Small Pond and Art As Catharsis are proud to announce the release of Leeds, UK trio Voronoi’s new album The Last Three Seconds—a complex and remarkably ambitious foray into the realms of progressive metal and jazz experimentation, set for release on 7th May 2021.
As the first track taken from the album, lead single ‘Gamma Signals’ serves as a toe in the water for the depth of things to come. The full-bodied riffwork captures the stop-start format of prog-metal heavyweights without being explicitly “metal”, yet beyond this, glitchy, experimental electronics cut through the composition like a knife.
The final product is something that captures the magic of the cosmos—a place where worlds orbit worlds, genres orbit genres. Each element remains different and unique, but still intrinsically tied to the other.
“Gamma Signals is about pulsars, and how when Jocelyn Bell-Burnell first discovered them, the media thought they were aliens trying to contact us,” says keyboardist Aleks Podraza. “Broadly, this song is about my love for and fascination with cosmology as a whole. That’s a theme that runs through the veins of most of the album.”
Forming off the back of contemporary jazz outfit Zeitgeist, Voronoi take the power and rhythmic complexity of heavier prog-metal and fuse it with the sophistication of classical music and jazz. A passion for science fiction thematically drives the band’s heaving and chopping style, whereas artists such as Autechre, Car Bomb, Tigran Hamasyan and J.S. Bach help shape the rigid, experimental structure of The Last Three Seconds.
“Compositionally and stylistically we have moved into much heavier territory than our contemporary jazz foundations,” says Podraza. “It really shows. If you were to put this record against the first tunes we played together as Zeitgeist, it would be like introducing a much less capable Thelonious Monk to a less hectic Dillinger Escape Plan.”
Those following Voronoi’s career will need little convincing on the quality of The Last Three Seconds. Collectively, band members have performed and recorded with groups like The Cinematic Orchestra, KOYO, NJYO, Jenova Collective, The Often Herd, Mik Artistik’s Ego Trip, Wandering Monster and more.
This in turn has garnered sizeable attention at festivals including Reading and Leeds Festival, Download Festival, and Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, not to mention Voronoi’s thrashing set at 2019’s ArcTanGent.
The cool and collected chaos of The Last Three Seconds serves as a snapshot of this live energy, as passion and fury hum at the end of every complex composition. From start to finish, the record is nothing less than executed perfectly, undoubtedly appealing to even the most seasoned of prog-lovers.
Gamma Signals, the first single from Voronoi’s The Last Three Seconds, is available to stream now. The full album releases on 7th of May via Small Pond Recordings and Art As Catharsis.