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Long-time visitors here (and of course many others elsewhere) will recognize the name Bornyhake, the nom de plume of the Swiss musician whose talents have featured in an extraordinarily broad range of bands and personal projects since the late ’90s, perhaps most prominently Borgne, Enoid, Pure, and Kawir.
Just looking at the Metal-Archives list of Bornyhake‘s current and past bands (32 o0f them at last count), and the fact that he also owns a recording studio and record labels, leads to the conclusion that music must be a necessity of life for him, perhaps second only to air (or a close third after the peskiness of food and water).
What’s also evident is that constant exploration and evolution must be an equal necessity, and that conclusion is reinforced by a Bornyhake solo project named The Path of Memory — a name you won’t find on that extensive M-A list, which is something of a broad clue about the nature of the music.
I first stumbled across The Path of Memory when encountering a song from the project’s debut album Hell is Other People (released by Iron Bonehead Productions four years ago), an experience I described as “a soundtrack for wandering alone, lost in gloomy memories, through vacant city streets lined with tall cold steel….” The music on that album shimmered, but was also desolate and even despairing, accurately described elsewhere as “a divergent-yet-related portrait of inner spiritual struggle and yawning emptiness”.
And now we have a new album from The Path of Memory, this one named Give Me Your End, a title that could be a postscript to the title Hell Is Other People. Like its predecessor, the album isn’t metal, though it’s plenty dark. Labels like “post-punk”, “gothic rock”, and “shadow-enshrouded deathrock” are more fitting. There’s a reason why the labels that are co-releasing it this time (GrimmDistribution and Acid Vicious) recommend it for fans of:
Joy Division, Beastmilk, Fields Of The Nephilim, Pink Turns Blue, King Dude, Rope Sect, In Solitude, The Cure….
As you can see, what we have for you today is the premiere of one of the new album’s 9 tracks, “Not All Madnesses May Be Bad“, presented through a video by Mary Kankava.
The music is an elaborate and spectral excursion, as if cold wraiths (or simply utterly lost human souls) have taken us by the hand and led us on a drifting progression through places where life is absent or scorned. The melodies vibrantly ring as they wail, creating a kind of piercing and distraught grandeur, signs of confusion and despair.
Bornyhake‘s baritone vocals (which also ring) present a gloom of a different kind, a brooding kind of wondering hopelessness. But as the music evolves, the musical gloom seems to warp, to become even more unearthly and unsettling, and the vocals also seem more frightening, collectively conjuring a kind of plagued spell.
By contrast, the mid-paced bass-and-drum rhythms are bone-deep, creating heavy slugging and throbbing sensations that somewhat balance the dreadful melancholy of everything else.
GrimmDistribution and Acid Vicious will release the new album on July 30th in a jewel-case CD edition limited to 500 copies (with a 6-page booklet), as well as digitally. It features cover artwork by Patricia Fonda Harrison and layout by Jane Orpheus (Funere).
Below, we’re also including a stream of the vibrant first single from the album, “I Will Never Feel the Sky“. It’s ghostly too, but more muscle-moving and radiant than the song we’ve brought you today, and Bornyhake‘s singing also elevates. It would be too much to say that the song is a completely happy one, but there is something about it that (despite the title) feels jubilant. You could imagine dancing to it, and it lodges in the head very damned quickly.