Vermapyre / Ides Of Gemini split 12"

Some of the very early information I heard about Vermapyre was this split. It was announced quite a while ago, and has only just surfaced very recently. At the time I knew very little about Vermapyre, and even less about Ides of Gemini, but was interested to see how this would turn out. It may have taken a while to get released, but it was definitely worth it. The contrast of metal genres given here is outstanding.

Ides Of Gemini contribute two tracks to this split, "Martyrium Of The Hippolyt" and "Constantinople". The former was already released on The Disruption of Writ EP a while ago, but the latter is brand new. 

Vermapyre contribute a recording from their latest live show, which was actually quite a while ago now. A have seen live footage of this show, but sadly was not able to get there for real. The set starts off with a harsh black metal track reminiscent of "March Of The Vermapyrical Legions", which then morphs into an abrasive black-noise track full of layers and atmosphere. I'm not really into noise, but I do find this particular track to be very interesting.

The cover of the Vermapyre side is of the mansion featured on the Vermapyre website, as well as the video released on youtube to accompany this performance.

It hasn't come out great, but the Vermapyre V logo is printed on top of the mansion in that invisible ink.

The Ides Of Gemini side features a person (I wanna say girl, but the hands look rather mannish) pulling up some sort of garment. Perhaps they are running to/from something? I'll probably never know.

I reckoned this would sell out pretty quickly, so ordered one from Magic Bullet as soon as I could. Two colour options were available; brown and green, with a pressing of 500. I thought the green sounded nicer so decided to go with it. Little did I know that a super limited (#/50) purple version would be available at the A389 bash very soon afterwards. I couldn't go to this either, so I wasn't too fussed. At least until these were put up on the HT website for sale soon after the show, argh! The green marble still does look really nice though.

Additional art was also promised by Magic Bullet, and this is what came. Keeping with Vermapyre's mysterious nature, the insert is totally ambiguous. That really could be anything.

Luckily the flip side is a bit more straight forward. At least here I can tell what the picture is of, and it clarifies that the cover artwork was of a girl.