Ingurgitating Oblivion – Ontology of Nought (Review)

This is the third album from German extreme metal band Ingurgitating Oblivion.

It’s been some time since Ingurgitating Oblivion terrified the world with their malignant presence. 2014’s Continuum of Absence showed great promise, which was then realised on 2017’s colossal Vision Wallows in Symphonies of Light. The wait is now over, for Ontology of Nought brings us a massive 73 minutes of darkness. It’s time to step into the nightmare once more.

Ingurgitating Oblivion consists of two core members, aided by skilled musicians, (including the drummer of Defeated Sanity), who provide added texture to the music’s churning maelstrom through an array of instruments including piano, flutes, recorder, and vibraphone. For reference points for Ontology of Nought you’re looking at acts such as Ulcerate, Deathspell Omega, and Imperial Triumphant, but basically Ingurgitating Oblivion are their own spectral entity.

Ontology of Nought contains five songs, spanning from ten minutes in duration to two that almost reach 19. Each one is a herald of the apocalypse, and taken as whole, this is an album of consummate extreme metal mastery. It’s a sprawling work of avant-garde death metal, ripe with ferocious dissonance, dense technicality, uncanny progressive oddities, raw chaotic violence, unearthly creativity, sanity-destroying jazz workouts, blackened malevolence, and layers of thick suffocating atmosphere. There’s so much going on across Ontology of Nought that’s it’s impossible to take in all at once. The album is one that needs to be slowly digested over time, so venomously multifaceted it is.

Ontology of Nought is what you get when you let a band do what they want, and then force them to channel the dark essence of multiple nightmare dimensions all at once. The entire record is cloaked in a surreal darkness. Ontology of Nought ranges from droning expansive emptiness to abrasive bursts of hateful brutality to adventurous avant-garde expressiveness, and much else. It’s a very involved record, full of nuanced delivery and detailed depth. The songwriting is intricate and deliberate; everything has been considered and honed to lethality, while also having a certain expansive quality that’s quite at odds with its claustrophobic nature. It’s not a record without beauty either, although it’s a beauty that’s corrupted, warped, and out of phase with our own reality.

It’s doubtful that this needs stating, but this is not a record of catchiness, hooks, or instant appeal. It is esoteric, confounding, challenging, and obscure. It’s a forceful onslaught of mood and feeling; a harrowing and punishing soundscape that’s powered by extremity and a band that are not trying to gain mass appeal. Ingurgitating Oblivion are inaccessible and harsh, but in this lies their many strengths, as the world that the band have crafted casts long shadows that will surely draw in select adherents of metal’s more arcane and rarefied arts.

Do not miss out on this overwhelming experience.