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Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Album Holy Complex Metal Maelstrom: De Magia Veterum's The Deification

Posted by Dave Segal on Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:48 PM

I admit, I’m a mere dabbler in metal and its subgenres. I force myself to hear a lot of it during my work day, but little of it sticks in my mind or compels further investigation. That’s just how I’m wired. I respect the skill it takes to create some of this music, even if I detest the pervasive vocal style that reeks of extreme agony and projectile vomiting. I get it: Life’s got you down. But your catharsis often is other people’s hell. Moving on to happier matters…

De Magia Veterum’s The Deification (Transcendental Creations) recently invaded my headspace and made all of my ganglia start gasping “HOLY SHIT.” This hardly ever happens with me and metal. What sets De Magia Veterum apart from the black-clad hordes is a kind of sonic high-wire act wherein he (Dutch musician Mories, aka Maurice de Jong) plays mind-bogglingly complex and mercurial guitar parts and insane rhythmic convolutions with superhuman velocity and ferocity.

Surely other bands are doing something similar to this; I just haven’t heard it yet. But it’s hard to imagine anyone doing this sort of thing better than De Magia Veterum. It’s like a molten mindmeld of Motörhead, King Crimson, and Magma—black metal collides with prog rock at 150 mph, and the resultant debris is fascinating. If there’s more stuff like DMV out there, please let me know.

Listen to The Deification here.

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Comments (3) RSS

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Holy fucking shit.

Posted by bleedingheartlibertarian on November 21, 2012 at 10:11 AM

Check out Cloak of Altering, the other releases by De Magia Veterum, Gnaw Their Tongues and pretty much all other projects of Mories (some of his albums are free!) at bandcamp and archive.org: http://gnawtheirtongues.bandcamp.com/
http://archive.org/search.php?query=crea…
It's amazing what range of sounds he covers in all his projects. I'd also strongly recommend 1973, a double album released this year by Mories as Seirom, available at Bandcamp and Aurora Borealis:
http://auroraborealisrecordings.bandcamp…

Posted by spillblood on November 22, 2012 at 6:28 PM

Thanks, @2.

Posted by Dave Segal on November 25, 2012 at 2:53 PM