Biography
Natural Snow Buildings formed in France as an experimental psych-folk duo featuring Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte. Their sound builds extended raga-influenced drones through dense layers of heavily distorted guitars, acoustic instruments such as woodwind and percussion, and chanted vocals, producing an intoxicating and frequently overwhelming body of hypnotic sound. The pair first encountered each other at a Paris university in 1997 and soon began collaborating on music, launching a series of self-released cassettes in 1999. French label hinah later issued their 2002 cassette Ghost Folks as a CD-R, after which the duo shifted to limited handcrafted CD-R editions that gradually earned them a devoted audience within the psych-folk underground. In 2007 Gularte launched solo work under the name Isengrind, while Ameziane adopted Twinsistermoon for his own projects. The following year brought multiple NSB CD-Rs and cassettes on the American imprints Digitalis and Students of Decay; the latter also put out the ambitious double-CD collection The Snowbringer Cult, which gathered solo pieces alongside joint recordings by both artists, and reissued the 2006 double CD-R The Dance of the Moon and the Sun. In 2009 the U.K. label Blackest Rainbow released another expansive double CD, Shadow Kingdom, and followed it in 2011 with Waves of the Random Sea and Chants of Niflheim. American label Ba Da Bing! entered the picture in 2012, beginning with CD and vinyl editions of the 2008 triple CD-R Night Coercion into the Company of Witches, then continuing with reissues of The Snowbringer Cult—now appearing on vinyl for the first time in a four-LP box set plus separate pressings of the two solo discs and the collaborative double LP—and the 2009 box set Daughter of Darkness, previously available only on cassette. After the duo’s own 2014 CD-R The Night Country, Natural Snow Buildings returned to Ba Da Bing! in 2015 for Terror’s Horns, their most concise and focused album to date.
Albums
