AMPHISBAENA slithered to life in 2013 from the chaos of Alberta, Canada’s renowned black/death vipers’ nest. Featuring stalwart psychopaths from known entities such as WEAPON, REVENGE, RITES OF THY DEGRINGOLADE and ANTEDILUVIAN, the two-headed snake tightened its coils around the throats of the unsuspecting, revealing itself through the self-titled EP in 2016. Few were lucky enough to witness the band’s horrifying, mind-altering live debut at Covenant Festival 2017, still mentioned in hushed tones and frightened whispers. And then the twin serpents went quiet…
After 7 years, the forked tongues of AMPHISBAENA speak again. The second coming arrives with the entity’s most realized offering to date: “Rift.” In a painstaking process, the album was carved out piece by piece across three recording studios over the last decade of our cursed age. Through these years of chaos and agony, beauty was born – and it is only for the few. On “Rift,” AMPHISBAENA opens up their dense sonic palette even wider: never content with their baseline of obscure blackened death metal, they turn their eight-string guitars and modular synthesizers towards doom metal, ambient and even prog. Not for genre purists, “Rift” spirals from cavernous murk to hyper-blasting chaos to atonal ambiance and back again.
This idiosyncratic fusion delineates a vision of Mankind’s endless, ultimately futile struggle for meaning in an indifferent, cruel and violent cosmos. Merging cosmic horror, mystical revelation and mechanized post-human transcendence, a buried transmission from the far end of existence offering broken hymns to gods no longer listening.
“Rift” is the wound that will never heal. It is the gulf between opposites, the dual perspective that AMPHISBAENA embodies. Between chaos and structure, melody and dissonance, fast and slow, life and death, the past and the future, the twin serpents cross at the balance point, floating above the bottomless abyss. Traverse the Rift!