NOIR NOIR
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 for a then emerging but still embryonal Sentient Ruin, and irreversibly influencing 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 more iconic raw black metal/ industrial hybrid compositions from 2015 and 2016. Noir Noir’s more deliberate and aggressive stile finally returned in 2022, when Hedonic Reversal released “Divine Swelling”, a split cassette release with Vesakh in which Noir Noir’s side featured five tracks with more condensed and straightforward song structures exalting once again the band’s masterful fusion of raw black metal, dark wave and black industrial, and thus 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 given 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 genre-defining centerpieces of a thriving death-cult that they directly contributed to shaping.