It’s the weekend! What better way to get it started than with the latest installment of “Funeral Doom Friday”. This weekly column looks to shed some light onto some of the darkest, most depressing, and discordant metal out there. Funeral Doom stems from the deepest depths of Death-Doom and Dirge music. Each week, the goal is to highlight some of the newest music or rediscover classic works from some of the earliest bands and originators such as Australia’s Mournful Congregation, United States’s Evoken, UK’s Esoteric and the Finnish Thergothon. Feel free to share your opinions and suggestions in the comments!
The solo project of Bremen, Germany's Imperceptum is a personal favorite of this column. Void's blend of funeral doom and atmospheric black metal just strikes a particular chord. Much like Ethereal Shroud's operation, the lines between black metal's rapid fury and funeral doom's glacial melancholy begin to blur in Imperceptum's music. This Wednesday, Void released his third album in two years. A second full-length called The Eternal Path to Nothingness.
Imperceptum continues his march into the abyss, projecting abstract terror into the infinite depths of space. The Eternal Path to Nothingness runs 65 minutes across four, new songs. Void's continued growth as an individual project is ever more noticeable. "Disintegrating Nebular Storm," and "Infinite Force of Destruction" are outright black metal demonstrations for much of the time. Yet, in brief moments, tempo shifts. The storm breaks and a listener is left floating in the remnant stillness. On the other hand, "Towards the Cosmic Abyss" and the title track are where it feels much more like funeral doom. Like the plodding paths of distant planets around the sun, these tracks are hallmarked by Void's patient pace. His ominous bellow fuses with the drone of guitars while drums work to keep a meter against ambient passages.
With this newest release proving to be Imperceptum's best effort yet, there is much hope and promise that this trend will continue into the future. The melding of black metal and funeral doom seems a relatively new endeavor for the genre as a whole (at least from what I have heard) and Void is exploring new frontiers.
