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CD/DVD Releases: Haiku Funeral's New CD Now Available

Posted on Sunday, November 07 @ 05:00:00 UTC by nightowl

Haiku Funeral's new CD, If God Is A Drug, is now available. It was released at midnight on Halloween by the Danish experimental/dark ambient label Hikikomori Records. If God Is A Drug is packaged in a half-sized DVD case with a hand-numbered booklet containing lyrics and full-color artwork. Two stickers are also included.

If God Is A Drug is Haiku Funeral's 3rd release to date (their 2nd on Hikikomori). The music is extremely dark and experimental, with touches of black metal, death ambient, psychedelic, and doom. Haiku Funeral consists of Bulgarian black metal vocalist Dimitar Dimitrov (Corpus Diavolus, Glades of Gloom, Unhealthy Dreams) on vocals and electronics and American progressive/avant-garde bassist William Kopecky (Yeti Rain, Far Corner, Snarling Adjective Convention, Kopecky, etc) on bass and vocals.

To order the CD, please visit www.hikikomori-records.com

If God Is A Drug track listing:

1. Izkuplenie
2. The Holy Connection
3. Fungoid Moon
4. If God Is A Drug part I
5. If God Is A Drug part II
6. If God Is A Drug part III
7. 7
8. The Trees Are Killing The Sky
9. City In The Sea
10. Bright Red Seeds (Featuring Ellom: poetry/voice)
11. Infected
12. They Dreamt Of Coffins

Haiku Funeral will be performing live at the Les Inovendables festival in Marseille, France on 12 November at Leda Atomic Music. This will be the CD release party for If God Is A Drug.

Haiku Funeral @ MySpace | Hikikomori Records @ MySpace

Praise for Haiku Funeral's debut CD Assassination In The Hashish Cathedral:

From Progression:

Holy crap! I've heard some evil shit over the years but this must be a true recording of hell. Drenched in doomy swirling echo this hallucinogenic nightmare grabs your throat and brutally assaults you for the full 53 minutes.

This is electronic doom/black metal with bass being the only "organic" instrument. William Kopecky -- whose descent continues from Yeti Rain to Snarling Adjective Convention to this drug-sick doorway to the damned -- viciously prowls the polluted bowels of the hashish cathedral with said bass growling, howling, and rumbling in ominous torture. Partner in slime, Dimitar Dimitrov, is a veteran of the black metal scene molesting electronics.

It's apparent these two wanted to one-up anything horrific in any genre as this terrifying collection of ear rape kicks through boundaries with determined hostility. Blood-curdling screams and whispered demonic moans ride over countless layers of distorted sheets of synthesized affliction. This disc lays to waste black metal, doom metal and death ambient with its unrelenting malevolence. Haiku Funeral has earned the key to hell.

From The Shepherd Express:

William Kopecky may have relocated from Racine to France, but as one-half of the duo Haiku Funeral, he arguably makes the most sinister-sounding music ever linked to Wisconsin. Sure, his work in Yeti Rain, Far Corner, Snarling Adjective Convention and the eponymous trio Kopecky has always been dark, but the sounds he spawned on Halloween night of 2008 with Bulgarian black-metal veteran Dimitar Dimitrov border on pitch-black.

Promo materials for Assassination In The Hashish Cathedral warn that the album contains ?dark poems of sick erotic visions, tortured screams in industrial landscapes, occult murmurings and eerie whispers.? That about covers it. Kopecky, as usual, plays moody, badass bass better than practically anyone else, and he even contributes some veiled vocals here. Dimitrov, meanwhile, electrocutes listeners with his arsenal of electronics.

Experienced collectively, the nine songs on Assassination In The Hashish Cathedral are hallucinogenic, morbid and terrifying as hell.

From Avant-Garde Metal:

Out of the blue, William Kopecky (bass, vox, delirium) and Dimitar Dimitrov (electronics, vox, hallucinogens) aka Haiku Funeral surprise fans of dark experimental music with an album fusing primitive and dirty black occultism with elements of psychedelic darkwave soundscapes and doomy, pounding rhythms. The whole thing is quite darkly vibrating and spooky, and right from the first few compositions, one can tell how much of a departure it is from bassist William Kopecky's precedent Prog/Jazz and Ambient curriculum vitae. I was surprised to hear, this time in a whole different style, Kopecky's convincing bass experimentation, which I had previously discovered in Yeti Rain. Haiku Funeral's music is indeed slow-moving, decaying, rotten, lung-filled with thick hashish smoke and black & white bacteriological filth. Equally ambient, industrial-fleshed, drone-y (bass) metal, Eastern flavoured and poetically meditative, Assassination In The Hashish Cathedral feels like a demented mindtrip in to your inner hell and as such, it falls short of heavenly transcendental psychedelism and sounds closer to a scary bad ass trip.

The first half of the album welcomes Kopecky on vocals and his spoken evocations certainly fit with the drug sick spirit of the music, while the second half sounds perhaps more Black metal in tone with Dimitrov performing his ultra distorted screeching.

In conclusion, the label's name perhaps will help you to get an idea. "Hikikomori, according to Wikipedia, is a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives." I could rephrase that and write that Haiku Funeral is a European/American band name which refers to the phenomenon of two reclusive musicians who have chosen to withdraw from the norms of music, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various deranged factors in their musical creativity. An album for those who prefer their coffee black and strong...

From Vital Weekly:

Similar to another album reviewed recently here in this magazine, Sektor 304's Soul Cleansing, present album focus on expressions of Industrial from the metal-based scene. Compared to the more expressive and downright aggressive style of Sektor 304, the band called Haiku Funeral is more introvert and ambient-based but with a similar utterly dark approach. Behind the project you find two members: WmK on bass, DiM (mis)treating the electronics and both members on screaming vocals. The electronic side of the album takes it starting point in the black ambient scene with drones of sheer darkness, but also subtle noise drones shines through the hellish soundworld first of all dominated by the creepy inhuman screams. The bass creates an ultra-heavy ground in the depressive musical textures. The band describes their music as "mental distorted drug hallucinations" themselves, which is a quite descriptive phrase. Everyone interested in the industrial-based metal-style (Godflesh, Scorn, Treponem Pal, Sunn:))), Helmet) should check this out. Limited edition of 50 copies. Address: http://www.hikikomori-records.com/.

From Progressor (Progressor.net):

Prolusion. The international ensemble Haiku Funeral is one of the few bands around sporting more nationalities than members, formed in a recording studio in France one late autumn night in 2008 by Bulgarian black metal veteran Dimitar Dimitrov and US born William Kopecky, the latter known for his work in a multitude of progressive and experimental rock bands on both sides of the Atlantic. The end result of the French encounter between these two artists was issued in August 2009 on the Danish label Hikikomori Records, in a limited edition of merely 50 copies.

Analysis. Those familiar with the output of either of these two musicians from previous occasions should be forewarned on one matter: This album ventures quite a bit outside of what either of them have been involved in previously, at least to my knowledge. Assassination In The Hashish Cathedral preserves one trademark feature of both musicians though: a sinister, brooding darkness. The overall musical style of this production resides somewhere in the electronic sphere. Synths and electronic noises make up most of the moods and atmospheres in these 9 constructions, which bear stronger resemblances to sound collages than traditionally-made music. You will have to listen long and hard to find clear-cut melodies or melodic themes here, with various forms of rhythms, most often provided by Kopecky's hard, aggressive bass guitar, as the most constant element with a resemblance to an ordinary composition. Describing the contents of this disc as experimental will probably not come as a surprise by now.

The moods and atmospheres conjured up by this duo are of a dark and sinister variety. Sounds from hell might be a useful description, but as that evoke associations in the direction of black metal and similar music it isn't quite satisfactory. Sounds from your innermost nightmares are a term I find pretty accurate myself. Or perhaps a soundtrack lifted directly from the nether regions of Purgatory. Multilayered, fragmented, decaying electronic textures make up the essence of these constructions. Dark, brooding, evil textures beneath and lighter, cold, clinical ones above create intriguing contrasts when both sets are utilized simultaneously. More often than not we're limited to a variety of dark sounds only though, with the aforementioned bass guitar of Kopecky underscoring and various forms of mostly creepy rhythmical noises accompanying them. Subdued spoken word passages from Kopecky and dampened, guttural noises from Dimitrov make up the final elements. The end result is evil-sounding ventures, sometimes coming across as futuristic seances from a dystopian universe of so far unknown deranged qualities, at other times as the final moans of souls tortured in hell for eternity. The atmospheres created are filled with hopelessness, bleakness and despair, yet most times with a passion of sorts. The duo doesn't come across as clinical in any manner whatsoever; there's a great deal of emotion amidst the terror-filled, bleak sonic tapestries. Personally I find this album intriguing in general, but some of the sound collages are too overwhelming, others to some extent too repetitive. There are limits to how long a particular set of sounds can be explored in such a setting, even when the subtler sounds and samples come and go to create a feeling of variation. In short: the momentum is missing on some occasions, which for me is a distracting feature.

Conclusion. Those who generally tend to enjoy music described as dark, evil and sinister might also want to check out the efforts of Haiku Funeral. Its evil-sounding, experimental sound constructions are somewhat of an acquired taste, but I would imagine that those who found a creation like Celtic Frost's electronic track "Totengott" to be fascinating could have an interest in purchasing Assassinations In The Hashish Cathedral, too, as this effort shares many of the characteristics of that particular release, although in a more sophisticated manner.

From Heathen Harvest:

This interesting new duo, Haiku Funeral, was forged in a place far from each other?s homeland: in a clustered studio in Marseille, on Halloween, 2008 the meeting of William Kopecky from the States and Dimitar Dmitrov. In reality, the former plays ?electronics?, sings vocals and plays the spring drum, while the latter, Kopecky, plays bass, sings too, also plays spring drum and children?s harp. The latter result was the formation of this new international duo, Haiku Funeral. The duo have really honed their sound down to an automatistic industrial, dehumanized, loud and insane sounding experimentalism going on.

On the CD cover which is unique for a CD - it?s like a DVD box only 2/3 the size - it lists 3 responsibility for each member: Dmitrov is: ?Electronics, Vox, Hallucinations? and Kopecky is: ?Bass, Vox, Delirium?.

Among some of the tunes to check out include: the title track, for sure, plus ?Let The Drug -Sick Visions Begin?, a morbid, hallucinogenic scene of chaos and suffering. ?The Forever Book Of Smoke? is so deep, so foggy that one feels suffocated after a while, like one is in a hole that can?t quite be gotten out of - until, of course, it lets go of you and you?re thrown into the fire of ?Funeral? - all very Goth,, tres Industrial and Aggro in some spots, yet it also has its ambient moments.

In some ways Haiku Funeral remind me of Skinny Puppy - the naked nihilism and the warped sense and idea of society: the filth, the depravity that lurks behind the most beguiling disguises and comes in all forms in this thing called ?humanity? - it?s not all for the good. I think that?s maybe one message coming out from Assassin In The Hashish House {Cathedral}, maybe more to it than that but that?s just one person?s perspective, but you can?t deny the samples of the sounds of the streets mixed up in there, disembodied voices that you?ll never see, that?s especially the case on ?Black Asylum?, which also features a wicked bass solo - played up in the high range of notes to almost sound like a low guitar, it really rocks and then slows, morphing back into being a bass, cutting out entirely for a chill-out moment, when nothing but synthesized voices are being lushly played over and over again.

So, don?t let the band?s musical ?label? (not record label, either) dictate preconceived notions, because, I, myself, did not hear any ?black metal? or any other metal, it was all very experimental, very mellow in a lot of places and it used rhythm in a well-spent way. I?d have a hard time labeling this band anyway, I suppose the only thing you can honestly say is that they?re ?experimental? (at least for the moment).

But the title of the album, Assassination In The Hashish Cathedral gives the listener a vivid picture of what?s to come: a very stony soundtrack to heavenly visions and limitless relaxation, pure pleasure.

Let?s hope this isn?t the last we?ve heard of Haiku Funeral because there is a big need for more stuff like this that can make radio either change or go away. Anyway, find this CD, buy this CD and become this CD - it?s that cool.

From Low Cut:

This is a strange, dark journey and features Bulgarian Dimitar Dimitrov (Glades of Gloom, Corpus Diavolis, and Unhealthy Dreams) on electronics, vocals and spring drum) and American, William Kopecky (Kopecky, Yeti Rain, Far Corner, Snarling Adjective Convention) on bass, vocals, spring drum and children?s harp. The CD features 9 experimental tracks in 53 minutes and was recorded in Marseille, France on Halloween 2008. This CD is limited to 50 copies and comes in a half DVD case with all the lyrics. On the web page it is described as mental distorted drug hallucinations! It has an amazing sound and could easily go into some scary movies. This is pretty far out but also creative stuff.

[Source; William Kopecky]

Posted in Album Release News