#pyrrhon — Public Fediverse posts

There’s a lot of weird shit floating around the metalsphere, and that includes Voidthrone’s newest addition, Dreaming Rat. The Seattle quartet has been kicking around for a decade, and in that time have released three prior platters of escalating lunacy. Without question, Dreaming Rat is Voidthrone’s most unhinged concoction to date, and a quick look at their Bandcamp credits gives prospective listeners a window into the alchemical ingredients they cook with, including Otamatone, conch shell, jaw harp, vibraslap, digeridoo, spoons, and a fretless bass. Throw in vocalist Zhenya Frolov’s deranged vocal stylings, and you’ve got yourself a bona fide manic expression of dissonant blackened death metal. With so many disparate components in Dreaming Rat’s stew, does Voidthrone soothe the savage beast or unleash a waking nightmare?

Listening to Dreaming Rat is a bit like experiencing an auditory fever dream, where disconnected fragments congeal into lurid, atonal anarchy. Voidthrone didn’t arrive at this sound overnight, though. Debut Spiritual War Tactics whipped and frothed with the restrained vitality of Krallice, and follow-up Kur added jazz-informed touches in the vein of Imperial Triumphant. Physical Degradation evolved Voidthrone’s sound, integrating more unconventional instrumentation and pushing the band’s songwriting past its comfort zone. On Dreaming Rat, Voidthrone takes the blueprint laid out on Physical Degradation and indiscriminately expands the range for strange. The result sees Frolov stretching his vocal performance into frenzied tirades, covering the gamut from Replicant’s vomitous barks to Sigh’s oddball deliveries. The instrumentation also gets exponentially wackier, as it conjures the rabid wrath of Pyrrhon along with the chaotic instincts of Afterbirth, resulting in an unpredictable romp to the end of the world.

At Dreaming Rat’s core, Voidthrone details the life and death of a solar system through bleak eras, segmenting the album into present, past, and future. The arcs are presented in that order, with each one comprised of three songs. The present describes the apex of a civilization, harnessing the promises forged upon the hopes and chaos of the past. Meanwhile, Voidthrone paints a grim outlook for the future, specifically calling out ‘an extinguished, lonely death of the physical, spiritual, and cognitive.’1 The lyrics throughout Dreaming Rat read like the demented ravings of a madman’s manifesto,2 and while I don’t think I could have divined the album’s overarching concept from them alone, reading them amplifies the bedlam Voidthrone has crafted on Dreaming Rat.

Writing music this lawless may seem haphazard, but over repeated listens, I’ve begun to glimpse the method to Dreaming Rat’s madness. Without question, everyone in Voidthrone earns their stripes. Ronald Foodsack’s guitars drench Dreaming Rat with warbling dissonance, perpetually in flux so that there’s never a riff or refrain to inhibit the music’s incessant lurch. Whether moving at frantic paces (“III-I. Surfing the Abyss”) or decelerating to a plodding crawl (“II-II. Morbid Seagull”), Ron’s six-stringed blitz never stalls. Additionally, Gavin Brooks contributes acoustic guitar and solos while manning the glorious fretless bass.3 Technical death metal has hogged the fretless bass for too long, and I’m glad Voidthrone has the stones to add it to disso metal’s tool chest. Tracks like “I-I. Bergen” and “II-I. Homeless Animal” showcase the character the instrument offers, bolstering the ever-shifting nature of Dreaming Rat. Drummer Josh Keifer grounds the band ably, locked into a supporting role that allows the other instruments to take center stage while he keeps things on the rails. Frolov’s feral vocals and the host of unconventional instruments further enrich Voidthrone’s distinctive identity, establishing what sounds like it could be the death throes of the universe.

What Voidthrone accomplishes with Dreaming Rat is fascinating and unique, and merits everyone’s attention. Sure, some songs could be trimmed to make such a scathing album a bit shorter and more palatable, and the three arcs could use some musical cues to distinguish songs thematically from one another, but Dreaming Rat is a crowning achievement for the band. Voidthrone’s psychedelic psychosis makes bold promises on paper and completely delivers in fact, and when I’m in the mood to get really weird with it, this will be the album I reach for.

Rating: Very Good!
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Release
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: May 8th, 2026

Pyrrhon – Exhaust Review

By Dolphin Whisperer

Stretched, stuck, snapped—Pyrrhon has spent much of the past few years living, trudging the way many do in their 30s. It’s not that life becomes untenable in the twists and turns about which time inevitably navigates, but that reality grows a face, a scent, a terror that swells as its layers develop and crust and encapsulate. Uncertainty and anxiety weigh heavy in the heart, and, no doubt, after releasing 2020’s Abscess Time, which they couldn’t support on the road, the ever-reaching cast of Pyrrhon hit a wall. Time passed, and pressure grew. So to escape the grind with grind, to combat the noise with noise, to face life with death metal, Pyrrhon holed up in the woods to create (lightly ‘shroomed) again—not to Exhaust, but to explore and explode.

A dry skronk persists through Exhaust in a manner that both befits Pyrrhon’s past and eschews elements of the established Pyrrhon sound. Modern classic What Passes for Survival and noise rock breakaway Abscess Time both found a bounce in guitarist Dylan DiLella’s manic string flips and vocalist Doug Moore’s echoing, encompassing howls. Exhaust, stripped by the intensity of its frustration, instead sees simpler, chunkier riffs dissolve and digest more easily into incessant snare guidance, with Pyrrhon finding a grooving, hardcore shuffle that owes its tangible hooks to the world of ancient Prong or Deadguy (“The Greatest City on Earth,” “Strange Pains,” “Luck of the Draw”). Pyrrhon hasn’t become accessible though—consonance incompatible whammy excursions (“The Greatest…”), psychedelic narratives (“Out of Gas”), and escalating, shrill recursions (“Strange Pains,” “Stress Fractures”) ensure otherwise. But they all build a feel relatable against the sense of mid-life dread that Exhaust embodies.

The lyrics that have always been Pyrrhon’s gravity come to focus in a manner that rings in the ear without the constant need for subtitles. Though Moore still possesses a demonic bleating, its power remains reserved for impactful moments like the grinding acceleration of “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce” and the closing quasi-slam of “Hell Medicine.” Spitting and sneering, Moore delivers higher clarity barked beats of plain-faced, pain-laced poetry detailing with little opacity existential musings of the current state of the world (“First as…,” “The Greatest…,” “Stress Fractures”), addiction trappings (“Luck…,” “Hell Medicine”), and exhaustion (“Out of Gas”).1 Pyrrhon teeters on the brink of collapse throughout each racing number, with Moore’s interjections finding psychedelic delay and rapid-fire tremolo modulation as layers beyond dense prose (“The Greatest…,” “Strange Pains,” “Out of Gas”). And as Exhaust’s back half unfolds, these same glottal expulsions find a distance and excruciated fizzle against Pyrrhon’s chaotic crescendos (“Stress Fractures,” “Last Gasp”). No matter the manner of narrative distribution, Moore’s words resonate with barbed intention.

Exhaust’s scathed landscape does come at a cost, though. Pyrrhon has steadily traded away complex song structure for riff-based impact and whiplash rhythms as a catalyst. Yet each lashing on this svelte journey maintains and thrives in a driving guitar chunk-and-twang that grip kitmaster Schwegler’s hopping ostinatos in an Obscura-by-way-of-Big-Apple-noise freakout,2 true to Pyrrhon’s trademark amplified scrawl. Phrase by phrase it becomes ever clearer that this more exacting songwriting approach means to snag your neck and groove as much as any long-form switch blast or paint-stripping sermon would. And with riffs that deliver the experimental grind of Brutal Truth as much as they do DiLella’s signature punk-frenzied whinny, even the simplest of pit-starters land with the bombast that Pyrrhon crafts (“First as…,” “Luck…,” “Concrete Charlie”). Marston3 has again taken the board for Exhaust, letting its rehearsal-room-on-fire-attitude muscle into DiLella’s tight, thrashing tone—a touch compressed on the ear at first, but a choice that lets darting chord squeals and tuning-challenging bends pierce through at will.

For an album dedicated to burnout, a theme all too appreciable to those on the wrong side of twenty-five, Pyrrhon charges forth with an experimental vigor and practiced ambition untarnished by time. Informed by age—by critique, applause, setback, adventure, waiting, watching, breathing, bleeding—Exhaust emerges as the product of a band that knows that lightning can’t strike twice: it must find a lead. Hunger steers Pyrrhon. Struggle defines Exhaust. Though far from the most avant, unpredictable set in the Pyrrhon registry, Exhaust billows with the fury of defeat and determination—damn fine music for a downfall.

Rating: 4.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Willowtip Records | Bandcamp
Websites: pyrrhon.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/pyrrhon
Releases Worldwide: September 6th, 2024

#2024 #45 #AmericanMetal #BrutalTruth #Deadguy #DeathMetal #Deathgrind #Exhaust #Gorguts #Hardcore #NoiseRock #Prong #Pyrrhon #Review #Reviews #Sep24 #TechnicalDeathMetal #WillowtipRecords

#Unterscheidung von #pyrrhonischer #Skepsis und #Akademischer #Skepsis

#Pyrrhon: #Ablehung aller #Aussagen über #Wahres

#Akademische #Skepsis: #Akzeptanz von #Graden an #Wahrscheinlichkeit;
#Rezeption im #klassischen #Recht: #Methodische #Kriterien; #Überprüfbarkeit, #Konstruktive #Skepsis

#Grade der #Wahrscheinlichkeit von #Sachverhalten:
1. Für sich #betrachtet
2. Kein #Wiedstreiten
3. #Allseits #bestätigt

#Wahrheit #Skeptisch

#Römische #Rechtsgeschichte #Avenarius, 8. Sitzung