Nerthus :: Love letters via Echelon (Eighth Tower)

Nerthus returns with Love Letters via Echelon, a bleak and cerebral descent that shifts from the project’s earlier atmospheric infernos into a more intricate, molecular-level sound world. Blending micro-processed electronics, droning reverberations, and shadowed post-industrial tension, it forms a deeply immersive journey into unsettling sonic terrain.

Uncanny, unsettling microwaves

Quite active these past few years (I remember having reviewed the sombre, doom-laden, abstract and ritualistic 2024 album The Path of the Elder Ones), the German act of Nerthus is back with a new album signed to the leading indie dark-music label Eighth Tower (owned by Raffaele Pezzella of Sonologyst).

I got in touch with this now-foundational project years ago with their release for the industrial and noise music label Ark Konkret. After the turbulent and moody-esque atmospheric inferno of The Path of the Elder Ones, the project offers a more scientist-cerebral-molecular climate behind a still eloquent compositional ability with roots in sophisticated organic avant-gardism.

Love Letters via Echelon functions as a weird and adventurous neuronal-sounding odyssey filled with micro-processed electronic interferences, longitudinal droney reverberations, and discreet hypnotic beat-laden pulses. This is quite an uncompromising and tripped-out musical affair, with a wide range of sound manipulations to ravish your ears in a kind of restrained trancey vibe and post-apocalyptical danger zone.

If you are looking for a nightscaping and lugubrious soundtrack for meditating on engulfed industrial derelicts and the future of so-called post-humanity, this is for you. For its thin, almost imperceptible tonal lines and nearly silent sonic aura covered by infinite micro-variations, this album also admits an affinity with lowercase music, notably Steve Roden and Bernhard Günter.

An inner voyage through uncanny, unsettling microwaves.

For fans of The Law-Rah Collective, Beyond Sensory Experience, Tholen, Kraken, Schloss Tegal, and THO-SO-AA—those drawn to shadowy post-industrial realms—this album adds an extra layer of intricacy, desolation, and menacing coldness.

Love letters via Echelon is available on Eighth Tower. [Bandcamp]