Out of the blue, William Kopecky (bass, vox, delirium) and Dimitar Dimitrov (electronics, vox, hallucinogens) aka Haiku Funeral surprise fans of dark experimental music with an album fusing primitive and dirty black occultism with elements of psychedelic darkwave soundscapes and doomy, pounding rhythms. The whole thing is quite darkly vibrating and spooky, and right from the first few compositions, one can tell how much of a departure it is from bassist William Kopecky’s precedent Prog/Jazz and Ambient curriculum vitae. I was surprised to hear, this time in a whole different style, Kopecky’s convincing bass experimentation, which I had previously discovered in Yeti Rain. Haiku Funeral’s music is indeed slow-moving, decaying, rotten, lung-filled with thick hashish smoke and black & white bacteriological filth. Equally ambient, industrial-fleshed, drone-y (bass) metal, Eastern flavoured and poetically meditative, Assassination In The Hashish Cathedral feels like a demented mindtrip in to your inner hell and as such, it falls short of heavenly transcendental psychedelism and sounds closer to a scary bad ass trip. The first half of the album welcomes Kopecky on vocals and his spoken evocations certainly fit with the drug sick spirit of the music, while the second half sounds perhaps more Black metal in tone with Dimitrov performing his ultra distorted screeching.
The album’s only weakness, in my opinion, is the lack of global vision, which is to say that Assassination goes in many directions though never really settles down on a crystal clear ‘band identity’. Hopefully this should get fixed with the next few albums, if any new album is planned. For now, the duo feels rather fragmented and chaotic, but that’s also part of their charm I guess. In conclusion, the label’s name perhaps will help you to get an idea. “Hikikomori, according to Wikipedia, is a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives.” I could rephrase that and write that Haiku Funeral is a European/American band name which refers to the phenomenon of two reclusive musicians who have chosen to withdraw from the norms of music, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various deranged factors in their musical creativity. An album for those who prefer their coffee black and strong…
-Oliver Side
VITALS:
Release: 2009
Label: Hikikomori Records
Avantgenre: Hallucinatory Music Of Doom
Duration: 53:31
Origin: Europe/USoA
Official site: http://www.myspace.com/haikufuneral
Review online since: 17.02.2010 / 19:05:19
TRACKLIST:
01 – Haiku Funeral
02 – Assassination In The Hashish Cathedral
03 – Let The Drug Sick Visions Begin
04 – The Jewelery Of Suffering
05 – The Forever Book Of Smoke
06 – Night Liquid Mother
07 – Funeral
08 – Black Asylum
09 – The Failing Of Feathered Light
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