### Virus: Black flux

#### 14/12/10 || The Duff

So you think you’re a G-niouse? You think you know in-depth, thought-provoking music that is better than all other people’s music? Do you drink in coffee houses alone whilst reading, occasionally glancing up to admire the patter of rain on the windows you pretentious twat? And do you think of yourself whilst making love so as to delay ejaculation, all the while thinking “Yeah, that’s the stuff right there..”? Then avant-garde jazz black metal band Virus is for you.

The band consists of Czar (Carl-Michael Eide – Ved Buens Ende, Dodheimsgard, Aura Noir, Cadaver and Satyricon), Plenum (Petter Berntsen; Er… I keed, I keed from Audiopain) and Esso/Einz (Einar Sjurso from Lamented Souls and Beyond Dawn). They are from Norway, and are an unusual bunch who play black metal music entirely cleanly and remind one of the scene-defying supergroup Arcturus era “La Masquerade Infernale”/“The Sham Mirrors” if only for the sheer bizarreness of what’s presented as well as vocals akin to Garm Sweet Magical Garm.

“The Black Flux” is album number two following a five year dry period from their debut effort “Carheart”, nowadays probably tougher to find than pussy in a mosque. The sounds created by this three-piece are dense, swirling energies akin to modern-day black metal bands all about the atmosphere, a clear example being Blut Aus Nord. Because everything is non-distorted, though, the album mixes soothing calm with unsettling discordance, the end effect creating an absolutely beautiful, harrowing disc that carries the listener across varied, turbulent noisecapes while encouraging thoughts behind the meaning of it all – “The Black Flux” is awe-inspiring.

Mixing disequilibrating rhythms with dissonance (artificial harmonics to boot in the most unusual and thoughtful of places), there’s no doubt that despite busy, jazzy musicianship and the forwardness of the maddening vocals, the focus is spent on a brooding, twisted atmosphere. It’s almost like the music to a measured dementia. The drums roll and fill in sporadic but tasteful beats akin to something like Miles Davis if I knew anything about jazz in the slightest, and the bass rarely rests in one place or follows-suit with the guitars; the vocals alternate from crooning to energetic (with some amazingly dark, abstract lyrics), but never pass beyond deeply resonant and clean, and the guitars (of which there is one) plays off of itself in a most successfully self-indulgent manner.

I would recommend “Black Flux” to any fan of muzak, forward-thinking metal, black jazz and zany shit, only to profess it without a doubt one of the greatest, most brilliantly put together records I’ve ever come across.

- Information
- Released: 2008
- Label: Season of Mist
- Website: Virus MySpace
- Band
- Czral: vocals, guitars
- Plenum: bass
- Esso: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Stalkers Of The Drift
- 02. As Virulent As You
- 03. Archives
- 04. The Black Flux
- 05. Intermission: Ocean Highway
- 06. Inward Bound
- 07. Lost Peacocks
- 08. Shame Eclipse
- 09. Strange Calm