A-Sun Amissa: Ruins Era

Richard Knox’s A-Sun Amissa project doesn’t exist to retread over the past. From the 2012 debut, Desperate in Her Heavy Sleep through to the band’s latest rumblings from the vortex, Ruins Era, each album stands completely on its own two feet; the band cultivating enclaves within enclaves that are entrenched in a serious blackened sound world.

Peerless in presentation as founder of Gizeh Records and through other sonic voyages which include Of Thread & Mist and Bleaklow, alongside Luke Bhatia (guitars) and his spouse Claire (clarinet/ vocals/ synths, and also of the Bleaklow), Knox’s attention to detail with A-Sun Amissa’s latest dispatch is seriously next level. Brooding, transcendental, minimal and textural, Ruins Era is an album that is meticulously plotted and wonderfully executed.

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For those constantly scouring across largely uninhabited frontiers in search of that moment, not only does Ruins Era capture it, but also lands within its ire. From the first notes of A Sad, Pathetic End to a Long Downhill Slide, it’s the first of six compositions that open new possibilities. A-Sun Amissa meet the listener head-on with a series of whirring hell-scapes, the noise cascading like a thunderclap from a distance with the results faintly lighting up the night skies.

The sweltering blackened throb of The Diamond Lodge sounds like an immaculate conception from the underbelly of a slaughterhouse. What Bardo Pond do for pysch-rock is what A-Sun Amissa do for drone right here: a purification of tone that goes unmatched, and if Sunn O))) were ever to pass through the dark portals of drone-rock, then it may sound something like this.

Next is You Never Knew It But I Really Was Your Friend – a hymnal likened to a spirit navigating through its own wake, as slow-motion synths and heart stirring tremolo create a narcotic, cinematic majesty tailor-made for The Leftovers.

A stark contrast to A New Precipice, which is a fiery slab of dead-eyed avant-metal. Just shy of 22 minutes, A-Sun Amissa pull together their most potent weaponry, with a cacophony of clarinet and visceral howls from guest vocalist, Owen Jones, in what is something that cloaks you in a barbed net of ruin.

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While Head Towards the Fog dials it down with a piano-led post-rock blur that sees A-Sun Amissa twisting the vestiges of the genre into something more brooding, closing stanza, Abbotoir Quarter, is everything its title suggests. With Bhatia’s buzz-saw guitars Claire Knox’s deathly whines of clarinet, this bloodied end-time ballad really is the sonic remnants scraped from the killing floor.

It’s the purity of sound that makes Ruins Era the triumph that it is. Cascading drone-rock that is a ghostly echo from the void. It’s music that constantly has you struggling for equilibrium; a feeling only the best art can produce, and with Ruins Era A-Sun Amissa have accomplished it. Not only is it the band’s defining moment, but also the first for new music in 2024.

Ruins Era is out now via Gizeh Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.