It’s Time to Gaze Voidwards into “Bagulnik”

‘Most lyrics are extracted from the diaries of a rural teacher, named Ivan Perfiliev, who claimed that the swamp on the outskirts of the town possessed supernatural properties. Believing he could hear the voice of the swamp inside his head, constantly calling to him. Somewhere in the depths of this swamp, he believed, lived an unknown ancient beast that howled at the moon and caused great suffering. In his diary, he also wrote how other people in the locality were suffering from the same condition.‘

Today, no matter how positively it started for you, will soon turn into one filled to the brim with negative absolutes — a voyage into haunted, desolate environments plagued with things beyond human psyche’s scope of comprehension and all carnal understanding. The once nameless dread has risen under the guise of Voidwards, and we’re glad to bring you the advanced stream for the horrid monolith that is Bagulnik right now, officially out via Aesthetic Death on December 27. So without further hassle, dive into the act’s dismal and brooding ambiances from below;

Voidwards has existed on various planes for twenty years, under a multitude of names and configurations, having focused on performing their blend of claustrophobic and droning noise-doom mainly live and via some improvised recordings. Bagulnik, being the anonymous act’s first actual full-length, paints an aural tapestry corresponding to the accounts unveiled on the opening quote, the field recordings having been made on-location at the swamp itself alongside some abandoned churches. The oppressive tonalities are guaranteed to invoke a sense of unease to anyone undergoing its leviathan mass, leaving you, as a listener, hopeless and completely bereft of any sensible direction afterwards.

‘It hasn’t been possible to verify the accuracy of these accounts, occurring over a century ago, but through the album Voidwards take us on a sonic journey of the events from the swamp, giving both hypothesis and conclusion to what caused people in this area to have such visions and mental illness. Perfiliev was later hospitalized with acute psychosis (schizophrenia) but later escaped the institution and ended his life through blunt trauma to his head.‘

Quite picturesque, no?

Voidwards has created something, well, fucked up, with Bagulnik. The two songs making up the forty-minute endeavour somehow reminiscent of the Black Paintings — but with even less colour — can’t really be separated from one another as they’re to be seen and heard as one coherent entity. What seems to get split in two, though, is one’s body and one’s soul when taking the plunge into the swamp the narrative explores here. Utter immersion is unavoidable, and while the album has the effect of turning you paranoid and cautious of your surroundings, there’s some rather perverse enjoyability in its ominous confines.

Bagulnik is out on the 27th of this month via Aesthetic Death, and you can score this beauty in a physical form from here, though I double-dare you to get the digital, too.