An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars begins with forty seconds of synthetic fanfare, a modest doorway into an album that immediately feels more measured than Witches Moon’s early work. The keyboard melody is bright but antiquated, like a damaged title theme from a forgotten fantasy film, and its brevity gives it purpose: the curtain rises, the scene is established, and “A Storm of Rosen Mare and Black Chalice” enters before the atmosphere can become self-satisfied. Guitars scrape against broad keyboard chords, programmed percussion pushes the music forward, and the Witch’s voice appears as another unstable character within the arrangement. Witches Moon’s familiar collision of dungeon synth, folk melody and black metal remains intact, but the parts now move with greater confidence.
Released independently in May 2020 and issued on vinyl by Death Kvlt Productions that November, An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars arrived after the astonishing burst of recordings Witches Moon produced between 2017 and 2018. Those earlier albums often sounded like separate doors being opened in quick succession: raw atmospheric black metal on A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn, synthesizer-led fantasy on Azazel Bedazzle, theatrical genre mixing on The Grim Botanical and more isolated keyboard experiments elsewhere. The 2020 album does not choose one of those directions. It gathers them into a relatively concise forty-minute sequence in which the shifts feel like parts of a single journey rather than demonstrations of how many styles the project can attempt.
“A Storm of Rosen Mare and Black Chalice” announces this retrospective quality even in its title, which echoes the earlier A Storm of Golden Mare and Black Cauldron. It is not simply an act of self-reference. The altered phrase suggests Witches Moon revisiting its private vocabulary and changing the objects within it, as though the same deck of symbolic cards had been shuffled into a new reading. Musically, the track establishes the album’s main balance. Synthesizers carry much of the melodic and emotional information, while guitar and drums supply momentum and abrasion. Neither side is reduced to an interlude. The fantasy atmosphere continues through the metal passages, and the blackened edge remains perceptible even when the arrangement opens into calmer space.
“Burning the Seal” is tighter and more urgent. Its compact structure keeps the Witch from dwelling too long on any single figure, a recurring strength throughout the album. Earlier Witches Moon songs sometimes repeated a good riff until its enchantment began to weaken. Here, ideas are more carefully rationed. A keyboard line is introduced, reinforced by guitar and then redirected before familiarity turns into stagnation. The programmed drums still possess an artificial stiffness, but the album uses that quality as part of its clockwork character. This is not music pretending to be a conventional band in a room. It sounds like one person animating a cast of instruments and assigning each a role.
The vocals contribute strongly to that animation. The Witch moves between black-metal rasping, cleaner declarations and layered ceremonial passages without treating any single voice as the project’s natural center. “Bring Dishonor” uses those changes to make its title feel more dramatic than descriptive. Harshness arrives as accusation, while melodic voices seem to answer from another position within the composition. The vocal production is not polished enough to erase the seams between these identities, and that is precisely why they remain interesting. They sound less like studio harmonies than figures appearing from different corners of the same imagined ritual.
Witches Moon’s eccentric titles are essential to the album’s tone. “The Lament of Two Fish” risks absurdity before a note is heard, but the music does not explain or apologize for the image. Its mournful melody allows the title to remain funny and strangely touching at once. This coexistence separates Witches Moon from fantasy-oriented black metal that treats solemnity as proof of commitment. The Witch’s world can contain grief, occult symbolism, talking creatures and nursery-rhyme logic without ranking one as more legitimate than another. Its seriousness lies in the care given to the atmosphere, not in maintaining a severe expression.
“Bag of Tricks and Arts” makes that playfulness especially audible. The song moves briskly, arranging its melodic ideas like objects pulled from the title’s imaginary sack. Keyboard flourishes, guitar figures and vocal gestures appear in rapid succession, yet the piece does not collapse into randomness. Its recurring tonal color holds everything together. The synthesizers favor sounds that are openly artificial—choirs, small fanfares, glassy leads and soft orchestral approximations—but their lack of realism is an advantage. They belong to a world produced through suggestion. A convincing horn sample would not necessarily improve music whose charm depends on cardboard scenery becoming magical through belief.
The first half of the album moves with consistent economy, each proper song lasting between three and five minutes. This pacing gives the sequence a stronger album shape than some of Witches Moon’s more sprawling releases. There is enough time for individual themes to establish themselves, but little room for extended ambient wandering. The original vinyl division is sensible: side one closes after “Bag of Tricks and Arts,” having presented the record’s more animated, story-driven material. Side two begins with “Pvre Ecstasy” and gradually turns toward slower, more contemplative territory.
“Pvre Ecstasy” retains rhythmic force, but its spelling and atmosphere point toward the project’s mixture of mock archaism and genuine longing. Witches Moon often uses antiquated language the way it uses synthesizers: not to reconstruct history but to create distance from ordinary speech. The substituted “v” is visually theatrical, a small piece of typographic costume. Underneath it, however, the music’s yearning is direct. Repeated melodic phrases reach upward while the rougher instrumentation prevents them from becoming sentimental. Ecstasy here sounds less like pleasure than escape—a momentary departure from a fixed identity or physical place.
“Has the Wind Always Blown So Slow?” is the album’s longest track and its emotional center. The question contains weariness, wonder and a subtle disturbance in the perception of time. Appropriately, the music gives its central ideas more space than the surrounding songs. The tempo feels less insistent, and sustained keyboard tones allow the melody to hover rather than march forward. This is where Witches Moon’s dungeon-synth side functions most effectively, not as an ornamental pause between black-metal tracks but as a way of changing the listener’s sense of duration. The song does not become empty or purely ambient; traces of the album’s roughness remain around the edges, keeping its beauty from settling into comfort.
The title track then restores a more compact theatrical movement. “An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars” is an excellent Witches Moon title because it joins the rustic, satanic, comic and cosmic without clarifying which quality should dominate. The goat could be the Devil, a woodland animal, an aged trickster or all three at once. The stars may be pieces in a game whose rules remain hidden. The music similarly refuses a single emotional reading. Melodies can feel celebratory while the vocals darken them; aggressive passages carry an undercurrent of delight; synthetic grandeur is repeatedly made intimate by the homemade production.
This ambiguity is not merely decorative lore. It determines how the album handles black metal. The guitars are important, but they are not asked to provide an uninterrupted atmosphere of hostility. They intensify passages, sharpen melodic contours and give physical resistance to the smooth keyboard surfaces. The drum programming supplies propulsion without pretending to possess the dynamics of a live player. Bass weight remains less important than middle-register interaction among guitar, voice and synth. As a result, An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars does not sound massive, but it does sound densely inhabited. Its scale resembles a puppet theatre whose limited stage somehow accommodates storms, rituals, animals and constellations.
“Carousel of Dawn” closes the record instrumentally, mirroring the short “Intro” while expanding its function. The carousel image is appropriate for music built from circular melodies and returning symbols. Its keyboard figures rotate with a mixture of brightness and melancholy, suggesting morning without presenting it as a simple victory over darkness. Dawn merely reveals that the strange game has continued through the night. Ending without vocals also changes the apparent distance of the album. The characters retreat, leaving the mechanism turning by itself.
The production, mixing and mastering were all handled by the Witch, and the consistency of the sound supports the album’s unity. This is cleaner than the most primitive Witches Moon recordings but not polished into anonymity. Synthetic percussion remains visibly synthetic; layered voices occasionally rub against one another; guitars have texture without becoming an opaque wall. The record knows what needs clarity and what benefits from roughness. Its melodies remain legible, which is crucial because they carry far more of the album than sheer intensity does.
The limited vinyl edition—one hundred copies on black 140-gram vinyl with an insert, poster and Will-Helm Arts cover—gives the album’s two-part structure a physical expression, but An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars works because the sequence was already carefully shaped. Its songs are concise, the reflective second half follows naturally from the animated first, and the instrumental bookends prevent the journey from feeling arbitrarily cut off. Compared with the restless experiments of 2017, this is a more settled record, though never a conventional one.
Witches Moon’s achievement is not technical perfection. The programmed drums can still feel rigid, some vocal choices remain deliberately peculiar, and listeners resistant to synthetic medieval color will find little accommodation. The achievement is personality. Few projects could place “The Lament of Two Fish” beside “Bring Dishonor,” or end a black-metal album with something called “Carousel of Dawn,” without seeming merely cute or self-conscious. Witches Moon makes those gestures feel natural because its world has always been spacious enough for menace and whimsy to coexist. An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars is the sound of that world becoming more disciplined without losing its oddness: a nocturnal game played with familiar pieces, rearranged beneath a larger and clearer sky.
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