Band:	Voidless Form
Album:	I, Nihilist
Style:	Noise, Drone doom metal
Release date:	May 15, 2016
A review by:	Auntie Sahar

01. I, Nihilist

As the ardent fan can tell you, there's something about the drone genre that is fundamentally paradoxical. To the outsider it appears as a somewhat pointless formula: formless music with no real sense of guidance or structure. But what if, in some inexplicable way, the lack of a structure demands the exploration of new, rather atypical ones, thereby fueling the creative process? Enter Voidless Form, a band committed to sailing these uncharted waters.

Voidless Form, the one man project of Radu Pătroiu (plus guests), employs a style of music that I like to think of as "expansionist drone metal." Much like Sunn O))) with Monoliths & Dimensions, the music on this year's I, Nihilist is drone, but it's a somewhat shaky label, for it is also so much more than that. A significant variety of stylistic influences encircle this drone core, as moons orbiting a large planet, creating a complex, yet truly stimulating listening experience. Though maintaining its drone underbelly, at times the music here will shift into territories of folk (augmented by the use of several nonmetal instruments), doom, psychedelia, and bizarre, mind-numbing electronic effects, and more, seemingly blurring the lines between each of these influences entirely.

This sort of musical approach, then, can easily make I, Nihilist feel as though it spins in a ton of different directions, without being quite sure of where it wants to go exactly. But, taking the album lyrics into consideration, this sort of songwriting only makes sense. Highly existential and dreamlike, they seem to be questioning reality itself, reflecting an individual's sense of fear and awe as they realize that nothing can truly be known, and explore the nature of thought itself. Fittingly then, the music seems to mirror this stream-of-consciousness nature of the lyrics. As the individual explores the nature of reality, and his thoughts go wheresoever they may choose, the music follows suit in pouring a plethora of different sounds and styles into its drone foundation, going wheresoever it may choose.

For so monumental and forward-thinking a release, I, Nihilist is not without its few slip ups. The smoothness of transition from one style into the next could be worked on a bit in the future, and I'd personally like to see less use (perhaps none at all) of the "sung" vocal approach and more of the straight narrative, spoken word type technique employed at the album's start, as it seems to suit the surreal nature of the music far better. Yet at the end of the day, Voidless Form deserves more praise for what I, Nihilist is than shunning for what it isn't. And what it is is an ambitious, incredibly intriguing journey into the subconscious. Fans of drone, or experimental music in general, do not pass this one up.

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