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Xihilisk - The Black Square

4:41 PM |

Posted by Fire Fly |

I do not know much about the Artist Xihilisk, yet when I opened his MySpace profile page, I noticed that he had almost a quarter million profile views, nearly forty five thousand friends and his music has been played close to two hundred thousand times, keep in mind that this does not include the amount of downloads his music has received, which I believe to be close to three hundred thousand . The music industry is nothing new to Xihilisk, in fact he has recorded fifteen albums, his first album, "The Effect" was released in 2001 and now he has released what he refers to as his "Swan Song Album", the 2009 release "The Black Square". So you might wonder why have you not seen his albums in record stores or heard his songs blurring on the radio, well Xihilisk does all the work and then releases his music for free. This might sound crazy to some people but after doing some research on Xihilisk, I realized that this practice is a moral standpoint which he has taken and has kept throughout his entire music career. So lets have a look at his latest full length album "The Black Square".

Xihilisk is definitely falls in the indie category and to dig deeper into his musical genre, the album can be classified as post electronica with flavors of black metal and just enough experimentation to keep it all together. The first track on the album starts with an introduction of electronical noise which evolves into a full fledged fast paced metal tune. This song does not set the trend for the rest of the album, after releasing the anger in track one the rest of the album (with one or two exceptions, like Larvae of the Sloth and Sake) take a much more subdued tone. The second track is a wonderful electronic melody which works its way up to a climax and leaves the listener absolutely enchanted. The song is instrumental but the music leaves no place for words. After I gave this album a couple of listens I came to a conclusion that although I like Xihilisk's music, I would not like to have his dreams or nightmares for that matter. The recording quality is exceptional throughout the album and yet it manages to come of rather raw at on certain parts but it sounds like the intentional kind of raw. I picked up hints and traces of bands like Stars, Xiu Xiu and even CocoRosie but the strange thing is that these aren't even listed under his influences. This is a great album and I am not sure what Xihilisk will get up to, seeing that this is his last album but I am sure that this is not the last we heard of him.