Shum
Hungary · last active 2024
Shum is the solo drone-metal and harsh-noise-wall vehicle of Hungarian musician Varsás Gábor, running since 2016 under the banner "Varsás Gábor & friends." Guitar-wall pieces stretch toward the ninety-minute mark, occasionally threaded with guest kaval and throat-singing textures that push the project past pure noise into a queasy folk-drone hybrid. It sits closer to funeral doom and dark ambient than to conventional black metal, despite carrying black-metal and DSBM tags on some releases.
SCORE PROFILE
Accent numbers counted towards the index. Hover an axis — or hold it on a phone — for what it means.
WHY THOSE SCORES
- Balkan 3 — Kaval (a Balkan/Bulgarian folk flute) played by guest Bigman Leacock runs throughout the 90-minute 'Lebegő klaszter' album.
- Black 3 — Label tags for Shum releases (NGC Prod, Bandcamp) include black metal and DSBM alongside drone metal.
- Folk 4 — Kaval and throat-singing are core, credited textures on 'Lebegő klaszter,' per the release's own label description.
- Doom 3 — Releases are tagged doom metal / funeral doom in addition to drone metal by the issuing label.
- Drone 8 — Spotify's own artist bio describes Shum as a 'harsh noise, drone metal and experimental music project'; drone/noise-wall is the project's core mode.
- Ambient 5 — Releases are tagged ambient metal / dark ambient / ambient noise wall across Bandcamp and the scout's own Discogs genre list.
MEMBERS
- Varsás Gáborguitars, composition, vocals
- Bigman Leacockkaval, throat-singing (guest, e.g. on 'Lebegő klaszter')
CONNECTIONS
- Becoming-Animalpath →
Becoming-Animal's Quetzal Tirado (vocals/reeds) collaborated with Shum (Varsás Gábor, Budapest) on the 'Ékszerdoboz' EP (released July 14, 2023), playing improvised saxophone against Shum's drone/ambient textures; Tirado also guested on saxophone on Shum's 'Pulzáló dobok tisztítják meg az eget' (2024). source ↗
- Phyllomedusapath →
Shared label roster: HNW Netlabel, per MusicBrainz. source ↗
FURTHER LISTENING
Nearest score profiles in the atlas.
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- Southern Lord / droneEI 23EarthDroneAmbientFolk
Earth is an American band formed in 1989 in Olympia, Washington, led by guitarist Dylan Carlson, who is regarded as a father of drone. Their 1993 album Earth 2 is recognized as a pioneering work of drone metal, built from heavily distorted, minimalist, slow-moving guitar. After a late-1990s hiatus, the band re-emerged in the 2000s with a cleaner, twangy desert-rock minimalism on albums like Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method (2005) and The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull (2008), with Carlson and drummer Adrienne Davies as its core duo.
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Mare Erythraeum is a Hungarian solo project (credited only to 'Z') that began in 2009 as disharmonic, industrial-tinged black metal before drifting into pure dark ambient/drone. Its sole full-length, Ophitae (2018, NGC Prod), collects three side-long instrumental pieces actually recorded back in 2010 and reissued nearly a decade later as '49 minutes of ethereal, floating space dark ambient about the order of the serpent.' The project is currently on hold.
- UnaffiliatedEI 13Cantata SanguiDroneAmbientFolk
A Finnish outfit, founded by bassists Mika A. A. Hyytinen and Topi Aarnio, built around the gimmick-that-works of having no guitarists at all — two bass players (4-to-12-string, baritone-tuned) carry all the riffing, joined by keyboards/samples and dual male/female vocals from Kari Husa and Anna Pienimäki. Their sole full-length, 2009's On Rituals and Correspondence in Constructed Realities (Season of Mist), moves from doom-metal roots into a cavernous, drone-heavy hybrid of gothic, black, and alt-rock with electro-folk and Baroque touches.
- UnaffiliatedEI 19Haiku FuneralDroneAmbientDoom
Haiku Funeral is a ritualistic industrial/black-metal-adjacent project born in a Marseille studio on Halloween 2008, built around Bulgarian multi-instrumentalist Dimitar Dimitrov (electronics, keyboards, vocals) and American bassist/vocalist William Kopecky, with Finnish drummer David Lillkvist also credited on record. Their sound is a hallucinogenic blend of occult drone, droning doom, and cinematic/ritual ambient, colored by theremin, e-bow, spring-drum, children's harp, and sitar - one reviewer singled out the sitar-and-tribal-percussion 'Cherni Shamani' as evoking cyber-shamanic trance. Six albums deep (most recently Drown Their Moons in Blood, 2021, via Aesthetic Death), they occupy a genuinely fringe niche between black metal atmosphere and psychedelic ritual ambient.
- UnaffiliatedEI 14SghorDroneAmbientBlack
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Moroghor was the solo studio vehicle of Massachusetts musician David Lanciani (aka Dimaension X), active 2007-2010 and built around a fictitious three-person lineup of invented characters (Ndethatl, Ygorathla, Zatholal). The 2009 debut '...and Space as Chaos' billed itself as 'Psychedelic Xperimental Black Metal From Beyond,' while its same-year companion 'Darkness...' pivoted to minimal drone/doom the artist himself pitched as sitting alongside Sunn O))), Nortt, and Nadja. Lanciani has continued working similar minimal blackened-drone territory under other names since the project went on hold.
- UnaffiliatedEI 15PhyllomedusaDroneAmbientDoom
Phyllomedusa is the prolific one-man harsh noise wall / goregrind project of Matt Mansfield, aka 'Big Frog,' active since 2007 out of Annapolis, Maryland. Across an enormous catalog (170+ releases), the project fuses gorenoise and harsh-noise-wall drone with goregrind, sludge/doom, black metal, and power-electronics textures, all wrapped in a running amphibian theme; No Clean Singing proposed 'frogrind' as a better label than plain 'gorenoise.' Mansfield also records frog-themed material as Amphibians Performing Surgery, Macrophagous Gilled Larvae, olm, and Toad Birth, and supports the Save The Frogs conservation organization.
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The Crawling Chaos is a Moscow noise/sludge act formed in 2013 ('filth & stench since 2013'), blending doom, black metal and drone into an abrasive, atmosphere-heavy sound thickened by saxophone and noise/synth layers. They've released a self-titled full-length (2015), Гильотины поют о любви (2016), the EP Стерилизация преданных слуг, and the 2024 split Организованное безумие (Organized Madness) with fellow atlas act Neon Scaffold.
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Ghostmass (大鬼眾) is a Beijing improvisation collective formed in 2021 from a shared passion for drone, doom, and extreme metal, filtered through harsh noise and free improvisation. Reviewer Michael Scharf (Outside Noise) describes their 2024 album 'Ghost Meditation' as evolving from chaotic noise toward a more structured, doom-metal-inspired sound, with anguished throat-singing-style vocals over grating feedback and power electronics. The lineup draws members from Beijing noise-rock scene acts Carsick Cars and Soviet Pop.