We have been blessed by the best christmas gift - Natural Snow Buldings - The Winter Ray Demo version

At around the same time that I stumbled upon neocities and the idea of making my own website to reclaim my own corner of the internet, I stumbled unto a band that had put all of my feelings about the world on disc using folk, noise, and drone. This little band is French duo Natural Snow Buildings. I will give you a small recap of info, but you can find more information, as well as their entire catalog and many more on the archive made by Samantha here.

Formed in 1998 in Paris by Solange Gularte and Mehdi Ameziane, they released music regularly from their beginnings up until 2016. Since then they have stayed off the radar, probably enjoying peace and quiet in the french countryside. A lot of the appeal for people that get into them at the beginning, at least for me, is the obscure and mysterious air that the band has around it. With no official presence on the internet, very limited physical releases, and even rarer live appearances, their whole allure is dark, unknown, and so far removed from what you can be used to nowadays that it seems surreal, not from our world or our time. If you add to that the atmosphere of the music they make together, in between post apocalyptic frozen landscapes and occult medieval times, you found yourself attracted by something that is nowhere to be found. It's music for the sake of it, a pure expression of two souls perfectly in sync, and if it finds you, it finds you and it does not let go. I have struggled to listen to anything else in the past six months. I took a bit of a break but I only replaced it with mindless listening of albums and artists that I was already very familiar with. Only when I was ready to dive even deeper into Natural Snow Buildings did I played an album of them that was still new to me at the time.

And in the middle of this second phase of my exploration of this band, while searching for the name of the band on youtube to listen to one of their albums, I found sitting there, at the top of the search results words that felt familiar, but just different enough that it captured my attention. "Natural Snow Buildings - The Winter Ray (Demo)". And this word changed everything. Demo. Holy shit someone found it.

Released in 2004 "The Winter Ray" is mostly considered by fans as part of the three best releases of the best, alongside The Dance Of The Sun And Moon, and Daughter Of Darkness. It is a very cold and lenghty album running over two hours. And it is very cold. And actually quite different from the rest of the discography of the band as it almost completely discards the folk element of the duo, leaving you in a hazy, frozen landscape of post rock guitar, noise, atmospheric pieces, and echoed piano that reverberates on the inside of your skull. It is an album for when the world has been wiped away by a sudden freeze, and you walk in the snowy remains of a former capital. Frozen steel buildings bent and creaking all around you, as the only sound you can hear is the snow crunching below your boots, and the howling wind screaming through the remnants of humanity. There are no campfires here, no one to tell stories and sing songs with, no folk guitar here to remind you that despite all of this there are other humans. Nothing. And yet it is soulful, it reaches deep inside you, it appeals to the basic human elements that are built into you. You can find comfort from the current world in its longing guitars, its metallic and bright pianos that seem to echo into the infinite blizzard, and yet it feels close, intimate. I don't know if it is my favourite release of them, but it is for sure very high on the list. No album can make you as joyful as this one when after an hour and forty five minutes you finally hear a voice singing over the music. Not a sample of preachers or the radio or anything like that. No. Someone singing, right at you. Suddenly the frozen landscape almost disappears and the humanity that was slowly withering away and frostbitten warms up, degree by degree.

Anyway, I won't go into more detail about the album. If you want to listen to it in its original glory you can download it on the archive linked above, or you can find the official release here What is important in this story is the demo version. The community was aware of its existence. Only one CD was made and it was sent to the head of a label who then gave the CD to a man named Frederic Magallon, someone who has contact with the band, or was at least at some point in their inner circle. That man actually helped quite a lot with the archive from what I understood. He then sold the CD to a collectioner living in Hong Kong. That buyer wanted to keep the CD to themselves and refused sharing it. From what I understood Magallon had made a bootleg copy and that is what we hear now. It was then shared to the woman taking care of the archive under the assumption that it would just be for information and curiosity and that she would not share it with anyone else, respecting the wished of the collector from Hong Kong. Fortunately for us, and because it is completely against the ideas that the band promote, she made it available to the whole world regardless. And thank god she did.

It is a very similar version but as they say the devil is in the details. Some takes are rougher, some songs are new, and the tracklist is in a very different order. Upon listening to it for the very first time, when Nikola Tesla resonated in my ears as the opening of the album, a song that normally ends the first disc, it felt like I was discovering a lost artifact, a song that I experienced only once in my life, in a haze, in a dream, a long time ago, and that I finally found it. Take into consideration that I am aware of the existence of the band for only half a year at this point. Imagine the reaction of people who have been fan for many years. That version is not necessarily better than the original version. It is a bit more folk-y, with definitely more singing and in that sense it is a bit closer to the usual NSB releases. The rougher parts of the recording and production cut back a bit on that glacial and freezing atmosphere, and it really feels like a much more intimate record at time. Any demo version is by itself already fascinating, as it gives a glimpse into how someone's mind works. And with a band as obscure as Natural Snow Buildings, there is never enough of that. Especially because we know we are out here looking for breadcrumbs. It will never kill the mystique of the band because any information is so rare. But once in a while you do not get a breadcrumb, you get a whole basket of bread with cheese. And that's what we all got for Christmas. So please listen to the original album, and then wait for it to really sit with you. And after a few months, come back to it, and listen to the demo.