Nick Millevoi is a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based guitarist who utilizes bursts of distortion, feedback and unconventional tunings in his explorations of six-string deleterious noise. Millevoi’s latest album, In White Sky (released on the always fascinating Flenser Records), combines six- and 12-string guitar drones with glacial lurches, creaking clangs, ear-splitting screeches and shuddering jolts. Mastered by Colin Marston (Krallice, Dysrhythmia), In White Sky is a dissonant, nerve-tweaking banquet for lovers of bleak experientialism, and it’s rich with calamitous atmospheres, gloomy hollows, and structureless mayhem.
Dour, rusty drone seeps from the brooding “Slowly Dark”, and “Before a Constant” tumbles forth with a riff that could almost be the filthiest NWOBHM intro you’ve ever heard, albeit it one slathered in waves of feedback. The stark minimalism of “Super-Lith Part 1” bleeds into the piercing avant-noise torrent of “Super-Lith Part 2”, but the album’s true highlight is “Endless Unfolding Hallways”. This 14-minute song begins with reverberating, windswept drone à la Hex era Earth, before shifting into a sci-fi nightmare of atonal noise — screeds of corrosiveness surge atop cascades of feedback, till all returns to white-hot drone and strum. In White Sky is a cacophonous, jarring jaunt, but through its barbarism comes clarity. The album’s jagged textures and discomforting tonalities leave you shattered, reducing your field of concerns to the primal. Purge-like curatives of intense instrumentation such as this should be mandatory prescriptions to rid you of existential angst.