Hyponic are a reality coming from Hong Kong and dedicated to a funeral doom really stimulating. Taken under the protective wing of Weird Truth Productions, the Japanese label specializing in doom and managed, not surprisingly, by Makoto Fujishima, the greatest exponent of the genre in that country, Hyponic in fact come back alive with their third full length after more than a decade of silence. The title of the album, as well as those of the tracks (with the exception of the Virus cover, Intro), are all composed of ideograms for us indecipherable so I will identify the tracks with the order of placement in the tracklist. The funeral doom of Hyponic is definitely interesting, precisely because of its difficult stylistic placement, and denotes, therefore, a good dose of personality and a predisposition to an experimentation that is anything but unrealistic; in fact, despite the music of Asian origin, sometimes lives of a reflected light compared to its sources of inspiration, whether they are of European or American matrix, we can say that the proposal in this case has its own distinct peculiarity, in the sense that the influences are processed and expressed in a non-calligraphic way, as happens with the dramatic openings in early Monolithe style, and with passages of ambient matrix and acoustic rarefactions that can lead back to the Esoteric or even to the same Funeral Moth of Fujishima. In substance, this album of Hyponic is of egregious workmanship, even if of not simple listening: there is no doubt that help not a little, at the level of fruition, the excellent guitar openings in the solo version that we find both in the opening track and, in a more disturbing guise, in the excellent fourth song; as already said, however, more often it’s an ambient component to take over, making the album no less interesting and, as elaborate as it is, anything but tedious, offering the possibility to enjoy a band able to hold high the banner of extreme doom of Asian matrix, thanks to a good comeback that hopefully is preparatory to other future releases.

2016 – Weird Truth Productions