“Change upon the Horizon” begins with keyboards that could have come from a faded fantasy-game soundtrack, their ceremonial melody sounding both triumphant and slightly uneasy. When the guitars enter, they do not replace this atmosphere so much as tear a rough opening through it. Tremolo-picked lines surge beneath the synthesizer, programmed drums establish an urgent forward motion, and distant shrieks turn the piece from medieval reverie into raw atmospheric black metal. This combination defines Witches Moon’s A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn, a 2017 debut whose homemade CDr presentation matches its music: ambitious in imagination, modest in means and unconcerned with making its contrasting elements appear seamless.
Witches Moon was a one-person project initially based in Raleigh, North Carolina, with the anonymous musician credited simply as the Witch. Across these six tracks, guitar, voice, keyboards and percussion are arranged less like a conventional band than parts of a miniature supernatural theatre. The keyboards supply painted scenery, the guitars create weather, and the vocals appear as a figure moving through both. The album’s identity depends on the friction between them. Its melodic black metal passages have the speed and abrasion expected from the form, but the prominent synthesizers refuse to remain atmospheric decoration. They frequently carry the main theme, redirect a riff or expose a brighter emotional color beneath the distortion.
This is immediately apparent in “Change upon the Horizon.” The opening melody has a folk-like simplicity, relying on a memorable sequence rather than dense orchestration. As the metal instrumentation gathers around it, the same figure acquires a different meaning. What first suggests the arrival of daylight begins to sound like a warning. The guitar tone is thin and buzzing but articulate enough for its melodic movement to survive, while the drum programming has a conspicuous artificial snap. Neither quality damages the track. The record’s appeal lies partly in hearing one musician force limited sounds into a much larger imagined space. Its castle walls may be painted canvas, but the shadows falling across them are persuasive.
“Gatekeeper” is heavier and more direct. The keyboards still provide harmonic depth, although the guitar occupies more of the foreground with minor-key riffs alternating between rapid tremolo and slower, almost doom-like movement. The harsh vocals are embedded in the mixture rather than placed clearly above it. Their words are less immediately important than their texture: a ragged human element cutting through instruments that otherwise sound stylized and remote. The lack of a strongly audible bass leaves open space between the thin guitar and the broader synthesizer tones. This unusual balance can make the music feel simultaneously raw and ornate, with no thick middle layer smoothing over the difference.
The medieval character of A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn does not arise from historical accuracy. There is little attempt to imitate an actual early-music ensemble or reconstruct a specific period. Instead, Witches Moon uses the familiar vocabulary of fantasy medievalism: synthetic choirs, modal-sounding phrases, processional rhythms, natural imagery and occult titles. “Through the Veil” makes particularly effective use of this language. Its shifts between floating keyboards and black-metal acceleration suggest passage between two connected worlds. The transitions are sometimes blunt, but that bluntness gives the music the unpredictable logic of a dream. A pastoral phrase can become hostile within seconds, then reappear unchanged after the turbulence has passed.
Much of the album’s charm comes from this refusal to choose between dungeon synth and black metal. It is not a black metal recording with short keyboard interludes attached, nor a dungeon synth album periodically disturbed by guitars. The two styles are woven into the same compositions. Synth melodies often continue through the most aggressive sections, while riffs retain a lyrical quality that connects them to the quieter passages. The Witch would explore fully synthesizer-based music on subsequent releases, but this debut captures the point where the project’s different impulses are still colliding. The result is less polished than a carefully unified hybrid, but also more lively.
The title track forms the album’s nine-and-a-half-minute center. Its extended duration allows Witches Moon to move through several degrees of intensity without treating them as separate episodes. Keyboard themes establish an enchanted, faintly mournful atmosphere before the guitars roughen their edges. Repetition is important here. Riffs and melodic figures remain in place for long stretches, seeking immersion rather than surprise. At times they persist beyond the moment when their direction has become obvious, exposing one of the album’s limitations. Yet the repetition also permits the strange tonal mixture to settle. The synthetic grandeur and abrasive guitar gradually stop sounding incompatible, becoming two surfaces of the same imagined landscape.
The phrase “a swing of sickle to summer’s dawn” condenses the record’s central tension. The sickle can signify harvest, seasonal change or death, while dawn implies renewal and approaching warmth. Witches Moon repeatedly places those ideas together rather than resolving their opposition. The album is full of bright melodies heard through a damaged recording surface, energetic motion shadowed by archaic images of mortality. Even its most aggressive moments rarely feel hateful. There is wonder within the harshness, as though the shrieked voice were responding to something immense rather than simply expressing hostility.
“Wyrm” leans further into the record’s fantastical side. Its riffs have a circular, quest-like momentum, and the keyboard writing enlarges the song without giving it the bombast of symphonic metal. The production keeps everything at a human scale. Choir sounds remain recognizably synthetic, drums retain their programmed stiffness, and layers occasionally compete for the same space. Those qualities make the piece feel like an individual construction rather than a genre exercise assembled from professional presets. The arrangement is busy, but its central melody stays clear enough to guide the song through changes in pace.
The closing “Dance with Lightning” is the shortest track and one of the most animated. Its title accurately suggests movement: rhythms feel springier, melodic turns arrive more quickly, and the keyboards introduce flashes of color against the guitar’s persistent rasp. After the longer title piece and the denser “Wyrm,” its compactness provides an effective release. The album does not conclude with a solemn ambient recession or an enormous final chord. It ends in motion, retaining the playful quality that has been present beneath its occult imagery from the beginning.
That playfulness distinguishes Witches Moon from atmospheric black metal built primarily around solemnity and scale. A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn certainly invokes veils, gatekeepers, serpents and elemental forces, but it does so with the enthusiasm of someone assembling a private mythology in real time. The Tarot-derived artwork and archaic language frame the music without making it forbiddingly serious. One can hear affection for old fantasy soundtracks, second-wave black metal, folk melody and the solitary craft of dungeon synth. Their coexistence feels intuitive rather than theoretical.
The CDr format suits that sensibility. This is music conceived within an independent digital and handmade physical culture, where a release can exist as both an album and a personal artifact before any larger label becomes involved. A limited vinyl edition from His Wounds followed in 2020, but the original 2017 version preserves the immediacy of the project’s arrival. The comparatively clear separation of keyboards and guitar prevents the rawness from becoming unintelligible, while the unevenness remains essential to its atmosphere. Improving every sound might have made the music heavier, but it could also have erased the precarious balance that makes it distinctive.
A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn is not flawless. Several riffs repeat longer than their development warrants, the programmed percussion occasionally flattens changes in intensity, and the missing low-end weight can make the faster passages feel fragile. These are noticeable weaknesses, not secret virtues. Yet the record survives them because its melodic imagination is strong and its personality immediate. Witches Moon understands that atmosphere is not produced by obscurity alone. It requires recognizable shapes within the fog.
The album’s lasting appeal comes from hearing those shapes repeatedly transform. A keyboard melody becomes a black-metal riff; a harsh passage reveals an almost pastoral core; a cheap synthetic choir briefly acquires genuine majesty. Witches Moon does not conceal the joins between these elements. The music lets them scrape against one another, creating a debut that feels raw without being primitive and whimsical without becoming slight. A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn builds its own small world from limited resources, then fills that world with enough movement, color and mystery to make its painted horizon seem real.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.