"A room with a black door, is where the story begins..." are the firsts words on the debut album from this steamroller-rock band from Brussels.
The real story, in others words the band's history, begins somewhere totally different. ETHER, let this be pointed out quite clearly here, is not some sort of project thought up by a few musicians who reckonned they could make some easy money by selling their story. ETHER is a band even if the biographies of the various musicians implies otherwise.
ETHER is a trio, that consists of Jean-Marc LEDERMAN, DEE-J and Luc DUFOURMONT. The first made a name for himself as the musical part of the EBM-duo THE WEATHERMEN and is responsible in ETHER for the industrial side, i.e. sampling and programming. DEE-J had been abusing his guitars for years in a band, which was the incarnation of death rock of all the times. A band that went by the lovely name of LA MUERTE. For over 10 years, the band had been generating the nastiest stuff ever on planet rock, made ZODIAC MINDWARP look like the US senate and sound like brine shrimp, until they finally said good-bye to the living in January 1994 with a concert of which even PANTERA would have been envious. Luc DUFOURMONT is for a number of years singing with THE UGLY PAPAS, a band that has quite a bad reputation in Belgium due to their experimental eclectism, dadaist nonsense and the unique powerful voice of their singer.
So much for ETHER's history, which may not really matter much, but it facilitates to dissect their debut album "HELLEVEN" into its musical elements. Knife and fork do not lead to any mind-blowings results, because of the sheer impenetrable complexity of "HELLEVEN".
Surgical instruments and a bone saw is what even an experimented music journalist needs here to make any sense of it. Even the PCness scale which is so popular these days is of no use. Just a quick glance at the track listing shows that these Belgians know more about motor and creating psychedelic states than about the vegan cuisine or liberating lab animals.
With this in mind - lots of fun with ETHER- MetalBodyMusic !
ETHER live is :