NOIR NOIR
Barcelona-based multi instrumentalist, visual artist, and occultist DVG has been scouring the outer realms of underground dark arts as Noir Noir since at least 2006, creating a grim intersect where industrial, black metal, dark wave, power electronics, occult ritualism and visual and performance art converge into death-heaving majesty. Few live rituals are known from Catalan musician, even less is known about the artist’s activity outside of Noir Noir, with DVG’s nameless reclusiveness, crypticity and isolation being the binding, connecting thread that strings together the entirety of his creations. Noir Noir first emerged in 2006 with a self-titled and self-released debut offering, independently replicated to a handful of home made black CD-R’s whose content and existence are now unknowable and unfindable and essentially shrouded in mystery. The project reappeared in 2011 with the “V.I.T.R.I.O.L.” full-length released on 12" black vinyl by Triangulum Ignis. The release’s lo-fi, highly experimental collaging of necrotic industrial clatter, raw black metal, and death-scarred invocations set the foundational framework for the band’s transformative black industrial triumph that would evolve out of it thereafter. The “Life and Death” EP followed four years later in 2015 (released on cassette by III Arms), replacing the previously seen lo-fi production and semi-improvised songwriting with a multi-layered weight and a more deliberate composition style that would define its cornerstone releases thereafter, signaling a clear evolution in the artist’s sonic arsenal and production skills with the introduction of more rhythmic and straightforward passages borrowed from EBM, dark wave, techno, and electro-industrial. This release marked the beginning of Noir Noir’s golden era, a prolific period in which its most iconic and defining output wold see the light amongst a period of renovation and pragmatism that would be unmatched for almost a decade. The “Enciclopiedia Chromo Vol.5” cassette tape soon followed, released by Cintas Chromo, featuring two live rituals, ten minutes in length each, from Noir Noir’s dismal performance at Barcelona’s iconic SÓNAR Festival. A rare event in which crowds were able to witness the artist’s shapeshifting monolith of suffocating electronics in a live setting. The following year, in 2016, Noir Noir’s crowning abomination titled “Black Curtain” was birthed, released on cassette by Jason Wood’s iconic black metal and punk tape label Fallow Field. This release represents the project’s pinnacle, as it encompasses the totality of its conceptual idealization, becoming also an instant fan favorite for a then emerging but still embryonal Sentient Ruin, and irreversibly influencing by the label’s vision and trajectory. The twenty minute mini-masterpiece condensed raw black metal, dark wave, power electronics and black ritual industrial all levitating out of a mesmeric architecture of crushing sub bass, layers of field recordings, analog effects, synthesizers, disarticulated rhythms and an inhuman assault of 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 proposing mostly abstract field recording and power ambient experimentations with long playing times and a reduced emphasis on the more straightforward and aggressive black industrial compositions from 2015 and 2016. “Black Curtain”’s more focused and concise multi-layered compositional greatness was however revived in 2022 when Hedonic Reversal released the Noir Noir / Vesakh split cassette “Divine Swelling”. This release reintroduced Noir Noir at the pinnacle of its game and delving again into the triumphant accomplishments of “Black Curtain”, with condensed and more straightforward song structures exalting the band’s masterful fusion of raw black metal, dark wave and black industrial into far more concise and aggressive compositions. When looking back almost twenty years across Noir Noir’s discography, one can not elude the greatness of “Black Curtain” and “Divine Swelling”, the enduring influence the former had on Sentient Ruin’s development, and the undying contribution of the latter to the vanguard of the black industrial cult. 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 of a thriving cult that they directly contributed to shaping.