Welcome to Demo:listen, your weekly peek into the future of underground metal. Whether it’s death, grind, black, doom, sludge, heavy, progressive, stoner, retro, post-, etc. we’re here to bring you the latest demos from the newest bands. On this week’s Demo:listen, we gather round the table, join hands, and, repeating the phrases intonated by the milky-eyed crone, make contact with the UK’s Opium Seance.
Occasionally here at Demo:listen, we get to bring you a band so fresh that their music is yet confined to that immaterial world, the internet. Such is the case with the UK’s Opium Seance, and their viscous, stygian demo Levitation. So while Levitation may not have any proper cover art as of yet, the four songs that comprise it are still more than worthy of your immediate attention. And while Opium Seance may yet be at work on their logo, their initial offering of haunted blackened death metal is more than enough to keep your imagination occupied for many sleepless nights to come.
So claims the sole entity behind Opium Seance: “I wanted something that was very heavy and very murky, and ritualistic and hazy, and there wasn’t many records that were really doing this for me so I thought I’d make it myself.” In which case, allow us to congratulate Opium Seance on achieving exactly what they set out to do. For this is absolutely one of the heaviest, murkiest, and haziest demos we’ve encountered in some time, perhaps ever. And yet it’s not exactly a wall of noise—at least not most of the time. True, about half of Levitation is similar to a boiling tar baptism, but always there is a sense of musicality, a piquant ecstasy to the torture, as if the person who’s maiming you is also humming, as in the latter half of “Obsidian Trance Visions.”
“Occult art, the western mystery tradition, psychedelics, [and] reverb,” according to Opium Seance, are the main influences behind the madness captured on Levitation. Which is neither surprising, nor unsurprising. Rather that list of influences seems inchoate. Certainly there is something else, something further removed from the knowledge of common existence at work here. Can you not feel the ectoplasmic dust that gathers on your skin when listening to Levitation ad nauseam into the lonely hours of the morning?
Those who demand a material possession to validate their enjoyment of something only need to exercise some patience. Levitation, according to Opium Seance (and confirmed by the label itself), “will come out on tape and CD via Gravplass Propaganda . . .” Then, the entity behind OS says, they “will make another record.” However, chances of the band ever appearing in person seems unlikely. Says Opium Seance: “I don’t really know anybody else into this kind of music in real life.”
You heard it here first on Demo:listen. Check this space next and every Friday for promising new metal.
