Description
The Black Flux was the catharsis of Carl-Michael “Czral” Eide as an artist, writer and performer and it represents a watershed in the field of avantgarde metal / rock. Hailed as “album of the year” in several publications, the album saw the band rise from curious underdogs to recognised innovators. Taking the eccentric guitar disharmonics of Ved Buens Ende beyond a dense maelstrom of sound and placing it within a surprisingly “rock” format, albeit never losing touch with the alien accents of the band’s Carheart debut, The Black Flux is the sound of an organism coming of age and understanding its purpose.
In conspiracy with Duplicate Records, Nuclear War Now! is honored to announce the reissuing of the first three Virus (Norway) albums, “Carheart,” “The Black Flux,” and “The Agent that Shapes the Desert,” on vinyl LP format. As a somewhat distant but still closely musically-related descendent of Ved Buens Ende, the music of Virus bears a somewhat more striking similarity to “Nothingface”-era Voivod than it does its black metal antecedent. With its generous reliance on an almost mechanized sequencing of dissonant chords and riffs, in confluence with a predominantly bass-driven backdrop, Virus draws an unmistakable influence from Voivod’s more experimental, post-thrash period. At the same time, these recordings exude a darkness that also resembles the prominent involvement of the band’s mastermind, Czral, in Ved Buens Ende, whose vision of black metal already contained traces of a genre-breaking evolution in the mid-1990s. The combination of these influences results in a series of recordings that straddle the boundary between second-wave black metal and one of its early offshoots. In deference to Duplicate Records, the band’s own label, the following descriptions of each album are offered:
