Review: Jute Gyte – Unus Mundus Patet

Style: avant-garde black metal, experimental ambient, drone, harsh noise, electronica (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Blut Aus Nord, Meshuggah, Merzbow
Review by: Andy
Country: United States-WA
Release date: 5 September 2023

Jute Gyte are the modern art of progressive metal, obscuring the boundaries of music so severely that several of my peers likely wouldn’t even consider the project listenable. But through violence Unus Mundus Patet strikes a delicate balance between metal and an axiomatic, Socratic form of music that at times is without really doing. For the uninitiated, Adam Kalmbach’s career as the wily genius behind Jute Gyte spans nearly two decades of constantly destroying conceptions of what metal is and can be, most notably through his inclusions of microtonality (quarter tones) and electronic noise elements. While the adventurous prog fan in me lives for this type of genuine innovation in the sphere I love, the normal person in me admits that Unus Mundus Patet–Jute Gyte at large–is uncompromisingly abstruse, but I love it for that.

Despite my philosophical ramblings, I also hate this record at points. Uncomfortably experimental music often translates much better to a theoretical framework rather than to good listening material. Positioned as the intro track, “Disinterment of Stanomoë” is like Cerberus sitting at the gates of Hades, a frightening gatekeeper of the descent into hell. Over an industrial drone, Kalmbach furiously picks perverse microtonal riffs that my virginal Western ears can’t seem to get used to. Besides the incessant blast beats, the buzzsaw guitars swarm and then sting like a swarm of bees or maybe like Reverorum ib Malacht. In this discordant industrial nonsense, though, the riffs contort in a freakishly alien fashion that is sure to excite the patient, pensive metalhead.

In addition to these hideous machinations present as early as the first track, Unus Mundus Patet contains many of Jute Gyte’s more recent electronica experiments on the breather tracks “Zweisiedler,” “Sema” and “Mere.” While these pauses from such dire metal are certainly necessary, I don’t find these three tracks compelling. Except for “Mere” with its eerie, undulating pulse that suddenly abandons the listener for silence, the electronica interludes don’t provide anything to heighten the experience of the metal: I want my electronica to be as fragmented as my metal. Speaking of fragmented, the main riff in “Only Castles Burn” is fucked. Warped beyond recognition, the main “melody” sounds tonally like the already out-there Kostnatêni if one heard Kostnatêni on a drug-fueled rager after days of sleepless partying. The track is utterly destabilizing, and yet that impossible riff paradoxically becomes the one thing I’m desperately latching onto as the rest becomes total noise. Jute Gyte’s compositional mastery is on full display in “Only Castles Burn.”

Like the solidly untenable, unrelenting songwriting, the production is full throttle at all times, but unlike the songwriting, it’s the album’s largest blemish. Puerile and cantankerous, the clashing, microtonal guitars eventually crawl under your skin and burrow to lay eggs. The drum production in particular is atrocious, the blast beats nearly overwhelming everything, leaving the vocals alone to spit venom into the background. This noisy, industrial production is what makes swaths of the album feel nearly unlistenable, everything drowned in a cacophony of reverb and grime. “Killing a Sword,” for example, takes an Omega Infinity-esque industrial section filtered by disturbed microtonality and then adds a fuzzed out noise that feels less painful to ignore than to absorb. These production problems are only compounded with the intimidating seventy-three minute runtime as focusing through difficult and abstract metal for anywhere near that long verges on painful. 

Fortunately, everything comes to a head after the silence concluding “Mere” with the gale-force of a hypercane that is “Hesperus Is Phosphorus.” Out of all the superlatives I can throw at this song, perhaps the most harrowing is scariest. This is the most downright terrifying metal song I’ve ever experienced, reminding me of the first time I heard the claustrophobia of Meshuggah’s I EP but expanded outward to a more universal horror. Blaring guitars and omnipresent percussive blasts wreak havoc on me like an unstoppable force of nature. The vocals are so buried underneath the mix they’re almost an illusion, but the slightest alteration in the sound among the unceasing, powerful drone is a relief, a reminder that the music still does something. Because besides the slight shifts in dynamic and occasional decomposed vocals, “Hesperus Is Phosphorus” is. Nothing changes; this is music stripped down to its fundamental axioms and spit back in the most savage, primordial way. This is music that transcends culture–transcends humanity–to simply vomit in the face of expectations. It’s as maddeningly repetitive as Plague Organ and as frightening texturally as Scarcity, yet it’s so profoundly minimalist. And at 4:45 the entire world that is “Hesperus Is Phosphorus” stops–this invincible force stops. This music that just is. Ceasing its being is the most electrifying, groundbreaking thing Jute Gyte could have done. And then the song proceeds as if the silence never happened. It’s an unspeakable, suffocating horror. It’s sublime, dangerous music. I genuinely believe that with Kalmbach’s pedigree, this is a masterfully composed noise piece and not just a lucky outcome of a prolific artist. My criticisms are merely about personal enjoyment, but Jute Gyte supersedes those–Unus Mundus Patet is as uncaring about what you think as its maker. 

Jute Gyte continue to push the ontological envelope of what music is in a way friendly to metalheads, and while Unus Mundus Patet is certainly overly long and often near unlistenable, its destabilizing nature ushers in a new way to hear music. I know this won’t ever appeal to the average person who’s casually listening to metal to briefly escape from the cubicle slog of corporate America, but for the people who seriously consider their most deeply held convictions about music, Jute Gyte are that theoretical philosophy in practice. Unus Mundus Patet again shatters what metal can be.

Recommended tracks: Only Castles Burning, Hesperus Is Phosphorus
You may also like: Scarcity, Kostnatêni, Yaeth, Stellar Descent, Plague Organ, Reverorum ib Malacht, The Mercury Tree, Omega Infinity
Final verdict: 6.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Metal-Archives page

Label: Jeshimoth Entertainment

Jute Gyte is:
– Adam Kalmbach (everything)