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Natural Snow Buildings/Isengrind/Twinsistermoon, "The Snowbringer Cult"
Ba Da Bing are clearly not ones to shy away from massive undertakings, following last year's 4LP Night Coercion into the Company of Witches reissue with yet another quadruple LP.  2008's The Snowbringer Cult was a monumental album for Natural Snow Buildings at the time of its release, as it was their first effort that was not available only as a hyper-limited cassette or CDr.  As such, it was many people's first exposure to the duo and Mehdi and Solange definitely set out to make it count, packing it with just about every single possible facet of their sound.  That "kitchen sink" approach does not make for the most listenable whole, but Snowbringer is not lacking in sustained stretches of absolute, otherworldly brilliance.
The original version of The Snowbringer Cult was released as a double CD by Students of Decay, a format that remains in place for this reissue.  The first disc contains a solo album by each member of the band, while the second disc is a lengthy collaborative effort.  Aside from the addition of a vinyl format, the reissue remains completely faithful to the original album in every way.  That was a wise decision, as only a lunatic would add bonus tracks to a 2 ½ hour album and the original art is thematically integral to the overall package (and also difficult to improve upon).  Also, remastering or "cleaning up" such a beautifully and uniquely produced album would be criminal.  The only truly significant change is that all three albums are now available as stand-alone releases, which makes them much easier to absorb.  That was a truly great idea.
The Isengrind album (Solange Gularte's solo project) is the shortest of the three, clocking in at just over half an hour.  Despite that comparative brevity, it contains many of the set's highlights, as Gularte was in the midst of a particularly fruitful creative period at the time.  With few exceptions, the mood is a very shadowy and ritualistic one, leaning very heavily on droning Indian stringed instruments, choruses of ghostly chanting, clattering percussive flourishes, and eerily discordant flutes and pipes.  On the best pieces, such as "To Ride with Hölle" and "Wooden False Face," Solange manages to sound so anachronistic and alien that it is actually far easier to imagine that this is an ancient field recording of a long-forgotten cult in the midst of a human sacrifice than the solo project of a contemporary French woman.  In fact, the latter often seems impossible.  The mesmerizing spell is disrupted only once, as the somewhat ill-advised "Cat's Cradle" dragged me reluctantly back to the present by drifting too closely to contemporary Freak Folk territory.  Happily, that song can easily be deleted from an iTunes library to leave a near-perfect album, but vinyl owners will just have to try to get used to it.
The Twinsistermoon half of the disc unsurprisingly shares a lot of common ground with Solange's effort, offering up still more occult-sounding drones, dissonant woodwinds, and tribal percussion.  There are some significant differences, however.  For one, Mehdi Ameziane's drone pieces are more dense and grinding than Solange's.  More significantly, those heavier pieces are interspersed with a number of melancholy and sweetly child-like acoustic ballads.  Another key difference is that the illusion of timelessness is not quite as effectively maintained as it is with the Isengrind portion, though that is mostly by design.  On songs like "Order of the Dreamt," Ameziane balances his more traditional instrumentation with roiling distortion and spacey flanging to create his own surreal headspace.  I am also quite fond of "Spells," which artfully combines Mehdi's talents for both ritualistic "funeral procession" percussion and cascading acoustic arpeggios.  The rest of the album is not quite on the same level, however, alternating between Mehdi's simple, eerie campfire songs and some lo-fi metallic drones.  Those remaining pieces are not exactly weak, but they are easily eclipsed by both Twinsistermoon's own post-Snowbringer work and the rest of this album (which is excellent).
I was very happy to learn that Ba Da Bing were making the Natural Snow Buildings' portion of The Snowbringer Cult available on its own, as it unquestionably one of the duo's finest albums and needs to be heard by itself (and with fresh ears) to be fully appreciated.  However, its original inclusion as the final disc of a three-way split release with the duo's solo projects was kind of an inspired idea, as it beautifully illustrated how the duo united was so much greater than the sum of its parts.  That is not necessarily true now, as both solo projects have evolved greatly in recent years, but Mehdi and Solange's collaborations still felt like a stunning and magical transformation back in 2008.  While I definitely like the Isengrind and Twinsistermoon segments of this collection, the Natural Snow Buildings portion of The Snowbringer Cult is an absolutely revelatory and dreamlike tour de force from start to finish.
Actually, "dreamlike" might be a bit misleading, as the opening "Resurrect Dead on Planet Six" (a cryptic Toynbee Tiles reference?) is much closer to a nightmare, building from queasily dissonant drones and flickering echoes into a roaring, visceral crescendo of guitar noise.  Structurally, it closely resembles some of Mehdi's solo work, but its execution is so complexly multilayered and seamlessly organic in its flow that it rises to a completely different level.  That trend basically holds for the entirety of the album: expected ideas are alchemically turned into otherworldly brilliance through ingenious layering and deft transitions (and it all sounds both massive and gloriously anachronistic).
With very few exceptions, almost all of these ten songs are highlights, a fact that is even more remarkable given the uncharacteristically varied stylistic territory covered.  "Inuk's Song," for example, is a gently rippling and hallucinatory reverie, while "Nieve Sacra" resembles a spacey, psych-damaged Morricone and "They Do Not Come Knocking There Any More" approximates a full-on tribal war march.  The more abstract title piece, on the other hand, basically resembles nothing else that earthbound mortals have recorded outside of Natural Snow Buildings–my best approximation would probably be "an ancient voodoo ceremony is sucked through a black hole and eventually re-emerges mashed up with the doomed Children's Crusade of 1212."  If there is a higher compliment for a piece of music, I certainly cannot think of it.
As was the case with Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches, The Snowbringer Cult is an absolutely exhausting and overwhelming listen in its entirety, which is its primary flaw.  There is way too much here to reasonably process and not all of it is great.  The similarities end there though: Night Coercion was a time capsule from a formative, largely unheard era of Natural Snow Buildings' career, while The Snowbringer Cult captures the duo at their absolute collaborative zenith.  The other major difference is that the best part of The Snowbringer Cult is now available by itself, no longer diluted by the inclusion of two full other albums worth of songs...and it is absolutely, screamingly essential.  The Isengrind/Twinsistermoon albums are perfectly fine, but the Natural Snow Buildings' third is a strong candidate for the best thing that anybody will release this year (reissue or otherwise). This is the kind of album that I would run into a fire to save.
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