>> NEWS

7 January 2012

To Blacken the Pages (Paul McAree) is back in the studio working on a bunch of tracks which we hope to release in April or May. Album is called 'Bogland', and the tracks see a major departure for the moment, using a much more stripped back sound, just one guitar, often using loops, all guitar parts recorded 'live' in the studio in one take, lending the pieces a much more experimental and improvised sound. At the moment he's adding other elements, juxtaposing electronic improvised sounds created on an ipad with 'visual based' apps. A couple of tracks have singing, and maybe more yet. Sometimes its loud!

Press

Press for A Way Dark - Rock-a-Rolla.

Download Crow's Nest for FREE right now.

The vinyl version is available to buy direct from here at the store page - a lush heavy duty vinyl, complete with handmade oversized obi strip, and bundled CDR containing an alternate version of the second track. This longer version comes with the vinyl only.

Click HERE for the free download.

More freebies to come really really soon.

Review below taken from HEAD HERITAGE

TO BLACKEN THE PAGES North (Colony)

Anyway, enough of my complaining, instead we’re gonna commence this month’s review section by celebrating the return of Ireland’s To Blacken The Pages, whose new Colony Records album NORTH (www.colony-records.com) is something of a departure from when last they appeared here as January 2009CE’s Album of the Month. Retaining their huge ambient cavernousness, the afterburner buzzsaw guitars and all of the ponderous ‘limping storm God’ elements of previous releases, this new incarnation of To Blacken the Pages reminds me of an even more alienated Residents during their ESKIMO period. And although NORTH features several shorter pieces, the odd intoned vocal and a whole new occasional percussive element that sounds like some great beast playing the Polar Ice-cap with pieces of 20-mile-long hollow industrial tubing, by the middle of this lonely record, all signposts have been long lost, the psychic frost and pack ice forcing listeners to bundle up in all their warmest clothing. It’s an essential sound and hugely useful to those of you looking to access your inner Titan without shelling out on the full Gore-Tex, snow mobile and huskies.

Review below taken from The One True Dead Angel

TO BLACKEN THE PAGES North (Colony)

Sculptor (of both art objects and sound) Paul McAree returns with more epics of drone and reverb, but while the sound -- one part Skullflower to one part reverb abuse -- remains largely the same, there are some new elements in the mix this time around. The opener, "Crossing," fades in from absolute silence into a cavalcade of heavily-reverbed percussive sounds, sounding very much like a guitar being dropped repeatedly in the world's largest cave, while two tracks, "Give to the sea" and "Lowlands," feature vocals for the first time. The use of silence is the album's secret weapon; several of the songs begin with silence and take their time fading up and building to the inevitable tower of drone. "I am screes on her escarpments," the first epic song, opens with a more restrained version of the same sound strategy employed on "Crossing" and eventually blossoms into vast sheets of drone and feedback that billow for thirteen minutes like cosmic dust trailing in the wake of a comet. "Give to the sea" fades up into a ominous cycling drone and forlorn vocals that ultimately give way to more wailing feedback and writhing drones, while "Lowlands" -- another epic at nearly fifteen minutes -- opens with dark, clanging percussion that's eventually joined by clattering sounds, guitar notes repeating endlessly, and a steadily growing thickness in the mordant guitar sound. By the time vocals appear, nearly ten minutes into the track, the droning, distorted guitar sound is so enormous that the vocals appear submerged, buried under ten tons of guitar-driven fear. The best track on the album, though, is "To be Dead," in which the fiery blasts of feedback and furnace drone play out over a simple but hypnotic beat for fifteen minutes, lighting out for the far reaches of the cosmos, anchored only by the insistent rhythm track. The track also features some of his most bowel-scraping guitar, not to mention plenty of painful high-end feedback wailing. "Night Drive" is almost as long but not quite as apocalyptic, filled with drones that sound like wind roaring through giant pipes and more endlessly repeating guitar lines, a sound less about dread than painting pictures of abandoned satellites drifting through deep space. The album ends with "August," built around the same brand of percussive rattling that opened the album, neatly bringing things around full circle. As good as the band's back catalog is, this is by far McAree's best and most consistent release, and one of the best drone-rock guitar albums you're likely to encounter anytime soon.

'North' now available to buy from Aquarius Records - if you're in the States, you might prefer to get your dose of TBTP direct from them. Review below taken from Aquarius.

TO BLACKEN THE PAGES North (Colony)

The third part in an ongoing series of blackened drone guitar missives from Irish one man slow and low wrecking crew To Blacken The Pages. Fans of the first two TBTP records (None and A Semblance Of Something Appertaining To Destruction) are already well versed in the bleak abstract soundworld this guy can conjure, fusing the low end explorations of groups like SUNNO))), Expo '70, Bohren, Slomo and the like, with something a bit more psychedelic and space-y. Sure, TBTP is capable of unfurling some planet crushing black hole heaviness, but also of tossing handfulls of notes into crystalline expanses of murky reverb, letting the various notes flutter and fall, before tossing out another handful. The first two tracks on North are perfect examples, "Crossing" and "I Am Screes On Her Escarpments", the first begins as a swirling almost static field of slow shifting reverb and delay, peppered with percussive thumps and creaks, sent careening into the ether, while shards of clean guitar, sounding a bit like super mellow Keiji Haino, unfurl like clouds of grey smoke, while underneath, a guitar rumbles and whirs, gradually becoming more and more rifflike, ringing out a bit chaotic and noisy, before slipping into the second which begins with the same sort of reverbed stretch of echoey thumps and creaks, before the guitar thickens into a crumbling corrosive wall of swirling chordal hum and keening feedback, a roiling blackened bit of guitar ambience, infused with melody and moodiness and shot through with strange high end streaks and swoops that are probably effected guitars, but almost sound like children's voices here and there. Quite haunting.

The next few tracks take TBTP's sound in a different direction, the root again being shimmering guitars, but this time the focus is on the voice, a lazy drawled croon nestled down in the mix, that drifts along side the increasingly caustic guitar buzz resulting in a sound not unlike some strange Dead C / Roy Montgomery hybrid, a sort of sun baked noise drenched dronedirge slowcore. Dark and woozy and melancholy and way druggy and drowsy sounding. Later, "To Be Dead" introduces actual drums, and gets all propulsive, a lurching noise rock take on spaced out krautrock, but with the guitars in full on overdrive, a constantly swirling squall of feedback and psychrock freakout. And then the last two tracks are massive billowing clouds of coruscating buzz and skree, blurred into gorgeous multi hued smears of blown out guitar and a gorgeous hazy shoegazey drift, in fact the nearly 15 minute "Night Drive" might be one of the prettiest heavy guitar tracks we've heard in ages, anyone into Nadja or Jesu, will love it, it's like the slow motion metalgaze of those two outfits but stripped of drums and allowed to just sort of hover. So nice.

Needless to say, the drone and dirge and doom obsessed out there probably already added this to their shopping cart (or if they didn't yet, probably should now), anyone who bought the other two records definitely NEED this too, and folks not necessarily into metal, but who still dig on dark drifty hazy heaviness might be pretty into To Blacken The Pages, North in particular...

To celebrate the launch of To Blacken the Pages' 5th CD, 'NORTH', we've posted a new video. ‘I am screes on her escarpments', the second track off the album, is a slow-burning film made up of footage of atomic bomb tests freely available through torrent sites on the internet.