#News #Stream Barren Canyon – A Virulent Steam
Upcoming release from Barren Canyon – A Virulent Steam via Avantgarde Music
“Barren Canyon is a project involving Maikan, a founding member of Spectral Wound and sole member of Circle of Salt, and Absent. The project moves away from the raw immediacy of traditional black metal toward something more diffuse and textural, drawing inspiration from ambient music like Berlin school of electronic music, Michael Stearns, Steve Roach, and even the New Age music of Windham Hill. For this album, we wanted to push that direction further, building hazy, dense, and airy soundscapes that feel thick, stifling and oppressive. We started thinking about literal “atmospheric metal” generated from industrial production.
The project has always been environmental in focus, but it did not make sense to us to recycle the same tired black metal tropes about the wood as refuge or spiritual sanctuary, at a time when forest fire ecocide has become an annual event, obliterating the Canadian boreal forest to ash.
We see firsthand how the romantic image of the frontier Canadian wilderness is dispelled by the reality of endless clearcutting. We wanted to reflect that feeling and create music that felt suited to our geography, whereas so many mine the same medieval dungeon synth melodies.
We started thinking of metabolic cycles, circuits, and flows: how forests and human bodies alike are drawn into industrial processes that convert vitality into exhaustion, waste, and toxic air. We looked back to early industrialization: the role of steam, the saturation of air with the noxious wastes of industry, warnings from Romantics like Ruskin and Morris, and accounts from Engels of workers dying of cholera and coal lung, whose own vitality was transmuted into the dead labour congealed in commodities whose production helped further intensify the endless cycles of extraction. We approach this less as a political statement and more as a visceral reaction, through the black metal tradition of anti humanism and through the lens of cosmic horror. We use the imagery of “A virulent steam” to depict a creeping calamity that has neutered all political responses and caused the failure of all philosophy” words by Maikan
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