Artist: Orrery
Country: Australia
Label: Forbidden Frequencies
Formats: LP
Year: 2025
I’m sure many a music fanatic has those releases, the ones that made an immediate impact, stuck with you for years, yet never got the proper treatment and recognition they deserved. Forgotten releases, classics to some, that always felt underappreciated. It is this thought that drove H. of Oerheks, Silver Knife and more to form Forbidden Frequencies, a vessel to release albums that needed more attention in his eyes. And the one release that started the fire was the only release by a band named Orrery.
Orrery was formed around 2007 in Tasmania, Australia, and much of its existence is veiled in obscurity. Pretty much all that is known is that the band produced a full-length album entitled ‘Nine Odes to Oblivion’ that was released by Ruin Productions on tape and Asgard Musik on CD in 2008 before the band ultimately disbanded. It is that album that Forbidden Frequencies now has delivered its long-awaited vinyl edition.
The original release of ‘Nine Odes to Oblivion’ featured 55 minutes of atmospheric Black Metal divided into two sides. These are actually made up out of nine individual tracks (supplemented with some bonus material for the LP release), but it helps highlight the notion that this album was meant to be absorbed as a whole. Indeed, the tracks fluently transition into each other, helped by the fact that five of the tracks are either acoustic interludes or a dungeon synth track. These songs help glue the larger body of the album together: four tracks of lengthy, minimalistic and raw atmospheric Black Metal.
While the compositions on ‘Nine Odes to Oblivion’ find their deepest roots in Burzum, the music is best compared to Eastern European Black Metal bands such as from the Blazebirth Hall collective, Walknut and the earliest works of Drudkh. At its core, the music of Orrery is droning, repetitive, with an almost Lo-Fi sound to one layer of the guitars. These long-spun riffs form the raw blueprint of the record, whereupon a cleaner and more melody-driven layer of guitars is built. At times these are combined with acoustic guitars that add a Pagan feel to the record. The drums are, very much like the Russian and Ukranian bands, the propulsive power behind the music, offering dynamics in an otherwise hypnotizing and uniform guitar landscape.
What sets Orrery apart is that the entirety of ‘Nine Odes to Oblivion’ is instrumental. That by itself is quite something to process, and personally it’s not typically something I handle well. It also brings a certain risk of transforming the material to background music, certainly in combination with a formula that is centred around riffs that repeat for several minutes. But oddly and most impressively, ‘Nine Odes to Oblivion’ is neither background music nor a tedious listen. On the contrary, the riffs are of such quality that they manage to remain interesting, despite minimal variation. The total product is simply entrancing.
The world of atmospheric Black Metal is much wider anno 2025 than it was in 2008, but I think Orrery still has something to offer these days. The raw and hypnotizing character together with the emphasis on a few dreamlike riffs may not be so unique anymore, but the quality more than justifies a vinyl release. And one can only admire the dedication to start a label, just to see ‘Nine Odes to Oblivion’ on vinyl. It’s exactly that level of commitment that has always been the driving force behind the underground and Black Metal.
