This first ran on Madeloud, way back when.
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Bunkur
Nullify
Three Stars

One single seventy-eight minute ultra-slow doom metal track from Holland. It starts off with some clanging which resolves itself into the sound of a train starting up. You’re not on the engine though, nor even on the caboose. Instead you’re sitting on the track in the middle of a barren plane, listlessly whacking at one of the rails with a two by four. Occasionally, a massive, drooling derelict leans towards you from the platform above and spits out phlegm-pocked gibbets of indecipherable apocalyptic imagery. The PA system crackles with more and more insistent feedback, inspiring you to hit that rail harder and harder, and the derelict to try more insistently to cough up a lung.

This all goes on for some time.

Still going.

Stilllllll gooooinnnnggggg.

Stillllllllll gooooiinnnnnnngggggg.

The loudness of the feedback changes some; the shrieking varies a bit; and every so often there’s a sound like a rusty gate being dragged across a chalkboard. But basically, nothing happens until past the 45 minute mark. At that point, the percussion shifts from single thwacks to a series of leaden drum rolls, the feedback resolves itself into a recognizable tolling, and suddenly we’ve got something that almost seems like a groove.

That lasts for about ten minutes before the momentum frays and cracks into more insistent feedback drifting above lumbering percussion and the same hideous screaming. And then it goes on like that for a surprisingly long time again, till eventually the screaming and the bashing drop out, and you’re left with just the feedback chords, which phase in and out, finally suggesting a train again laboring off into the distance.

Nullify is one of the more extreme examples of doom, and as such it encapsulates the genre’s paradox. In some ways, doom, is absolutely the quintessence of metal — metal stripped down to its bleak, black, featureless soul. It almost isn’t even music anymore; just a giant, repetitive pummeling; a noise stripped of all meaning except pure, blind force. It’s the overwhelming soundtrack that lets you, the tiny hobbit, know that the great Sauron is upon you, moments before he crushes you beneath his heel.

And that’s why, at the same time, it ceases to be metal at all. Doom really does function almost as a soundtrack; background shoegazy ambience for a pleasantly Tolkienesque apocalypse. Being pummeled very, very slowly is, as it turns out, kind of restful. Almost despite itself, the nihilistic Nullify, promotes a spirit of peace and goodwill, as extreme metal fans and non-metal fans join together for 78 minutes, of slow nodding to the same non-beat.
nullify