23 March 2021 - 0 Comments

It's so edifying to get to listen to a short prog track. All those juicy changes and sonic railroading genre tangents condensed into an experience even my burnt out attention span can't turn away from for a second of its run time.

★★★★★
(Intimacy’s End, Callum Wagstaff - Muzic.net.nz)

Magnalith is dense but concise, expressionistic but corporeal music. Tangentially metal, curiously harmonic, the new EP is a convulsive listen. Unbridled structural deviations see handbrake slides into weird, cinematic passages that lurch back into leviathan riffs.

Brevity does not constrain the expansiveness of the three tracks. Experimental vignettes, conceptual lyricism, pathos and sagacious mixing by Dave Holmes (Jakob, Saint Agnes, Maisha) lend to the fantastical but humanistic atmosphere. The effect is bursts of contemplative, layered composition to capture the imagination of progressive metal/rock fans.

Recorded in historic and hideaway places in Auckland, New Zealand then mixed remotely through UK lockdown—re-amping the guitars and bass through vintage gear locally—this was an international collaboration of audiophiles. Bosher gathered three engineer friends from across his career to undertake sections of the production. Work began at The Lab below Mt Eden’s Crystal Palace Theatre in the storied ballroom popular in the 1920's (later a cabaret room). Capturing the kinetic energy of the drums on the Neve console helped to create the foundational tank tread of the EP’s heft. The team moved to makeshift spaces for other instrumentation and the material then shipped to the UK to be re-assembled within a 500-tonne lightship and then an ex-food processing plant. The record is a result greater than the sum of its parts in the pandemic post-production context — presented with a “pretty, ugly” treatment oozing thickly between the cracks of an ornate edifice.

Debut EP out 16 April.

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