MERZBOW & PEDRO VIAN - Bardo Thödol LP Neo-Crust Listening to Koude's self-titled debut

Listening to Koude's self-titled debut album can feel like floating in still dark water or like crawling slowly through a moonlit forest

run by author Richard King and James Webster

creating a new variant of supremely pleasing acoustic-psychedelic-drone-Americana etc

the album focuses on an endless cascade of pirouetting geometric melodics

a steady deep ecstatic low thud dictating the premises over metallic reeds gently strummed by the wind and Stella’s commanding haikus generating human empathy

MERZBOW & PEDRO VIAN - Bardo Thödol LP Neo-Crust Listening to Koude's self-titled debutIn their third collaboration, the shared project between Merzbow and Pedro Vian shifts towards less confrontational and more introspective terrain. Bardo Thdol, released as an LP, draws on The Tibetan Book of the Dead not so much as an explicit narrative framework but as a conceptual resonance: a passage, a suspension between states. Where Inside Richard Serra Sculptures and The Wheel of Mani foregrounded a relatively defined dialectic between Vians