Yoga - Megafauna (2009)

Švedski bend totalno bezličnog imena stvorio je halucinatorni, uradi-sam ritual crne psihodelije. 

yoga666.bandcamp.com/album/megafauna




Sweden's Yoga (Eld Anka and Vatten Hast) crafted the electronic psychedelic post-metal symphony Megafauna (Holy Mountain, 2009). Seventh Mind is a magniloquent dub-metal mini-symphony for Chrome-like android panzers. Drawn by the monster vortex of Flying Witch, the distorted guitars lead the orgiastic voodoo dance of Encante. The soup of warped galactic signals Wagion segues into the mini-concerto for hyper-psychedelic distortions The Hidden People tender and macabre carillon of Dreamcast. The dreadful wall of guitar noise Fourth Eye, with its majestic riff, drowns into the stormy electronic soundscape of Black Obelisk. The gothic march of the damned Treeman reprises the grandeur of the overture, but then the music rapidly decays from the worm-breeding liquefaction Haunted Brain to the angelic drones of Chupacabra's Rotting Flesh. Yoga's journey to hell leverages a generation of experiments in gothic, industrial and psychedelic music to create a superhuman synthesis. - www.scaruffi.com/

When Holy Mountain compare this band to "Mayhem performing Twin Peaks incidentals in a prairie recorded by The KLF" it's with good reason. The grimy black metal soundtracks on offer here sound like they've been recorded onto some shoddy fourtrack recorder that could never really hope to do the ferocity and scourging nature of the band's sound any sort of justice, but what the end product loses in terms of heaviness it more than makes up for in spook-laden, nightmarish ambience. This is especially true of a piece like 'Dreamcast', which comes across like an especially uneasy Xela track, loaded with grotty music box twinkles and a general air of '70s Euro-horror foreboding. More in the style of fizzy, guitar-spun Norse metal, 'Treeman' and 'Encante' are here to remind you that Yoga probably spend a decent amount of their time covered in black and white face paint, LARP-ing it up in the woods at the weekends, but there's so much more going on in here: take for example the cryptozoological death drones of parting piece 'Chupucabra's Rotting Flesh' - it actually sounds rather like one of The Caretaker's blurry, uneven crackle-scapes. Ace. - boomkat

Debut release for the mind-bending duo of Sam Meringue (aka Explorers, James Ferraro’s 90210 etc) and Jason Pearl (Living Tapes). Yoga play a form of hallucinatory 21st century DIY ritual that filters metal bombast and black psychedelic atmospherics through hyperreal hypnagogic territories and Skaters-style luminal dreamtones. Parts of this almost sound like Lamborghini Crystal soundtracking some 1980s apocalyptic city-under-siege VHS, but it’s the metal backbone that transports it fully into its own universe, with flashing keyboards and buzzing electro-melodies generating a murky swamp-storm while somewhere in the distance the silhouettes of dinosaurs make a thunderous passage through the skies. Some tracks seem to be made up of a handful of simple sounds, a phased guitar, a keyboard loop, but the degree of F/X and the precise placement of the tones makes the whole deal sound miles deep, like Goblin’s soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria heard through torrential rain or black 1980s keyboard zones broadcast through ancient tannoy systems somewhere in space. Massively psychedelic and another thrilling step sideways for Meringue and co. Highly recommended. - sunflowerchakramilk.blogspot.com/

Yoga comes out from nowhere, torch the night in iridescent fires and crawls back to its original nothingness.
What did you exactly hear? You don’t really know… For a brief moment (but maybe much longer than you think) you visited another world.
You held your breath and closed your eyes. Space and time were gone. And that’s when the visions started: you were standing at the thin edge of reality and the gate, in a slow fractal motion, opened wide…
In stupor, fear and amazement, you saw the whole universe swallowed by a giant voracious mouth, then regurgitated in a cacophonous orgy of sounds echoing from star to star, to the furthest galaxies where the unnamable waits in hunger. Then you got tossed back on earth, like a meteor of light, wandering as a ghost in the strangest places you’ve ever been… Some flooded basement or a putrid swamp perhaps? An abandoned industrial complex in the middle of nowhere maybe? Unless it’s an Enochian temple or the ruins of some long forgotten city, lost in the desert, bathing in moonlight… Shapes and sounds kept on changing until the very last second of your trip. When you finally woke up. Who knows what exactly happened?
“Megafauna” is a sonic Ayahuasca decoction where the notions of “black metal”, “ambient”, or even “songs” can be left at the door (and all due respect, I don’t think that a black metal equivalent of Throbbing Gristle works either, a musical equivalent of H.P Lovecraft meeting Don Juan on a Jodorowsky set maybe). Yoga is all of that and none of that. Yoga is a big mystery that challenges you to face the unknown. And when you think you finally get it, this fuzzy, lo-fi mantra goes deeper in its irrevocable march to the realms beyond. This album is a vortex.
And I’m so glad it exists. - www.cookingwithsatan.com/

The fusion of black metal and dark electronic music continues to gain steam with the release of Megafauna, the first proper full-length from Yoga. The band’s name might signify a rejuvinating, esoteric form of exercise, but the sounds of this epic 12-track journey illustrate an audible fate far more taxing than two hours of holding the downward facing dog pose. Here, synthesizers are cauterized of their sonic sheen, implementing a muddy, caustic veneer more in line with a scratchy, old 78 than a shiny, new 12-inch and creating a sound drenched in murky dissonance and creepy ambience that would make Tobe Hooper’s arm hairs stand on end. This is something like a field recording of some soundtrack to a nightmare scored by an unholy studio session between Xasthur and Alan Lomax. And if that seems like something which would appeal to you—yes, it is that awesome. - Ron Hart

Yoga are the manifestation of utterly frightening subjective culminations put to sound. I remember when i was an 11 year old kid the first time I had heard Slayer "hell awaits" and the intro seeping in through the beginning of the album as if the devil himself was being summoned into my room. It scared the shit out of me and brought a sense of panic that was only somewhat relieved by the pounding, underwhealming thrash that followed.
Yoga is anything but underwhealming, and it will certainly scare the shit out of you and induce a state of panic while listening to it... Without very much information on Yoga out there little is known on the band. Apparently there are two individuals who put to life the menace and torment that gleams throughout "Megafauna". As per the bands myspace and last fm pages they are inspired by "cryptozoology and all things unexplained". Although with Yoga Im inclined to think that it doesnt really matter what inspires the music, but the effectiveness with which it is delivered.
"Megafauna" is an album that is always in flux between basement black metal sensibility, and thick, complex layers of repetitive noise, droning, and mesmerism. While the music is scary in itself as the melodies are awkward and mysterious, what may be the actual fear inducing quality of the is the appearance of intention to put the listener into a trance. All too often throughout "Megafauna" I find myself disturbed by the use of repetitive sound that comes across as if the attempt is to put a spell on me. While obviously music is a type of magic in-itself, and Im not actually worried I will be put under some evil curse- the fact that I get to have that feeling at all is a beautiful thing!
There is something human and appealing to society about wanting to have the elevation of fright and the sensation of being scared shitless. Why else the existence of horror movies, and television shows about people catching ghosts? Yoga appeals to this instinct without flaw, and in one of the most fine examples of it put to music in quite some time... I can make one type of analogy and say "imagine Swans, Neurosis, and Mayhem stretched out on the rack, ripped down to bare essence and eliminated of all pretention or rock n roll stupidity and you have Yoga." But the better way to go would be to say listen for yourself, and DONT DO IT at a time when you are vulnerable and its the dead of a winter night while you are all alone.- Matthew Kinne

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