Adam Kalmbach, the sole musician and producer behind the project, is the most important musician in metal since Death's Chuck Schuldiner. As a teenager into the Mortal Kombat soundtrack and Nine Inch Nails, Adam learnt metal guitar. Later, he studied composition at university and had his brain nuked by early and baroque music, serialism and Sibelius. Jute Gyte applies microtonality and modernist compositional approaches to black metal. Jute Gyte's orchestra of microtonal guitars sounds as though it is vomiting blackholes. But maybe what initially scans as occult horror in Jute Gyte's music is just seasickness caused by the unfamiliarity of this new terrain. "I understand how stuff I've done sounds ugly to people," Adam concedes, "but it doesn't sound ugly to me. Or, it doesn't sound exclusively ugly. It's just a different kind of language. It's not just uniformly ugly, just as Schoenberg's work is not intended to be uniformly ugly." Adam has crafted two side-long pieces. The first of these, The Sparrow, is a kind of modernist black metal symphony that might share some signifiers with the despair-loaded blizzard hymns familiar to fans of Norwegian BM. But those beautiful flocks of guitars - sometimes they sound like they're hovering, or scrolling back and forth, rather than iffing'. A dazzling murmuration. The second piece, Monadanom, is from a suite of ambient microtonal guitar pieces that Adam has been incubating for us since early 2014. It is oceanic, not in the usual new age-y sense most often applied to ambient music, but in that it is raging with life and detail; unfathomable
