GLYPTOGLOSSIO — YOTTAANNUMS in the BYSS (review)

GLYPTOGLOSSIO — YOTTAANNUMS in the BYSS album cover

Album · 2019 · Avant-garde Metal

3.5/5 · 2019-05-15
siLLy puPPy

Colin Marston (Behold… The Arctopus, Gorguts etc) debuted his avant-garde freakzoid project GLYPTOGLOSSIO in 2016 with a strange freeform style of metal that sounds like absolutely nothing else and while i thought it was so far out of the box that it would probably be a one off, turns out this is an ongoing project with more metal gibberish to be expressed! The new album YOTTAANNUMS in the BYSS continues the formless distorted guitar and bass riffs, spastic freeform drumming and the robotic narrations which put the avant-garde on steroids.

This one also consists of a mere two tracks but both tracks exceed are quite lengthy with the first track merely named “3” extending towards 19 minutes whereas the following “4” reaches over 15 minutes. The titles follow the titles “1” and “2” from the debut “GLYPTOGLO5510” which only had a running time of over 25 minutes. This one is a full-length of chaotic swirls of bass lines, non-musical guitar riffs and pummeling drums. The amount of effort to keep anything sounding like any established form of music is quite impressive.

Exercising the utter disregard of any sort of musical form, this project also lists the lyrics on the Bandcamp site which are as bizarrely surreal as the music(?) itself. While there is probably some cryptic themes expressed in all this madness, it’s not apparent reading the lyrics that there is any meaning at all. It is more likely that this project is to merely create a form of sonic bantering that is designed to be as surreal and detached from reality as possible and in that department it truly succeeds!

Despite the freeform gibberish that comes off as a bizarre musical Frankenstein with snippets of this and snippets of that, there are recognizable riffs, drum rolls, bass lines etc. There are also cowbells and other sound effects. The vocal style becomes somewhat tedious as the robotic monster voice remains monotonic and never deviates from its simple narrative role as swirls of chaos explode in the background.

If you thought Behold…The Arctopus was too much to handle then this will drive you insane. As someone hardened by weird concepts in the avant-garde and experimental sectors of the musical world, this is bizarre and alien even by my standards and can be questioned if this is music at all. There are no established patterns, no musical scales, no melodies and the whole thing comes off as a dissonant barrage of noisy guitar, bass and drums all striving to remain defiantly dissonant and ununified with almost hypnotic tortured monster vocals narrating Salvador Dali inspired poetry.

I’m not really sure if this is a band or just Marston flying his freak flag as high as possible. Whatever the case, this is weird for weird’s sake and will appeal to very few if anyone but for some reason i have an appetite for this kind of stuff now and again so i listen and imagine these sounds to be some sort of anthem for an alien robot A.I. army awaiting its attack on the galaxy and taking ultimate control. Since there is nothing tangible to latch onto, these sounds stimulate the imagination to construct some sort of explanation for its existence which is a psychological phenomenon that allows me to appreciate this. All i can say is that this is fucked up weirdo shit.