring delicate guitar work accentuated by the sounds of birds in the background—this proves to be the first and last glimpse of light the listener will have—before it abruptly shifts, plunging over the blackened horizon into ever more depressive regions. A warped repetitive riff of slow bending notes carries the momentum of the song, causing a temporal distortion as it’s woven into the latticework of a steady blastbeat moving four times faster—like the anxious constancy of one’s breath over the percussive fervor of one’s heartbeat. Only one other track, “Granite,” which was also featured on the 2002 demo, can really be described as something like traditional black metal, with assertive drums like railroad tracks guiding the movement of the song beneath a canopy of guitars, synthesizers, and ethereal vocals.

As the album progresses, its lonely and bruised meanderings persist through stylistic and compositional variations that maintain the album’s allure—from the funeral doom aesthetics of “Minions” through the haunting echo chamber of despair evoked by “Paramnesia” to “This Blood Falls as Mortal Part III,” which features a Sylvia Plath spoken-word sample amid a melancholy interplay of Eno-esque sustained guitars and synthesizers, to the neofolk evocations of “Vortex Chalice,” before culminating with the sorrowful ardor of “Fastened to the Five Points.” The album closes unceremoniously, leaving the listener fractured and depleted.

At the time of its release, no other album sounded quite like this one, and it’s no exaggeration to say that no comparable release has emerged in the last 12 years since Lurker of Chalice: the album truly occupies its own shade along the ever-expanding spectrum of black metal. Nuclear War Now! is honored to present this new edition of Lurker of Chalice, which will include the bonus track featured on previous vinyl editions of the album. Additionally, NWN! will be working with Wrest to unearth and remaster some previously unreleased Lurker of Chalice material for future releases.

In the leadup to its double-LP release, the entirety of Lurker of Chalice is streaming in full.

Cover and tracklisting are as follows:

Tracklisting for Lurker of Chalice’s Lurker of Chalice
1. (untitled)
2. Piercing Where They Might
3. Spectre as Valkerie Is
4. Minions
5. Paramnesia
6. This Blood Falls as Mortal, Pt. 3
7. Granite
8. Vortex Chalice
9. Fastened to the Five Points

further info:
www.nwnprod.com