This 2020 split joins two one-person American black metal projects that had appeared almost simultaneously the previous year. Kūka’ilimoku came from Honolulu, while Ebony Pendant operated from Seattle. Both were young projects working quickly, recording alone and using the freedom of digital release and small physical editions to establish complete identities without waiting for bands, studios or conventional album cycles. Their methods overlapped, but their music emerged from very different landscapes and historical concerns.
The split was written and recorded during March 2020 and released digitally on April 6. Kūwāha’ilo performed and recorded the Kūka’ilimoku side, while S.C. handled every instrument and all recording for Ebony Pendant. The complete release runs a little under twenty-eight minutes, with four pieces from Kūka’ilimoku and three from Ebony Pendant. It was later issued on vinyl by Goatowarex in 2021 and received a second pressing in 2023.
The physical release gives the collaboration a traditional split-album structure: one artist occupies each side, and the act of turning the record creates a clear boundary between them. That separation matters because the projects are not trying to merge into a shared sound. Each side remains independent, but the pairing reveals qualities that might be less obvious when either is heard alone.
Kūka’ilimoku is named after Kūkaʻilimoku, the Hawaiian form of the god Kū associated with political power, warfare and the rise of Kamehameha I. The name therefore carries specific Hawaiian historical and spiritual weight rather than functioning as generic martial imagery. Kūwāha’ilo’s project draws upon Native Hawaiian language, history, land and anti-colonial anger, placing those subjects inside raw black metal and hardcore punk.
That combination is significant because black metal has often treated European paganism, nationalism and landscape as its assumed cultural property. Kūka’ilimoku uses the same underground machinery while shifting its center thousands of miles away. Distorted guitars, primitive percussion and hostile vocals are made to speak from Hawai‘i, where conquest, annexation, tourism, military occupation and the commercial consumption of land create a completely different historical field.
The project’s official description is blunt: disgust and hatred directed at those who leech from the lands of Hawai‘i. That statement places the music against the familiar tourist image of the islands as endlessly available paradise. Hawai‘i is not presented as scenery, fantasy or spiritual decoration. It is inhabited land carrying memory, conflict and continuing pressure.
This gives Kūka’ilimoku’s rawness a practical meaning. The recording does not sound primitive because the project is reenacting a romantic European past. It sounds immediate because the anger is treated as current. Short structures, punk momentum and abrasive production prevent the material from becoming ceremonial pageantry. The music moves quickly enough to feel closer to an attack than a monument.
Kūwāha’ilo has described the project as a personal outlet that comes more naturally than his previous musical work. It was designed for solitary home recording rather than live performance or the negotiations of a conventional band. His recording method during this period was unusually direct. Percussion was performed on a small electronic drum pad, with the kick recorded separately by striking another assigned pad with a stick. The arrangement was inconvenient but allowed the entire project to remain physically played and independently controlled.
That homemade method suits the ideological position. The music does not ask an external institution to authenticate Hawaiian anger or translate it into a polished form for outsiders. It is constructed privately and released on its own terms.
Kūwāha’ilo has also spoken honestly about the possible tension between his cultural material and the musical language carrying it. Black metal and punk may be understood as foreign or “haole” interests within parts of his home environment. The project therefore exists between identities rather than presenting a simple fusion in which every element fits comfortably.
That friction gives the music its character. Hawaiian subjects are not placed over black metal as decorative lyrics. The imported genre is forced to operate inside a local worldview that may itself remain suspicious of the music. Kūka’ilimoku becomes an argument conducted through a form that is both useful and culturally unsettled.
The split arose through friendship rather than strategic label planning. Kūwāha’ilo and S.C. knew one another, admired each other’s work and noticed that their first demos had appeared around the same time. After discussing a split, both completed their recordings within roughly a month. The speed reflects the way each project worked during its early period: ideas were written, recorded and released while the initial pressure remained intact.
Kūwāha’ilo later explained that he shifted his writing slightly toward Ebony Pendant for this release. He used chord progressions he would not normally have chosen, producing what he considered some of his most conventionally black metal material. Even with that adjustment, his side remained concise and direct, while Ebony Pendant’s writing retained a more dramatic and expansive character.
That difference creates the split’s internal movement. Kūka’ilimoku operates through compression. Its material feels carved down to attack, with punk economy preventing riffs from becoming long atmospheric journeys. Ebony Pendant opens the other side into a colder and more spacious environment. The contrast is not between raw and polished music. Both recordings are rough. The distinction lies in how each project uses roughness.
For Kūka’ilimoku, abrasion communicates immediacy, territorial anger and refusal.
For Ebony Pendant, it creates distance, obscured beauty and psychological enclosure.
Ebony Pendant had released its first demo, Sempiternal Passage Through Realms of Suffering and Hatred, in July 2019, followed by the full-length Incantation of Eschatological Mysticism in February 2020. The split therefore appeared only weeks after S.C.’s first album and continued a rapid period of development.
The project’s early identity was already firmly established: solitary black metal, heavily layered guitars, bleak melody, repetition and lyrics concerned with death, occultism, nature, dream states and the destructive tendencies of human consciousness. The sound was raw but not deliberately unreadable. Melodic lines remained present beneath the distortion, allowing atmosphere to grow from the struggle between clarity and concealment.
On the split, Ebony Pendant’s side feels more compact than the preceding album without abandoning its dramatic shape. S.C. still writes in arcs rather than bursts. Riffs accumulate and return, giving the music the sensation of moving through a structure whose full outline remains hidden. The rough recording does not reduce the scale. It makes the scale feel distant, as though towers, storms and forests are being seen through snow or smoke.
This creates an important contrast with Kūka’ilimoku’s relationship to landscape. Ebony Pendant’s natural world is symbolic and interior. Forests, stars, storms and black fortresses become forms through which isolation, hatred and mystical dread can be understood. The landscape mirrors consciousness.
Kūka’ilimoku’s land is political before it is symbolic. Hawai‘i is not an abstract wilderness into which the individual retreats. It is a specific place shaped by ancestry, occupation, extraction and contested belonging.
One side turns history into direct fury.
The other turns inward suffering into vast imagined architecture.
The pairing works because neither project treats black metal as a fixed European inheritance. Both are American, but neither is interested in celebrating a broad national identity. Instead, they operate from locations whose distance from one another becomes part of the split’s scale.
Honolulu and Seattle are separated by the Pacific, climate and cultural history, yet underground distribution allows two solitary musicians to share a release almost immediately. This is one of the defining conditions of twenty-first-century black metal. A project can remain physically isolated while entering international networks of labels, collectors and collaborators within days.
The split format is especially suited to that environment. Historically, splits helped bands divide manufacturing costs, exchange audiences and document friendships between scenes. Digital release removed much of the financial necessity, but the format retained its social meaning. A split says that two artists recognize something in one another and are willing to place their identities in direct comparison.
Here, that recognition does not depend upon identical politics or mythology. Kūka’ilimoku’s anti-colonial Hawaiian focus and Ebony Pendant’s nihilistic mysticism are not presented as one philosophy. Their connection lies in method, intensity and independence.
Both projects reject the ordinary visibility expected from modern performers. Neither is built around a public band personality, professional photographs or constant explanation. The individual creator remains partially concealed behind the project’s language, images and sound. Yet the solitude does not produce vagueness. Each side is unmistakably attached to the person and place that made it.
The release also appeared during a moment when raw black metal was experiencing renewed underground attention. Bandcamp, limited tapes and boutique vinyl labels had made it possible for small projects to build international followings quickly. The style’s deliberately degraded surfaces offered a counterweight to the increasingly clean, edited and standardized production of contemporary metal.
That revival carried obvious risks. Rough sound could become branding, and obscurity could be manufactured as easily as polish. Kūka’ilimoku and Ebony Pendant avoid becoming empty exercises because each project has a subject larger than fidelity. The production serves the worldview rather than replacing it.
Kūka’ilimoku’s side would lose force if its anger were smoothed into professional distance. Ebony Pendant’s side would lose its strange depth if every guitar layer were separated and illuminated. Their recordings need friction because friction is part of what they are describing.
The inclusion of a Beastcraft interpretation on the Kūka’ilimoku side also places the release within a recognizably underground black metal lineage. Beastcraft’s primitive Norwegian satanic black metal represents one branch of the form’s deliberately regressive tradition. Within this split, that influence is absorbed into a project whose cultural and political center remains Hawaiian. The gesture acknowledges ancestry within the genre without surrendering the project’s separate identity.
The split’s later vinyl history shows that the collaboration continued to attract attention beyond its first digital appearance. Goatowarex issued the initial pressing in 2021, and Kūka’ilimoku offered a second black-vinyl pressing in 2023 with a double-sided insert. The movement from an independently released digital recording to repeated vinyl editions mirrors the underground process through which a quick collaboration becomes an enduring physical object.
The release remains most compelling as a record of two projects near their beginning. Neither musician had accumulated a large catalog or a settled public history. Their first demos had appeared less than a year earlier. The recordings were completed quickly, before either project had reason to imitate its own reputation.
That early energy survives in the lack of unnecessary framing. There is no elaborate concept claiming to unite Honolulu and Seattle. No invented story is needed. Two musicians recognize mutual force, adjust slightly toward one another and divide a record.
The first side strikes from inhabited land.
The second opens into an imagined storm.
Between them, the split demonstrates how raw black metal can carry radically different relationships to place. One voice insists that land cannot be separated from people and history. The other transforms landscape into the architecture of a solitary mind.
The record does not resolve that difference.
It preserves it, presses it onto opposite sides and makes the listener turn the object over.
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