Here’s a review written by Bayern/ METAL ARCHIVES
Please, welcome this talented multi-instrumentalist from the same latitudes as
the ones I hail from, the Balkans that is; and he also has the same name as
mine, would you believe… yes, Ivan Sikic has all the rights to view himself an
underground phenomenon by releasing three high quality products under three
different monikers within a short span of time, starting as Traumasphere which
demo (“Voidcall”, 2001) was a totally delightful slab of very technical
dissonant death metal that slightly predated the similarly-styled but much less
comprehensible vistas of the Australians Portal.
This is his second spell with the music industry, and the man has voted to
compartmentalize his delivery a bit more by siding more readily with the
dazzling brutality movement (Cryptopsy, Suffocation, Kryptopsy, etc.) although
this is a more engaging, more adroitly-constructed listen that also echoes
meisterwerks like Psycroptic’s “Sceptre of the Ancients” and Crimson Massacre’s
“The Luster of Pandemonium”. Sikic rages on full-throttle with the tight
puzzling shredder “Dawn of the Miserable”, a surreal accumulation of
time-signatures, maddening tempos, and ultra-dense staccato riffs, a most
shining example of his bewitching style which on “Die Dreaming” turns to
highly-stylized chaos with bizarre riff-patterns overlapping each other in a
weird surreal fashion that even the Finnish auteurs Nomicon may find hard to
match. There’s this underlying melodic current that unobtrusively guides the
hyper-active shredoramas the man never losing his vision although that latter
composition surprisingly offers a downbeat doomy finale which stretches to
nearly 3-min... nothing inherently wrong with that especially when the
title-track comes crashing down with a pleiad of perplexing jarring rhythms, a
more abstract all-instrumental number with Sikic accumulating a pile of twisted
melodicisms and crooked riffs to a strong hallucinogenic effect.
The man doesn’t slouch behind the mike, either, although his guttural
semi-shouty deathy baritone can’t be anything but a side-dish under the very
lofty musical circumstances; another brief breezy slab of tech-death wizardry
has Sikic provided, easier to swallow than the first outing but almost as
compelling and absorbing. He changed the direction quite a bit, though, for his
third appearance that was named Ummon, and served ultimately abstract sterile
thrash/post-thrash, a summation of what Voivod’s “Negatron” and “Phobos” were
about but seen through a very robotic futuristic, more dispassionate
perspective…
“how’s that possible?”, I hear some of you say… it’s possible, it’s possible;
anything is possible in the world of a visionary, audacious musical adept. To
be continued… if not in this, in some other more advanced world than ours. 92%
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