Sentient Ruin is honored to announce the first manifestation of our new pact with long running Spanish black industrial master Noir Noir, materializing as the death-heaving full-length compilation "Black Curtain / Divine Swelling" - streaming in full and pre-orderable now via all our channels along with an exclusive offering of brand new on-demand merch, and an official street date set for October 17 2025 on LP, CD, MC and digital formats worldwide, while a
For almost twenty years Spain's recluse visual master, composer and death fetishist Noir Noir has dredged the most forlorn depths of death industrial, dark wave, and raw black metal to uncover an auditory death ritual of unprecedented wretchedness and magnificence. The project's two crowning achievements - 2016's mini album "Black Curtain" (originally released on cassette by Fallow Field), and 2022's "Divine Swelling" (originally released by Hedonic Reversal as side one of the split cassette with Vesakh), now finally see their righteous enshrinement, remastered (courtesy of death-industrial master Grant Richardson) and released for the first time ever on vinyl and CD formats (and reissued on cassette) as due solemnization to one of underground industrial's most defiant, enigmatic, and transformative entities.
While the band's sparse but enduring output has touched upon various digressions in the realms of dark ambient, noise and power electronics, these two releases in particular are the ones which showcase the band's most coherent, focused, and visionary output, being the foremost two releases in Noir Noir's discography which most define and consecrate the project's monumental morbid triumph. By far the band's two most pervasive and straightforward releases, "Black Curtain" and "Divine Swelling" unfold a prodigious death-scarred voidscape of oppressive ritualistic rhythms, glacial sequences and tortured proclamations that condemn the listener to an all-consuming auditory punishment. Obviously influenced by, or convergently evolved from, the darkened explorations of acts like Brighter Death Now, Lurker of Chalice, Mütilation, Trepaneringsritualen, Skinny Puppy, Throbbing Gristle and Dead Can Dance, these crowning forty minutes of Noir Noir's discography represent an inestimable underground hidden jewel of perverse and grandiose nekro-industrial that are a must for any enthusiast of hermetic and cult-like auditory divergences into the depths of occultism, ritualism and sadism.
Barcelona-based multi instrumentalist, visual artist, and occultist DVG first emerged under the name Noir Noir in 2006 with a self-titled and self-released debut offering, independently distributed as a handful of home-duplicated black CD-R’s whose content and existence are now unknowable and essentially shrouded in mystery. The project reappeared in 2011 with the “V.I.T.R.I.O.L.” debut full-length (released on 12" vinyl by Triangulum Ignis) showcasing a lo-fi, experimental amalgamation of necrotic industrial clatter, raw black metal, and primitive power electronics. The “Life and Death” EP was released four years later in 2015 (released on cassette by III Arms) beginning the band’s most prolific and inspired era and introducing a far more multi-layered, diverse and deliberate composition and production style than its predecessor, with far more rhythmic and straightforward passages borrowed from EBM, dark wave, techno, and electro-industrial. The “Enciclopiedia Chromo Vol.5” cassette live tape followed in the same year, released by Cintas Chromo and featuring two live rituals - ten minutes in length each - from Noir Noir’s rare performance at Barcelona’s iconic SÓNAR Festival. The following year in 2016, Noir Noir’s crowning achievement titled “Black Curtain” was birthed, released on cassette by Jason Wood’s iconic black metal and punk tape label Fallow Field, and becoming an instant fan favorite of a then emerging but still embryonal Sentient Ruin, and irreversibly influencing by the label’s vision and trajectory. The twenty minute mini-album condensed raw black metal, dark wave, power electronics and black ritual industrial into a mesmeric architecture of crushing analog electronics, disarticulated rhythms, and inhuman guttural invocations. A 10” split release with Heulen followed the same year, containing more ambient-oriented power electronics improvisations, and the same formula repeated in 2019 and 2021 respectively, when two split cassette releases with Scmute appeared, again leaning mostly on abstract field recording and power ambient experimentations with long playing times and a reduced emphasis on the straightforward and aggressive black industrial compositions from 2015 and 2016. Noir Noir’s more deliberate and aggressive stile returned however in 2022, when Hedonic Reversal released the Noir Noir / Vesakh split cassette “Divine Swelling”, in which more condensed and straightforward song structures exalted once again the band’s masterful fusion of raw black metal, dark wave and black industrial, resulting in a spiritual successor or sister release of sorts to “Black Curtain”’. When looking back almost twenty years across Noir Noir’s discography, one can not elude the greatness of these two releases, the enduring influence the former had on Sentient Ruin’s development, and the undying fuel the latter has been in recent times to black industrial’s unholy flame. Their inevitable conjoining into a singular remastered full-length release (the “Black Curtain / Divine Swelling” compilation envisioned and released physically and digitally by Sentient Ruin in late 2025) thus comes as both unsurprising and necessary given the limited circulation of their individual initial pressings, and their importance as cornerstones to a thriving death-cult that they directly contributed to shaping.