"The First Circle": EDEN's Unholy Garden of Noisy Delights (Early Album Stream)

Listening to music is generally a “familiar” experience: most of it, especially in heavy music, is crafted from bits and pieces we know and can place within the mix. Not so much with EDEN, a mysterious collective of noisemakers poised to unleash their debut album The First Circle later this month. At any given moment on The First Circle, there’s at least one unsettling, unrecognizable noise adding to the gloomy cacophony and pulling the work farther away from earthly comparisons. Crafted from miscellaneous instruments and mostly improvised, each song on the collective’s debut album is a different take on noisy, industrial black/post-metal that finds a new way to startle listeners. Check out the whole thing now with our exclusive premiere:

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While the textures EDEN wield are certainly alien, the rhythms and structures behind them are more conventional: punk-heavy black metal provides a throbbing conduit for the crackling sleaze to ooze through, with powerful backbeats anchoring the chaotic creations to reality. Growns, growls, and screams loop behind a curtain of depressive fuzz, but it’s hard to make out more than a word, and even then it’s really guesswork—serving more as additional layers than a vehicle for lyrics, each gasp and grunt builds more twists into the maddening tapestry.

The First Circle showcases a real aptitude for post-metal in its songwriting, though it doesn’t sound, at first blush, anything like the genre normally does. But “Your Void is Mine,” were it not for the off-kilter industrial percussive grooves and modulating vocals that tear apart familiarity, easily fits the mold. It displays a sense for managing tension, as well as yearning riffs and progressions, that would probably work just as well without a creepy detuned piano in the background… but, it must be said, it probably wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining.

Though it’s an unordinary expression of both black metal and post-metal, The First Circle reveals some truths about each of those genres in how it executes them: we may not know which broken gadget or sabotaged instrument EDEN used to create the specific sounds here, but they create a specific, familiar sensation in our minds nonetheless.
EDEN comments:

We consider The First Circle as a kaleidoscopic crash of many elements colliding: punk at heart, experimental in execution, raw and multi-layered.

Each song was created in a single recording session, allowing space for both chaotic improvisation and spontaneity as well as a thorough research in terms of sound manipulation and deconstruction.

The whole album was recorded using unconventional instruments such as recycled material, broken toys and other weird things such as a prepared piano altered with screws and bolts.

We are fascinated by incommunicability and therefore our lyrics do not have a precise meaning. The vocals are made of loops, whispers and screams – an unpredictable and disturbing chant providing tension and a psychological heaviness that is in contrast with the rawness of the more aggressive parts.

Our idea of music is abstract, visual and synesthetic.
We wanted to create something visceral, using controlled chaos as means to summon visual images of darkness and lunacy. Our songs are intended as performative action, a ritual aimed at liberating the unconscious and allowing it to guide our actions.

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The First Circle releases July 30th, 2021 via Brucia Records.