Have you ever sat and contemplated what may happen if you were to infuse the strangest, most mind warping extraterrestrial deep-space chemical material and a massive hurricane of detonating fecal matter, and then you were to channel that otherworldly cosmic flatulence into creating music? Me neither. Anyway, when trying to make heads or tails of this new Voidceremony release my own perfectly functioning imagination (that I promise works in a similar way to most of you other humans) generated an image similar to that which I have just described to you. This album is musically strange, it’s experimental, and by any unit of measurement that I can even begin to map out its artistic merit with, it’s not even worth describing it as nuts; that adjective would be a woeful disservice. This album entitled ‘Abditum’ is, by all means, absolutely ludicrous.
Now, I’m no stranger to the oddball landmark pillars of Death Metal, the likes of classic albums by Demilich, Gorguts, Portal or Atheist. In fact, there are releases in this vague, spasming and vomitous lane that I consider to be amongst some of the most ground breaking works of extreme Metal ever conceived. However, when indulging in the creative act of channeling one’s inner Death Metal mutant-freakazoid it’s not enough to just create something highly eccentric and then blindly assign to it a totemic stature of genius. There must always be a method to successful, ponderous madness. ‘Abditum’ is the third full length from Voidceremony, picking up the baton from 2023’s ‘Threads Of Unknowing’ (Vm Underground also reviewed this album that year). ‘Threads’, showed the band as formidable conjurers of dissonant freak-Death, albeit with a showing that was loosely chained to a more central sense of direction and rhythmic solidity. ‘Abditum’, whilst still a Voidceremony album in terms of superficial aesthetics, represents a sort of Adhd brained maniachal descendent of the album that preceded it.
The album opens to a synthesised progression reminiscent of a vintage video game and it feels somewhat akin to a track of Dungeon Synth exploration. A fitting opener for an album whose creators could only have been cut from a cloth of nerdy obsessive musical proficiency. Track two ‘Voracious Duality’ immediately lays bare a sense of free-form bombast. All the instrumentation hopping, skipping and projectile regurgitating its way from one time signature to the next like a ravenous dog chasing scattered scraps. With bass performances that sound like Jaco Pastorius high on deep space anti-matter and guitars akin to a Guthrie Govan gone rabidly homicidal. This is uber-technical grimy Death Metal from the cesspit of Limbo that has been impregnated with the same seed of Jazz Fusion that made Atheist’s ‘Unquestionable Presence’ so profoundly unexpected and baffling upon its own release in 1991. The free-form nature of the playing here is ever present throughout ‘Abditum’ as the structurally mercurial songs weave and contradict their way throughout every fibre of your consciousness. The band never settles into something resembling a groove or refrain throughout these songs and they rarely if ever repeat any particular riff idea for more than two full repetitions consecutively. Even with a significant amount of repeat listens you will frequently be caught off guard. Just as you start to predict where the music is heading next a new surprise turn will always open, introducing you to an entirely new riff or progression before your brain has even had a chance to process another paradigm shift. During one of my listens to track five ‘Despair Of Temporal Existence’ I managed to count around 15 different central riffs: this is in a song with a runtime of less than two minutes!
For all of this woozying, dimensional rift perforating technical terrorism; Voidceremony still manages to leave space for genuine moments of beauty. Around the halfway point of the song ‘Failure Of Ancient Wisdoms’ a melodic guitar solo flies over an emotive swamp of slowed murky distorted power chords: it generates a sort of doomy interlude during the otherwise seismic volatility of the track. Later on in the song the drums take numerous opportunities to fill the gaps between short bursts of sustained guitar notes with the sort of confident swing that you would expect from a big-band brass ensemble. The guitar soloing in the latter part of the song takes on an even hastier flight over an airy Jazz Fusion backing; it is a moment of sheer magical sorcery. I think that it is important to note that with all of the genre crossing at play here, the band really does sound just as nonchalantly virtuosic when playing their Jazzier passages as they do when devouring the listener within a wormhole of brain-corroding Death Metal.
‘Abditum’ is the result of relentlessly disciplined musicianship, paired with a wild creative licence. It is an album that rewards repeated analysis, and for that, its sheer excellence will surely captivate the attention of the extreme Metal intelligentsia as one of 2025’s finest releases. A more memorable and more interesting album than its already great predecessor, Voidceremony is a band that is clearly striving to bypass the threshold of creative genius.
