By existing, I win.

The stereotype of black-metal musicians as murderous, church-burning, white-­supremacist pagans in corpsepaint was out of date ten years ago—by now the style has worked its way into almost every corner of the underground, and you can find just about as many kinds of black metallers as you can metal­heads in general. However, it’s still unusual to encounter one who spends just as much time obsessing over arcane modular synthesizers and ancient analog drum machines as he does practicing tremolo picking and blastbeats. Local artist Surachai has released more than a dozen albums in the past six years, including full-band ensemble pieces that stick fairly close to the black-­metal playbook (such as this spring’s Embraced) and total avant-garde synth freak-outs. In his spare time he’s part of the Trash Audio collective, a coalition of gearheads that delights in making esoteric sounds with alarmingly complicated synthesizer setups.

- Chicago Reader

What I’ve been listening to this year so far. An excellent year for electronic music.

Atom TM – HD

Autechre – Exai

Ceephax Acid Crew – Cro Magnox

Coh – Retro 2038

CX Kidtronik – Krak Attack II

Diamond Version EP 1/2/3/4

The Dillinger Escape Plan – One of Us is the Killer

The Haxan Cloak – Excavation

Jacques Brodier – Filtre de Realite

James Blake – Overgrown

The Knife – Shaking the Habitual

Lightbearer – Silver Tongue

Marielle Jakobson – Glass Canyons

Mego Editions GRM Recollection
All 7 of them!!

Nails – Abandon All Life

Portal – Vexovoid

Queens of the Stone Age – Like Clockwork

Rotten Sound – Species at War

Skinwalker EP2
Here

Ulcerate – Destroyer of All (Reissue)

Valance Drakes – A Fatherless Child

Vatican Shadow – It Stands To Conceal

Best review so far!

Surachai/Embraced (Trash_Audio / Bandcamp) Easily one of the worst black metal I have heard in years. Total tin can sounding drums along with useless shit speed played as fast as possible and sounds like a wall of noise and the singing is a total joke. All he does is screech and scream into the mic. This is so fuckin bad it isn’t funny and the first song is 15 min. Yeah 15 min of torture. Guys do the black metal world a favor and break up.

- Metalcore Fanzine

8/10

‘Embraced’ is Surachai’s first album to be recorded as a full band and is written in a four-part harmonic style, with bass, tenor, alto and soprano guitars. Stylistically, ‘Embraced’ is a continuation from 2011’s ‘To No Avail’, which saw Surachai adopting a black metal style mixed with noisy modular synthesizers. There is less noise to be found on this album however, with most of the music following a more conventional modern black metal style. The aforementioned harmony guitars sound fantastic, complete with lots of tremolo picking and dissonant harmonies. The drumming is incredible and the harsh vocals mix in perfectly.
Opening track Ancestral is a fifteen minute epic of intense black metal, ending with a beautiful, eerie ambient section filled with contrasting modular synthesizers which build up unsettling dissonance. The pace picks back up again with the excellent Sentinel and the album closer Surrender continues the relentless assault until it ends with a much more elegant melodic section which is slowly stripped away.

If you are a fan of modern black metal, then you should almost certainly enjoy this album.

Manyara

- Musikchan

The avant-garde is strong with this one. Change is a tricky thing to engage in for any band but based on experiences with Surachai’s past work, Embraced is a testament to how to do it well. Unfortunately it’s a little too esoteric for its own good throughout otherwise, hyper-dense and spiraling in a thousand different directions, some awesome, others not so much.

Opener “Ancestral” tells you everything you need to know, with absolutely chaotic and likely jazz-themed programmed drums spiraling and absurd. Atop these drums the other instruments seem to be playing with the intent to diverge from one another, rarely with any kind of synchronicity or cohesion. That being said, it does work work surprisingly well. That it’s fifteen minutes long, however, can be taxing by the end.

The tracks that follow, “Sentinel” and “Surrender” drop the length and the intensity and similarly the memorability. A multitude of directions, intentions, sounds, stuff this thing to the brim. On the bright side it weighs in at a succinct 33 minutes and is makes for a fantastically intense gym-companion. It’s a quality experimental work, but an acquired taste in the extreme, proceed with caution.

- Dead Rhetoric

My favorite record stores in Chicago are carrying Embraced vinyl now.

Reckless Records
Permanent Records

Amoeba in LA will be receiving it in a couple weeks, as will a TBA UK distro. Negotiations for mainland Europe and Japan are in the process…

I first covered Surachai’s EP To No Avail a couple of years ago and was pretty impressed with it after reading a couple of good things about it. I haven’t really been keeping tabs on the project since then though and was somewhat taken aback when I was told about this new full-length being released. I was going to cover it anyway but when I got a message from the man behind the band himself I put it at the top of my “listen to immediately” list.
Sonically, I can’t really say that Surachai’s sound has changed too much since the release of the aforementioned EP above, but that’s not a bad thing in my opinion. The black metal portion of his sound definitely brings to mind groups like Krallice and, to a lesser extent, Liturgy with the use of the higher end of the guitar to construct dense walls of melodies. But perhaps the biggest shift has been in the department of the drumming, performed to perfection on here by Charlie Werber who gives the entire thing a very jazzy feeling. He certainly blasts with the best of them, but it’s all his interesting fills, cymbal work, and breaks into oddly timed grooves that proves to be the highlight on here. With all the high intensity tremolo picked guitar lines going on for the majority of these tracks, it’s his drumming that really keeps things on a down to earth level. It’s an interesting dichotomy between the ways the guitar sort of wind together on both channels of the speaks (or the way each one is panned to a side) while the drums feel so clear and present in the middle. At times the drums appeared to come through clearer to me than the guitars to be honest. That’s not to discredit the guitar work, because I certainly enjoyed it – Sentinel being a great piece – but the way it was present, it just felt like the drums overshadowed them a bit. Not bad, it’s probably just the way my ear heard it. The other two tracks on here, opener Ancestral and closer Surrender are by no means weaker pieces though, with the former being a complete rush for the majority of it’s running time and the ladder being the most tense piece on the entire album. The three perfectly compliment each other, with aggression leading into melody leading into chaos, hopefully that’s not giving too much away.
Then there’s the other side of Surachai’s sound, which is the electronic stuff. The industrial effects, the ambient textures, the droning feedback, the melancholic field recordings – all that stuff which is, for the better part of this album, reserved for closing each track. I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. In one sense, I’m partial towards it that way because it doesn’t break up the intensity that the “main” portion of a given track presents, but on the other, you’re left these sections which feels tacked on. I’m certainly not opposed to the electronics being given more of a place in the music, I just feel sort of let down that it’s like you have these two separate sides of the project and Surachai is trying to find a way to bring them together, but the only solution thus far is to just put two tracks together, a metal one and an electronic one, and the result just sounds like two tracks were stapled together and that just didn’t satisfy me.
Overall, I dug this album, I had a slight problem with the way two sides of the project were presented, but neither was done badly. All I can hope is that the two sides either stay completely separate or are joined into more of a single being on a future release. Definitely worth looking into if you’re interested in some pretty cool electronically tinged black metal.
Overall Score: 8
Highlights: Sentinel

- Don’t Count On It

No one can deny that the current extreme metal scene at Chicago has spawned out an unbelievable plethora of interesting (to say the least) bands. From black metal acts such as Nacthmystium, to the atmospheric sludge overlords The Atlas Moth to the “cannot-fit-into-one-category” Yakuza. And I can only apologize for not finding out about Surachai earlier, another Chicago based band that seems to be climbing up the ladder of the regional scene.

Embraced is the third release from Surachai, behind which, mastermind Surachai Sutthisasanakul (only time I am going to write this), conjures his twisted visions of black metal experimentation, entwined with electronic music influences, industrial like moments and noise variations on his music. Supported by an impressive list of session musicians, including Shane Prendiville (guitars) and Charlie Weber (drums) of Murmur, Andrew Markuszewski (also known as Aamonael on guitars) of Lord Mantis and until recently of Nachtmystium, along with Tom Kelly on acoustic bass, Alessandro Cortini on buchla easel and Richard Devine on sound design, this endeavor simply cannot fail. And of course it does not.

The only way to characterize this album is as a victory for experimental music, comparisons will be made between Surachai and other experimental black metal acts such as Altar of Plagues or technical/progressive black metal bands such as Krallice. In the end it is only fair to say that Surachai is reaching for true greatness with Embraced.

- The Ritual Mag

The records came and they look, feel, and sound incredible. Embraced was structured and composed to be released specifically on vinyl. With the beautiful gatefold artwork from Caspar Newbolt, the audiophile quality weight of 180 grams, along with the logo card and stickers with an order, Embraced is to experienced in this form.

- Surachai Bandcamp

Embodiments of every genre gather for six weeks of summer fun: Hardcore grills burgers as Ska guzzles root beer; Classic Rock steers the boat as Indie Rock trails behind on an inner tube; “Where’s Seapunk?” asks Vaporwave, and everyone has a good laugh. EuroHouse runs around the grounds passing out invitations to a Memorial Day Rave. R&B, Detroit Techno, even Gamelan all get the nod. “But you guys can’t come,” EuroHouse tells Black Metal and Modular Synthesis, snatching the embossed invites from under their noses at the last second. “You’ll just scare everyone off.” Mod-Synth scoffs, “We don’t need ‘em.” The two flee to a cabin on the outskirts of the grounds. Inside, a wood-paneled chamber overflows with rack-mounted hardware and patch cables. Mod-Synth points to an empty corner. “We’ve got room for some half-stacks over there.” Montage: Black Metal moving gear in; the two pals hunching over a sequencer as LED lights dance across their faces; a tremolo picking workshop featuring chalkboard wrist diagrams; EDM and Nü-Metal making out at the Memorial Day Rave; genres heading home to their parents at camp’s end; our heroes shutting themselves in and woodshedding through the winter; finally high fiving over what they build together.

A co-founder of Chicago-based synth collective Trash Audio, composer Surachai Sutthisasanakul has fused avant-garde synthesis and metal across a number of vinyl and digital-only EPs since 2010. Embraced, the most recent release under the Surachai moniker, represents a labor of love for Sutthisasanakul: his detailed statement follows his creative process from composing to tracking a full band of collaborators to putting it on wax. The album finds four guitars, howled vocals, bass, and blast beats cohering into the near-baroque arrangements and melodic odysseys we’ve come to expect from contemporary USBM heavyweights Wolves In The Throne Room, Krallice, and Ash Borer. Surachai juxtaposes all this against squeals, drones, and fragmented sequences from the Buchla Easel rig of Alessandro Cortini (he of Nine Inch Nails collabs and a forthcoming 2xLP on Important Records), and maxes out the overwhelming mix with the help of Richard Devine (credited here with Sound Design).

Let’s pretend we all knew Modular Synthesis and Black Metal were best friends this whole time. Embraced slays.

- Tiny Mix Tapes