There are few people I’ve met in my life who are able to bring both levity and gravity with their presence in an authentic and seamless way as Amenra’s Colin H. van Eeckhout. He’s a kind and funny person whose art reaches into the depths of isolation and despair and pulls screaming shadows from it. In May, he released Kalvarie, and it’s out via Relapse Records — order it here. The Kalvarie EP consists of “Eternit,” one 15-minute track, but it engulfs my senses in the atmosphere of a full record. Maybe it’s the hurdy gurdy he’s playing, the crackling in the background, the stripped-down percussion, or the massive explosions of bass, but something about this song feels like it’s bringing me into an unimaginably distant past that somehow lives on in my bones and blood. “Eternit” doesn’t scream; it soars while it crawls and laments. It’s a song to sing at the end of an eternity, something we humans have been dreading maybe since the beginning of our time.
I think you connect to this kind of music in an instinctive way, I compare it with a fire: when you see a fire, you look at it, you get lost in it. The same thing can happen with repetitive sound: it triggers something inside. It’s stripping back, trying to use music for how it was intended.
Colin H. van Eeckhout
