This 2015 split gives Wolfkrieg and Via Dolorosa barely ten minutes to construct a complete ideological and musical environment. There is no introductory ambience, extended ritual, or long descent into atmosphere. Each project receives one side of a five-track-sized object reduced to two substantial pieces: Wolfkrieg’s “Runes of New Order” and Via Dolorosa’s “Reikon (Anima).” The limited seven-inch format turns the record into a concentrated exchange between two approaches to militant black metal, one driven by guitar movement and harsh propulsion, the other more ceremonial, programmed, and deliberately monumental.
Wolfkrieg opens with “Runes of New Order,” a title that immediately establishes the project’s attraction to symbols, historical rupture, and authoritarian rebirth. The song begins from a dense guitar figure whose melody is partially concealed by the raw recording. Rather than building from silence, it arrives already moving, with the percussion pushing behind a riff that feels circular rather than progressive. The music does not travel toward a destination. It repeatedly inscribes the same pattern, as though the “runes” of the title are being cut into the track through repetition.
The production is rough but not shapeless. Guitar occupies most of the available space, spreading across the center while the drums remain thinner and more distant. Vocals enter as another corroded layer, less a clearly articulated narrative than a hostile presence pressed into the instrumental surface. The words may be difficult to distinguish, but the emotional direction is unmistakable: declaration, discipline, and confrontation.
Wolfkrieg’s strongest element is the guitar. The central phrases carry enough melody to keep the track from collapsing into undifferentiated raw noise, yet they never become triumphant in the polished sense associated with melodic black metal. The lines sound weathered and unstable. Notes seem to scrape against the limits of the recording, creating a rough halo around the riffs.
The drums perform a functional rather than spectacular role. Their purpose is to keep the music advancing while the guitar establishes atmosphere. Blast-driven passages increase pressure, but the track does not depend entirely on speed. Its harsher effect comes from the persistence of the riff and the lack of emotional relief. Even when the rhythm shifts, the song remains locked within the same severe climate.
“Runes of New Order” is compact enough that its changes feel like alterations within one continuous attack. The song does not pause to display separate ideas. Instead, the arrangement thickens and loosens around the main pattern. This gives the track the character of a single statement rather than a miniature suite. Wolfkrieg uses the restricted side effectively: establish the symbol, repeat it until it acquires weight, then end before repetition turns into exhaustion.
Via Dolorosa’s “Reikon (Anima)” is nearly two minutes longer and immediately feels more staged. The title combines the Japanese word commonly translated as “spirit” or “soul” with the Latin anima, creating a doubled image of an inner essence. The duplication suggests that the track is interested less in individual psychology than in constructing an idealized spiritual identity through ritual, history, and force.
The programming is more visible on this side. Where Wolfkrieg’s track sounds like a band fighting through a raw recording, Via Dolorosa creates a controlled martial frame. Percussion arrives with mechanical regularity, allowing the guitars and vocals to behave theatrically above it. The result is colder and more deliberate, with less of the unstable live friction heard on the first side.
Longinus’s vocals possess a declamatory quality. He does not simply scream from inside the instrumental mass. His voice seems positioned before it, delivering the track as proclamation. Nebel’s guitars and programming establish the surrounding architecture, while v.o.n. Brahma FSS supplies bass. The division of roles produces a piece that feels composed around ceremony rather than spontaneous collision.
“Reikon (Anima)” moves between abrasive black-metal sections and broader passages that imply grandeur. Keyboard-like textures and programmed rhythm give the song a symphonic outline without the full orchestral excess of conventional symphonic black metal. The arrangement is sparse enough that each element retains a hard edge. The electronics do not soften the guitar. They make the environment feel more artificial and controlled.
The track’s pace allows its atmosphere to become heavier than Wolfkrieg’s quicker attack. Repeated phrases accumulate with the stiffness of a procession. The music suggests banners, uniforms, stone, and choreographed movement, but those impressions are generated by rhythm and arrangement rather than any actual field recording or elaborate sound design. The song creates spectacle from limited materials.
That spectacle is also where the record’s ideological character must be confronted. Both projects belong to areas of black metal where authoritarian, ethnonationalist, and fascist imagery can operate as more than theatrical provocation. The titles, label affiliations, visual presentation, and surrounding scene are not neutral decorations. They shape how the music communicates and what kind of power it attempts to make attractive.
Musically, the split repeatedly converts submission into grandeur. Rigid rhythm becomes discipline. Repetition becomes certainty. Harshness becomes purity. The listener is invited to experience authoritarian order as an aesthetic sensation before encountering it as an argument. This is one reason such music requires more than a purely technical description. A riff does not become fascist by itself, but riffs, symbols, lyrics, imagery, and networks can work together to give destructive politics an emotional body.
That does not mean the recording is without musical distinction. Wolfkrieg’s side is raw, compact, and driven by memorable guitar movement. Via Dolorosa’s contribution uses programming and vocal staging to create a colder ceremonial scale. The split works because the two tracks are not interchangeable. Wolfkrieg supplies agitation and abrasion; Via Dolorosa supplies controlled procession.
The seven-inch format sharpens the contrast. After four minutes, Wolfkrieg’s turbulent side ends and the record must be physically turned. Via Dolorosa then begins from a more deliberate position, as though the disorder of the first side has been reorganized into ritual. The sequence creates an accidental narrative: force appears first as eruption, then returns as system.
The foldout cover and limited pressing of 300 copies place the release firmly within the small-label economy of underground black metal. Four labels participated in producing the record, dividing expense and distribution across an international network. Such cooperation allows highly specific material to circulate without broad commercial demand. The object’s scarcity is not incidental. Limited production strengthens the sense of membership surrounding it, turning ownership into evidence of access to a closed cultural channel.
The problem is that scarcity can also protect ideology from ordinary examination. Material circulates among people already familiar with its codes, while outsiders encounter fragments without context. The music may then be defended as private symbolism or aesthetic extremity even when the surrounding references are explicit. Reikon is most honestly heard by holding both levels together: the actual construction of the songs and the political atmosphere those songs choose to inhabit.
As a recording, the split is efficient. Neither project wastes its side. “Runes of New Order” compresses melodic raw black metal into four minutes of persistent abrasion. “Reikon (Anima)” uses nearly six minutes to build a colder, more theatrical structure from programmed percussion, harsh vocals, and symphonic suggestion. Together they create a severe little object whose sound is more carefully differentiated than its shared ideological environment might initially suggest.
The record’s title order may vary between listings, but its internal opposition remains clear. Wolfkrieg carves the rune. Via Dolorosa constructs the ceremony around it. The first side sounds like an order struggling to be born through noise. The second sounds like that order imagining itself already eternal.
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