Here at Heavy Blog we take huge pride in being able to recommend awesome bands of all stripes to you, our dearest readers. But even we need to turn to others to recommend things to us, and that’s where fellow music enthusiasts and music bloggers come in. One of the better resources out there for post-rock and metal is the excellent Greece-based blog Post-Engineering, and a few days ago they did something particularly incredible. They assembled 39 tracks, all from different bands, into a mega-compilation spanning over 4 hours, and they’re offering the entire thing for free! Furthermore, this compilation is a veritable who’s who of excellent bands we’ve highlighted ourselves in the past year or so (some in this very same column). Check out the entire thing after the jump!
- Le Seul Elément – 01 03 47
- stonefromthesky – Interstellar
- Afformance – Dancing Lessons For The Advanced In Age
- Wander – Soar
- Summon The Octopi – Apricots Apricate (Alligators Alligate)
- Black Clouds – And Then I Dove
- Waypoint – Translation
- threestepstotheocean – Sur
- Catacombe – Jardim Da Sereia
- Sleep Maps – Become Nothing (previously unreleased)
- The Union Trade – Murmurations
- Platonick Dive – Geometric Lace
- Arms Of Tripoli – Snowed In (Radar Cult Remix) (previously unreleased)
- Musth – The Flood
- To Destroy A City – The Imposter (previously unreleased)
- The Boats – Trash Can Willy (Part 1)
- gates – At Last the Loneliest Of Them
- Barrows – Red Giant
- North – Veiled In Light (Demo) (previously unreleased)
- EUS, Postdrome & Saåad – The Only Path
- We Deserve This – Pacific
- Exxasens – North Winds (previously unreleased)
- Frieda’s Still In Love – Jugamos Al Béisbol
- Blueneck – Man Of Lies
- Last Builders Of Empire – Huida Hacia El Sol
- Kollwitz – Horizon
- Whale Fall – Swelter In The Key Of G (Raw Rehearsal Demo) (previously unreleased)
- Labirinto – Masao
- Beware Of Safety – To Be Curious Is Dangerous Enough
- Maïak – Nutributter Green Is People
- Huldra – The Hum Of The Earth (previously unreleased)
- Sleeping Bear – Machines
- UpcDownc – I Think About Forever (Live Studio Out-take) (previously unreleased)
- thisquietarmy – The Black Sea MMXIV (Y Edit) (previously unreleased)
- Release The Long Ships – The Heart Of The Mountain
- This Patch Of Sky – And So They Watched As The Years Passed Us By
- We Lost The Sea – A Gallant Gentleman
- Dumbsaint – Cold Call
- When Icarus Falls – Black Tree
So let’s see here. We’ve got stonefromthesky, Platonick Dive, Arms of Tripoli, gates, Maïak, Huldra, Sleeping Bear, We Lost the Sea, and Dumbsaint included in this stellar list. As of writing this I still haven’t made my way through this entire thing, but I’ve probably added about a dozen new bands to my library. There is just such an incredible depth and diversity to the bands featured here, and all of them are doing things worth your time. You can sure as hell bet that we’ll be highlighting some of these bands more in-depth in the future.
I was so impressed by this collection that I decided to reach out to the folks at Post-Engineering to ask them about how this whole thing came about and how difficult it was to pull something this massive in scope together. One of the two founders, Saf (who goes by the handle Nordsee on the blog), had this to say:
Me and a friend created this blog almost 9 years ago, with the sole purpose of promoting the bands we loved. It was only 1 year after we started discovering ISIS and through their music the whole post-rock spectrum from Mono to Cult Of Luna. The idea of the compilation existed in the back of my head for years now, but I didn’t had the means to do it, meaning that the blog didn’t had the fame to pull the compilation I wanted. And I would only be satisfied, if the compilation came out as I wanted to. So after (almost) 9 years, a good amount of followers on facebook, instagram, daily visits on the blog and interviews with more than 50 bands, I felt that this is the right time!
So I started asking a few bands if they wanted to be part of the compilation and after some positive responses the compilation project was on! I must admit that personally I didn’t expect such a positive response from almost every band I contacted. It didn’t matter if the band was famous or not or the genre. I just had to love their music and play post-related music. My friend Kapiller Ferenc, whose work I admire, kindly accepted to do the compilation artwork, which looks stunning and adds some post-rockish feeling to it.
In my opinion a proper compilation has to have its breakouts and its mellow parts, otherwise, especially with 39 tracks, it will become boring. That’s why the compilation has a variety of genres from noise ambient, to post-rock, to post-metal and as these genres are dependent to each other I just had to put the tracks in the right order! It was more time consuming than I thought, as I planned to release it in April, but apparently some bands were in the recording process and it took more than 6 months to complete the compilation. When I heard the track by Le Seul Elément I knew that this is the intro I want for the compilation, as I knew When Icarus Falls track will be the perfect outro.
I was lucky enough to receive some previously unreleased material by bands like Upcdownc, thisquietarmy, Sleep Maps, Exxasens, To Destroy A City and North and some new material from Huldra, We Lost The Sea and Whale Fall and I want to thank again all these bands and labels that contributed their tracks and trusted me to put this amazing release together! It took some time and work, but I think the result is rewarding! So rewarding that vol.2 is already in motion!
Saf also wanted me to stress that this compilation is 100% FREE, and if they run out of free Bandcamp downloads that there will be Dropbox links available to anyone who wants it. So really you have absolutely zero excuse not to immediately go over to their Bandcamp page and download this thing.
All I can say really is thank you to all the people and bands who were involved in putting this entire thing together. The Internet and the world of music are as vast as the world itself, and we need people and sites like Post-Engineering to help cut through the noise and highlight the excellent music people across the globe are creating in relative obscurity. And here’s to Volume 2 sometime in the not-too-distant future!
-NC