Night Coercion into the Company of Witches

Having their debut release on Ba Da Bing consist of three CDs' worth of material may seem a touch excessive, but given the reach of Natural Snow Buildings' mostly self-released discography by 2012, it actually made perfect sense. Consisting of a re-release of material from a few years previously, Night Coercion makes for an involving introduction to the duo's work — with track times ranging from a quarter-of-an-hour to a full hour, there's no other way to go but the whole, long haul. The opening "Kadja Bosou"'s blasts of feedback soon incorporate an extra swirled layer, a sonic windstorm through which chimes and beats sneak through at the start only to be further subsumed as it goes, only itself turning into a blend of distant drone howls and calmer melodica and flutes. "Night Coercion" is more of a feedback scream from the start, but the layered rhythms lurk below, as occasional extra zones and blasts and screams stretch out further and ebb away just, only to have everything turn even more violently exultant in its second half. "Brooms, Trapdoors, Keyholes" begins as the calmest so far, but it's still out there before slowly evolving into a massive feedback doom monster, with rhythm near absent in favor of interlocking sheets of white sound. "Gorgons" moves from point to point fluidly, with a calm kind of a start intertwining into everything from layered wailing vocals working around a central core, to a bedrock hum/rumble around which feedback crests and buzzes. "Mirror Shield" starts almost formally in comparison to everything else, its high and delicate guitar parts echoing off and up into the distance on a more hopeful and genteel note, which the increasing presence of further extreme feedback and textures never totally buries — it's a nice shift away from assault to something in the realm of Neil Campbell, perhaps. "The Great Bull God" acts as a fitting conclusion by putting what sounds like everything together into one massed hour-long composition, at once gently melodic and completely overdriven into a meditative zone, with elements sometimes stuttering in and out, sometimes shifting to a calmly queasy jam.