Band:	Victory Over The Sun
Album:	Nowherer
Style:	Avantgarde metal, Black metal
Release date:	April 2021

01. Nowherer
02. God Howling In A Cage
03. Alveromancy
04. Oscines

We are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream. The octaves are not what they seem.

I woke up, I started to make breakfast, and a creeping feeling came over me, increasing in intensity until I looked up at my walls to find them covered in kitchen knives arranged in occult patterns. As they all turned to point towards me, I was overcome with terror, and I woke up, I started to make breakfast, and? repeat, repeat, repeat. I still clearly remember this horrific false awakening loop I experienced some decade ago. This album seems to aim to convey such a nightmare, and does it very well, while being nearly as exhausting a listen as such a dream itself.

Despite having been a musician for many years, I still have a quite bad ear for music, and couldn't find microtonality in my own ass. However, knowing what to look for, I didn't need many listens to Nowherer to get the point. This one-woman progressive black outfit discards the common twelve-tone basis of most music in favour of an octave divided into seventeen equally spaced intervals. You might not realise it at first, but just like a false awakening, eventually you'll hear that something sounds just off, and as you listen more closely, more and more aspects of Victory Over The Sun's music start to sound simpy wrong.

Wrong in a good way, that is. Riffs repeat, but kind of don't either, being nearly imperceptibly perturbed by quarter tones or even stranger fractional intervals (I wouldn't presume to know) between iterations, and dissonant harmonies are subtly unsettled to take on uniquely eldritch qualities. I was pleased to find the microtonal approach never coming off as a gimmick, but subtly constituting a main ingredient of the music. Nowherer consistently sounds eerily off, but tastefully so rather than in your face.

Dissonant black metal is by now a well-established style, and at a glance, Nowherer somewhat comes off as King Crimson doing Deathspell Omega covers. This is, of course, high praise, as the free-form, varied composition style of the former is spiced up by eerie, unexpected harmonies akin to those of the latter. Songs are easily recognisable, from the screeching atmospherics on "Nowherer" through the jazz metal riffs of "Alveromancy" to the prog-by-post-metal journey "Oscines", which is the main gripe I have about this album; on its own, it's 20 minutes of intriguing music, but paired with the first half of the album, it starts to get tiring to these low-attentive ears, and I feel some editing wouldn't have hurt.

That said, while I've often found Nowherer challenging to sit all the way through, unless for some reason you're already familiar with listening to tones you wouldn't, literally, normally expect to exist, it ought to spark a curiosity about music akin to considering mathematics outside the common set of axioms... and then, I woke up to start writing this review again.