Niko Skorpio's new album is called Psilocybe Necrophila, referring to a psychoactive mushroom that grows on decomposing flesh. Although recorded mostly in 2007, parallel to last year's acclaimed Half Born in Half Light, it is quite a different trip. The basis of this work was Niko Skorpio's old cassette tape collection from the 1980's. Containing mostly heavy metal demos and live bootlegs, the dozens of kilometres of obsolete tape were sacrificed on the altar of creation.
Does consciousness survive decomposition?
Magnetic tape — as a symbol of DNA — was deconstructed, cut, mangled, eaten and torn apart by a number of malfunctioning cassette players. These emerging mutations were captured, processed and reconstructed, over and over until a new form began to take shape. Carefully chosen and prepared additional ingredients were then introduced to this primal tissue in order to impregnate it with a new kind of energy. Metaphorically speaking, soul was injected into the golem.

As is common with Niko Skorpio's works, the album works thematically on many levels. On the immediate surface it reflects a surreal journey to the deepest chasms of inner space, where — quite unexpectedly — one may find herself in wholly unfamiliar surroundings. And what's more, one may not find herself alone anymore, but instead, communicating with something unknown. And it always gets the darkest just before dawn. But whatever happens, eventually the dawn comes. In the end we return to where it all began, but affected, observing that things will never be the same again.

Some call Psilocybe Necrophila a "death album". Skorpio agrees and adds: "It can be perceived as symbolising the process of death and reincarnation. Besides, it is likely to remain the last 'conventional' album from me in the foreseeable future, so calling it a 'death album' has certain appeal."

CD version is a limited, hand-numbered edition of 418 copies.

Reviews

"Finland artist Niko Skorpio has been releasing electronic music since 1998; however Niko has extreme metal roots stretching back to 1990. Psilocybe Necrophila is his latest cd. The starting point for this album was Niko’s old metal and bootleg tape collection from his youth. The tapes were then put through the mixer, torn apart, eaten, torn, repeatedly processed and reconstructed until they formed the sounds for Psilocybe Necrophila.
Psilocybe works as a great innovative collection of mutated ambient dark sounding damaged material. It is also beautifully enhanced by some nice artwork. I was painting upon my first listen to this and it helped take the pieces I was working on into some good new directions, much like the original sources of the album. The fact that this is a reconstruction of the artist’s Metal tape collection on metal tape makes it one of the most original left of field hybrids of metal in a time where the genre has been greatly reconstructing itself in it’s more extreme forms. Whilst not a band based project Psilocybe maintains metal’s true status as an outsider music, when practiced fully the genre gives us its greatest examples (Iron Butterfly, Sabbath, Bathory, Venom, Burzum, Earth, Skullflower, Jesu, Khanate, SunnO)))…) this album being a true example of that theory." (Zenon Gradkowski/Judas Kiss)

"The album title refers to a mushroom which grows on decomposing flesh so for his newest album, Niko Skorpio applied the same transmutation process to music using Km of old tapes to give birth to new music. From death arise new life so the six track of this album are like born from an alchemical process. Musically most of the tracks sound experimental and ambient but with a certain amount of tension which is crawling between the sounds of the CD. The treated tape cut-ups, sound like struggling dead souls and the whole result is a sort of psychedelic death trip." (Chain DLK)

"Niko Skorpio, who currently resides in Finland, is a very versatile artist working in the field of electronic and experimental music. I already reviewed an album of him some months ago called Half Born in Half Light, which was a pretty interesting record. This time it’s again released on the Some Place Else label and is very sexy titled Psilocybe Necrophila. Psilocybe is a genus of small mushrooms growing worldwide, which contains the hallucinogenic substances. Very well.
The opening track, The Day the Night Embraces, sounds very much like an avant-garde rock collage. Then we get to the second track, the epic Unended, and is very different. The music is basically one long drone with all kinds of creepy nuances. You have to turn the volume up to hear all the little subtleties. An excellent track! Then we go in one flow to the next track, Untitled. I still had the volume up rather high because of the former track and suddenly I hear all kinds of disturbing sounds very hard blasting into my ear. It scared the shit out of me because I wasn’t expecting it. The song has a very good and very creepy necrophila-like atmosphere. But remember to keep the volume at hand! With the short song Uncut we get all kinds of crazy sound manipulations. Numberless Reflections is again more quiet, but you never know what Niko plans for you listeners. The song has a very disturbing, yet very beautiful atmosphere. The last track, The Backward Trail, really sounds like it is recorded backwards. In the beginning of the song he uses some vocals, perhaps of Niko himself? I couldn’t find out. It’s again a very weird and experimental song.
Again a very interesting and pretty weird album. Some sudden changes in volume do help to give the album a kind of unexpected disturbance. The sounds are very good and really give you the feeling of a hallucinogenic necrophila insanity trip. For lovers of experimental music something to check out." (7.9/10, Gothtronic)

"The result of this peculiar composition method is actually quite difficult to classify. This record generates some dark, stifling atmospheres on one hand (as in the track Numberless Reflections, for example) and some psychedelic bright intervals on the other hand (as in Untitled [or meeting Niels Bohr's Ghost in the Rotting Wood], amongst others). Speaking of psychedelics, the record's title comes from the name of a psychoactive mushroom. Many of the sounds used here are pretty shrill, and most of the time it's almost impossible to identify the instruments they've been created with in the first place, because the sounds are processed and melted onto one another to the point of becoming unrecognizable. From time to time, you can yet hear some organ notes, and although most of the tracks are instrumental, the final piece (The Backward Trail) contains some spoken words, which are declaimed on an odd and disturbing intonation.
Niko Skorpio describes his album as a metaphor of a new life form emerging from the remains of an old one, of which components have been resettled into a new configuration. He seems to compare his own work to that of a geneticist, manipulating and reconstructing tapes and sounds as if they were DNA. An interesting and original concept, indeed." (7/10, Connexion Bizarre)

"Taking its name from a form of hallucinogenic drug that grows on decomposing flesh, Psilocybe Necrophila was recorded in parallel with Finn Niko Skorpio’s last album Half Born in Half Light. For this release Skorpio took his collection of old 80’s heavy metal cassettes containing mostly demos and live recordings and mutilated them in malfunctioning cassette players, recording the resulting sound, processing it and reprocessing it over and over to use as source material for this recording. Augmenting the recordings with new sounds to add a degree of energy and life to them, Skorpio created new music out of old, his theme for this album being death and rebirth. Opening in typical with the dark, disorientating, experimental swirl and demonic reversed sounds of The Day The Night Embraces, the mood changes with Unended, a track that focuses on a deep, minimal drone that mutates into a eerie atmospheric soundscape. From there, things get somewhat more abstract, psychedelic and disturbing with Untitled and even more tortured and disturbed with Numberless Reflections. Closing the album is the 12-minute The Backyard Trail which starts out as a vibrating drone but builds and dissipates, slowly mutating with dark atmospheric ambience. Throughout the second half of the track it becomes a slow paced song with a distorted melancholic voice lamenting death to a repeated piano refrain.
The pre-order edition of the album came with a hand decorated, numbered and titled Rorschach style inner sleeve with an additional three inch cd containing a single 16 and a half minute track. The untitled bonus track contains a creeping windswept soundscape that develops into a flurry of cascading rhythms that crisscross and interact to eventually dissolve into ethereal murmurs as the track closes." (7/8, Side-Line)

"The enigmatic trip continues and this time through Psilocybe Necrophila, focusing into psychedelic drone ambient experimentations, the title album makes reference to a psychoactive mushroom that grows on decomposing flesh. A surreal voyage to most in deep reflections of Niko Skorpio’s subconscious levels penetrating to such planes of evocative dreams and subliminal echoes, reflected in each one of the six chapters generated in this release.
The first psychoactive trip is The Day That Night Caresses dark ambient piece with such experimental explorations and elements dressing the whole picture of the track. then comes Unended a long 15 minutes composition with minimalistic elements and eerie soundscapes transporting you to the most inner realities where all dreams shall become flesh, and spectral voyage to the center of nothing, coz there inhabits the resurgence of atavistic emanations where Niko Skorpio’s comes from. through Untitled (or meeting Niels Bohr’s ghost in the rotting wood) impregnating your aura with such suggestive drone ambient passages and diverse sounds which stimulates in a sense the most in deep regions of your mind, to the point of collapsing themselves into an unimaginable reality. Uncut is a short track, a surreal transmission of living entities entering this plane via psychoactive mushrooms. Spectral voices and strong sound sources evoked into a specific structure. The next track is Numberless reflections with such amazing ambient soundscapes crawling slowly into drone spaces to create subliminal, enigmatic portals for incoming of entities. A vast scenario of ambient structures converging themselves to create one of the best compositions here. Closing the album we must mention The Backward Trail, another spectral, eerie trip with the mark which Niko Skorpio includes in each release. The basis of this release was Niko’s old cassette tape collection from 1980’s. a psychedelic trip which you must experience in order to understand the enigmatic, surreal concept created by Niko Skorpio through this interesting album!!! “CLOSE YOUR EYES AND ENTER PURE REALITY” " (Pan.O.Ra.Ma Journal)

"Ehtivä mies tämä Niko Skorpio. Reilu puoli vuotta sitten ilmestyneen Half Born In Half Lightin seuraaja on jo täällä. Psilocybe Necrophila on painajainen, josta et halua herätä.
Siinä missä edeltäjänsä seikkaili ympäri ämpäri industriaalisen äänimaailman eri tasoja, on Psilocybe Necrophila huomattavasti kotona viihtyvämpää sorttia. Uutukainen ei ärhentele harsh noisen keinoin, ei tanssahtele heikkopäisenä power electronicsin tahtiin, eikä muutenkaan käyttäydy kovin aggressiivisesti - muutamaa poikkeusta lukuunottamatta. Linjat on vedetty uhkaavasti humisevan dark ambientin ja - hetkittäin jopa kiusoittelevan - paikoillaan polkevan dronen tonteille, eikä Psilocybe Necrophila sieltä kovin hanakasti edes karkuun yritä; positiivinen yllätys hieman pyttipannumaisen Half Bornin jälkeen. Albumi on jaettu kuuteen osaan, mutta varsinaisista musiikkikappaleista ei voida puhua, sillä perinteillä on heitetty vesilintua: alut, keskikohdat ja loput (ja 45 sekunnin kestot, heh) loistavat poissaolollaan. Varsinaisia kliimakseja ei teokselta siis kannata odottaa, mutta kokonaisuutena ajateltuna Psilocybe Necrophilan kauhuelokuvamainen tunnelma toimii esimerkillisenä oppaana ihmismielen synkimpiin syövereihin. Kuuntele Psilocybe Necrophilaa kuulokkeilla päivänvalon ulottumattomissa ja tee matka itseesi.
Albumin äänilähteenä on käytetty herra Sirkiän 80-luvun heavy metalliin keskittyvää kasettikokoelmaa, joka on revitty rikki ja transformoitu täysin uuteen uskoon. Twisted Sisterin tai W.A.S.P.:n riekkumista ei näiden "kappaleiden" seasta siis löydy, sillä niiden alkuperäinen muoto on mutatoitu huumaavaksi huojunnaksi ja surisevaksi sirinäksi. Mätänevässä ruumiissa kasvavan huumesienen inspiroima nimi taitaakin kertoa albumista huomattavasti enemmän kuin sen tekoprosessi." (8/10, Lammas Zine)

"Niko Skorpio on itselleni entuudestaan tuttu lähinnä nimenä, mutta muisti- ja mielikuvani herran musiikista osoittautuivat jokseenkin paikkansapitäviksi. Synkeänhypnoottista drone ambient-äänimaisemointia tarjoileva Psilocybe Necrophila on lakipisteeseensä kohotessaan varsin sykähdyttävä ja jopa pelottava kokemus.
Lähdemateriaalina tälle levylle on toiminut Skorpion 1980-luvun hevikasettikokoelma, joka sisälsi lähinnä demoja ja livebootlegeja. Nauhat uhrattiin rekonstruktion alttarille pur­kamalla ne alkutekijöihinsä ja luomalla niistä täysin uusia ja uniikkeja äänimaisemia.
Ajoittain levy tuntuu kuitenkin hieman liian hahmottomalta, jopa ambientiksi. Staattisen poljennon sekaan olisi kaivannut hieman lisää liikettä ja alkeishiukkasten kuhinaa. Unessa levyn täysi potentiaali muuttuu lihaksi ja luo moniulot­teisia ja punertavia piirtymiä alitajunnasta.
Empiirinen tutkinta paljasti albumin aiheuttavan suoranaisia fyysisiä reaktioita kuten kouristelua. Tämä on tietysti jo sinällään hieno saavutus. Etenkin päätöskappale The Backward Trail on hämärine puhesampleineen jotain äärimmäisen toismaailmaista." (3.5/5, Inferno)

"Vaikka pitkän linjan suomalainen marginaalimuusikko Niko Sirkiä eli Niko Skorpio on nimennyt uusimman Psilocybe Necrophila -albuminsa huumesienen mukaan, on kiekon sisältö kaukana siitä, millaiseksi psykedeelinen musiikki perinteisesti mielletään. Koskaan radiosta Avaruusromua-nimistä ohjelmaa kuunnelleille tämä genre on tuttua, mutta toisille voi tuottaa vaikeuksia yhdistää tällaista kaoottista äänimaailmaa musiikkiin ollenkaan.
Albumi pohjautuu Niko Skorpion 80-luvulta peräisin olevaan hevipainotteiseen kasettikokoelmaan. Magneettinauhaa on leikelty, revitty ja muuten mutatoitu ja mutiloitu - levyä kuuntelemalla voisi epäillä, että tarkoituksena on ollut synnyttää Frankensteinin hirviö. Saatananpalvojia kavahtavien kukkahattutätien kauhuksi hevikasetteja on soitettu ahkerasti myös takaperin.
Kokeellisuudestaan ja abstraktiudestaan huolimatta Psilocybe Necrophila ei ole Kiasmaan suunnattua avantgardea tai oman merkityksensä pohdiskeluun hukkuvaa kakofoniaa, vaan drone-vaikutteista dark ambientia, jonka tavoitteena on luoda maailmoita kuuntelijan pään sisälle. Tässä levy onnistuukin mainiosti.
Välillä tunnelmat äityvät hyvinkin pelottaviksi. Kolmosraidalla Untitled kuulostaa siltä, kuin vähintäänkin suuri Cthulhu ja muut Suuret Muinaiset olisivat palaamassa maan päälle. Seuraava biisi pelottelee kuulijaa ryskäävillä hevisampleilla. Levyn viimeisellä kappaleella kuullaan tummasävyisiä miesvokaaleita jopa jossain määrin melodisilla taustoilla.
Jos Psilocybe Necrophilalta haluaa jotain vikaa lähteä etsimään, jotkut kappaleet jäävät genressäänkin hieman turhan monotonisiksi ja samoja juttuja toistaviksi. Suurempi käytännön ongelma tosin on se, uskaltaako tämän jälkeen enää käydä nukkumaan - ainakaan pimeässä." (4/5, Vertigo)

"Niko Skorpion tuore Psilocybe Necrophila -pitkäsoitto nostaa esiin kysymyksen, missä kulkee musiikin ja äänitaiteen raja? Uutukaisella on saavutettu piste, jossa on mahdotonta puhua enää kappaleista. Näillä raidoilla ei löydy perinteisiä rakenteita, kertosäkeitä, melodioita – ei mitään mikä muistuttaisi pop-musiikin luomasta päivänpaisteisesta maailmasta ja sen säännöistä.
Suurta hiljaisuutta rikkovat toisinaan luotaavilta vaikuttavat äänet. Pimeyteen välähtää vaimeita vinkaisuja ja pitkitettyjä äänten kaaria, aivan kuin ne olisivat kaikuja jostain toisesta ulottuvuudesta. Näissä loputtoman tuntuisissa hiljennetyissä hetkissä on omaa tiettyä viehätystään, tosin väsyneenä teokseen ei kannata tutustua, sillä silloin mieli saattaa vaeltaa huomaamatta unen puolelle. Silloin tällöin äänet yltyvät voimakkaammiksi ja kosmiselta taustasäteilyltä tuntuva häly valtaa tilaa avaruuksia syleilevältä äänettömyydeltä. Äänekkäämmin tai vaimeammin, rätinät, huminat ja suhinat punovat kuvioitaan kiireettä, kun parhaimmilllaan (tai pahimmillaan) ”sävellysten” kesto nousee yli kymmenen, jopa viidentoista minuutin.
On täysin kuulijan vastaanottavaisuudesta ja kulloisestakin tunnetilasta kiinni, mitä näin erikoinen teos voi antaa vastineeksi sille uhratulle ajalle. Tyyliltään raidat olisivat miltei täydellisiä David Lynchin teosten taustoiksi, etenkin jos puhutaan herran uudemmasta äärimmäisen vaikeasti tulkittavasta tuotannosta. En osannut päättää onko tämä yhden vai viiden tähden äänitaidetta, joten päädyin kompromissiratkaisuun." (3/5, Desibeli.net)