Dio Drone is a rad DIY label from Tuscany, central Italy, who’s made a name for them selves by releasing such fucked up and awesome Italian bands as Hate & Merda, and OVO, just to name a few – their catalog is pretty vast now, and all the bands they work with are spot on. Today we’re stoked to bring to your attention two great new bands of theirs that we believe everyone should familiarize themselves with: Hyle, an all female Italian black/crust band that simply rips, and Werl – a project of Aidan Baker (Nadja, Caudal) and Tomas Järmyr (Motorpsycho, Zu) exploring the depths of drone, noise and dark freejazz.
I. HYLE – Malakìa
Hyle come from historically artistic/leftist/counterculture centre-north Italian city Bologna. As in the tradition of bands hailing from there they play highly political (in the anarcho-feminist realm of things), and ripping crust punk, with black and doom influences. Malakìa is their debut offering after a demo surfaced a couple years ago. It is comprised of little over ten minutes of dark, savage and ruinous d-beat driven hardcore punk leaning on the more nihilistic and darker side of the spectrum – a crossroad of sorts between the apocalyptic wrath of crust bands like Tragedy, Discharge, Doom, and the primitive and black malevolence of bands like Hellhammer, Amebix, and Ildjarn. Just gut-ripping.
II. WERL – HH.2016.09.08
I’m always fucking scared of missing the next new Aidan Baker “side” project, since there are so many, yet they all rule. Fortunately Dio Drone brought this to my attention and got me fucking stoked. With Werl the drone genius of Nadja fame has teamed up with Tomas Järmyr from none other than Motorpsycho and Zu to explore the most liminal and immaterial depths of drone and dark freejazz. Again – I would have to guess this record was all recorded live and is probably improvised, as this type of composition only gets restrained and contrived when/if mapped out to be recorded conventionally. The result is something staggeringly dense and intricately mental: static dark matter and abstract ritualistic percussion encircling a black hole of drones and coalescing into falling ash. I can’t fully distill this release in words or categorize it but it’s absolutely nuts, and a towering example of top notch improvisational and free form experimental rock.
