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Sergei Milushkin from Moscow, bass-guitarist, vocalist, composer and principle sound-architect of VIR’ is a veteran of Russian doom-sludge-drone-metal underground (he is also involved with the bands OCTOBER.14.1964 and KAISA). The band (its name was taken from Ivan Bunin’s rhyme “Vir” of 1900) in various forms exists since 1998 and produced several self-released albums, mixing doom-sludge distorted riff heaviness with post-industrial grim atmospheric drifts. For music samples and booking please visit VIR' official homepage or MyspaceMusic page.
Vir' / Horna (2008) / CD $11.00
The second full-length album, Horna (inspired by the Finnish-Karelian folk-epos “The Kalevala”) was completed in late autumn 2008 by Milushkin alone (bass, voice, assorted metal objects, plates & pipes, violin, mouth organ, music & lyrics) with occasional support from Alexei Krupa from ALETERA and OCTOBER.14.1964 (theremin), Karl (drums), and Ilya Alexeev from ANKYLYM (trumpet). Part dirge ambient-drone atmospherics, part noisy black-doom horrors, the album's five epic-sized compositions sucked the inspirations from Lustmord, Skullflower, Earth, Sunn0))), Khanate, Nadja, Jesu, and belched them out into breathtakingly emotional, bass generated audio nightmares with the signs of melodic and rhythmic organization. An avalanche of dark apocalyptic images hovering over countless layers of sound and distorted sporadic vocals (all lyrics are in Russian). Recommended. (5 tracks - 43 min.)
PRESS CLIPS
"...An amazing brand of droning out-heaviness that I'd never heard of before, but whose mixture of grim industrial atmospherics, crushing ambient sludge, and kosmiche-influenced soundscapes has been lodged into the C-Blast stereo ever since we got this disc in... It's a mixture of shimmering krautrock and pulverizing doom-drone, starting off with a gorgeous black field of sparkling melodic chimes and pulsating synths buried under layers of rumbling drone, very reminiscent of Tangerine Dream and Cluster but bathed in endless shadows, before moving into the crushing thirteen minute second track. Here the band moves into punishing waves of amplifier sludge and static distorted chords drifitng through space, like Black Boned Angel or Sunn moving through jet-black expanses of Teutonic space music, grinding guitar drone smeared in caustic noise and deep bass blasts, wheezing synths streaking overhead, distant mechanical rhythms and robotic tribal beats appearing through the murk. The sound is massive, and regardless of how heavy this becomes, there is always that classic kosmiche music sound underneath it all, making this much more than just another slab of rumbling guitar-drone exploration. The third track layers multiple strummed guitars all playing a simple two-chord riff with more gurgling electronics and crackling distortion while a frantic male voice shrieks in Russian over top, and the end result sounds like a weird sort of ambient power-electronics before it moves into a seven minite stretch of massively low-end guitar-feedback undulations and metallic scrapings. The last two tracks explore similiarly weird territory, all revolving around immense oceans of distorted guitar drone that are populated by blasts of harsh noise and menacing Prurient-style high-end feedback abuse, blissed out krautrock ambience, distant free-jazz horns, densely layered collages of voice recordings, thunderous sheet-metal reverberations, weird electronic sounds, fragments of sampled dance-pop music creeping through the filth, and other random sound events floating through VIR's monstrous dronemetal galaxies... Weird, nightmarish droneological heaviness for sure, but it totally works, invoking all kinds of apocalyptic hallucinations through these stretched out slabs of black murmur." – by Crucial Blast (USA) (February 2009).
The album was also reviewed at: Metal Library (Russia), Go-Punk (Russia).
| Title | Media | Price |
| CD-R | N/A | |
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| CD-R | N/A | |
| 3"CD-R | $9.00 | |
| CD | $11.00 | |
| CD | $9.00 | |
| DVD | $11.00 |
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