Ebony Pendant’s first release is only three tracks and twenty-eight minutes long, but it already contains the full outline of the project’s world. Recorded in Seattle during June and July of 2019 by S.C., who handled every instrument, Sempiternal Passage Through Realms of Suffering and Hatred arrives as a self-contained act of raw black metal rather than a tentative sketch. The recording is rough, solitary and severe, but its strongest quality is not abrasion alone. Beneath the distortion is an instinct for melody and repetition that gives the music a much longer emotional reach than its demo status might suggest.
The title is enormous, almost deliberately excessive, yet it accurately describes the scale the music is trying to create. “Sempiternal” suggests something everlasting, but not peacefully eternal. The passage continues because suffering repeats itself. Hatred is not presented as one dramatic eruption. It is a permanent route humanity keeps choosing, generation after generation.
The release’s own statement makes that idea explicit. Time is described as a snake eating its tail, while people continue killing one another and reproducing the same destructive tendencies found throughout history. Ebony Pendant presents mankind less as the victim of an approaching apocalypse than as the machinery producing it.
That distinction is important. A great deal of black metal treats destruction as an outside force, summoned from wilderness, hell, winter or cosmic darkness. Here, the source of ruin is human recurrence. Violence returns because people preserve the conditions that create it. History does not progress cleanly toward enlightenment. It circles back through domination, war and cruelty.
The music follows that circular logic. Riffs are repeated long enough to stop feeling like ordinary sections inside songs and begin functioning as environments. Movement occurs, but the listener is repeatedly pulled back into the same emotional weather. The long forms do not rush toward a chorus, climax or clear resolution. They allow patterns to accumulate until the distinction between momentum and entrapment becomes uncertain.
Raw production is essential to the effect. The guitars occupy a broad, grainy surface, while the drums drive from inside rather than standing cleanly in front. The vocals arrive as another damaged layer, less a narrator explaining the record than a presence trapped within it. Nothing is polished into separation. The instruments bleed together and create the impression of one storm containing several movements.
Yet the recording is not shapeless. Ebony Pendant’s later comments about trying to balance rawness with intelligibility help explain what is already happening here. The sound is intentionally obscured, but not to the point that the compositions disappear. Melody remains traceable through the distortion. The riffs are built to linger after the recording ends.
That tension between ugliness and memorability gives the demo its identity. It belongs to raw black metal, but it does not treat poor fidelity as sufficient evidence of authenticity. The recording has ideas beneath its surface. Its harshness changes how those ideas are perceived, making melodic lines feel distant, half-buried and recovered through effort.
This is one reason the release connects so naturally to the cassette-oriented black metal underground of the late 2010s. By that time, digital recording had made clarity cheap and widely available. Choosing roughness was no longer merely a consequence of limited equipment. It had become an aesthetic decision, a refusal of the smooth transparency expected from modern production.
That choice could easily become empty imitation. Countless projects reproduced the hiss, thin drums and overloaded guitars of earlier black metal without recovering the danger or imagination that originally made those sounds compelling. Ebony Pendant avoids that trap by using rawness as emotional perspective rather than historical costume.
The recording feels obscured because its subject is obscured. Humanity repeats its failures while pretending each disaster is unprecedented. The past remains present but indistinct, like architecture visible through fog. The production places the listener inside that condition.
The project’s use of nihilism also deserves attention. Ebony Pendant identifies itself as “nihilistic black metal,” but the music is not empty in the ordinary sense. It is highly concerned with human behavior, consequence and meaning. The nihilism lies in the absence of faith that mankind will learn from any of it.
That creates a contradiction at the center of the project. To make art about humanity’s inability to change is already to preserve a desire to understand the pattern. The record condemns recurrence while repeating riffs. It rejects faith in progress while constructing a complete imaginative world. Its despair is active, not indifferent.
The Seattle setting places Ebony Pendant within a region with a long history of atmospheric and nature-oriented black metal, but this demo does not simply reproduce the expansive Cascadian model. The music is less pastoral and less concerned with immersion in wilderness as spiritual escape. Nature may surround the imagery, but the emotional center remains human corruption.
The atmosphere is cold without becoming scenic. Forests, night and distance function as conditions of isolation rather than destinations offering transcendence. The project’s world does not promise purification by leaving civilization behind. The same destructive consciousness travels wherever people do.
The release also appeared during a productive moment for underground American black metal. Small labels, Bandcamp pages and limited cassette editions allowed solitary projects to move quickly from private recording to international circulation. Artists could establish complete identities with one demo, a logo and a carefully chosen image before ever becoming a conventional live band.
Ebony Pendant used that economy effectively. The project’s obscurity was not caused by a lack of definition. The music, name, visual language and philosophical statement all arrived already aligned.
The first digital release appeared in July 2019. Physical editions followed through small underground labels, including a limited Grime Stone Records CD-R edition. The scale was modest, but the recording quickly became the foundation for a larger catalog. Forbidden Sonority contacted Ebony Pendant immediately after the demo appeared and continued working with the project on later tape releases.
That rapid response makes sense. The demo sounds like the beginning of something, but not because it is underdeveloped. It creates a world with enough room for expansion.
The following release, Incantation of Eschatological Mysticism, broadened the approach through slower passages, layered guitars and a longer album structure while retaining the blast-beat-driven, hypnotic character established here. Later splits, EPs and albums would increase the project’s visibility, but the essential method remained recognizable: raw production, extended repetition, bleak melody and distrust of mankind.
Seen from the later catalog, Sempiternal Passage is not simply a primitive version of a more accomplished sound. Its compactness gives it a particular force. There is no attempt to demonstrate range, introduce numerous collaborators or build a polished public identity. One person records three long pieces and releases them with a statement denying any dedication.
“This album is dedicated to no one.”
That line completes the work’s refusal of consolation. Dedications usually place art within a relationship, offering it to a person, community or memory. Ebony Pendant withholds the gesture. The record is not presented as service, tribute or communication with a beloved listener. It appears almost as an object discovered after the person responsible has already left.
Even so, the music communicates intensely. Its solitude is not silence. It turns isolation into a large acoustic space and fills that space with recurring evidence of hatred, grief and exhaustion.
The cover and title encourage expectations of total hostility, but the recording’s endurance depends upon its underlying beauty. The melodies do not rescue the listener from the distortion. They make the distortion more painful by suggesting something recognizable and almost tender inside it.
That is where the demo exceeds genre routine. Hatred alone becomes flat quickly. Suffering alone can become theatrical. Ebony Pendant combines them with a sense of tragic repetition, the feeling that the cycle is terrible precisely because alternatives can still be imagined.
The music keeps moving forward while returning to the same place.
The snake continues eating its tail.
The passage has no destination because humanity has mistaken repetition for history.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.