Zyklon-B Productions – ZBP-023 146.68MB FLAC
Mikalp Khis Bia Ozongon does not behave like a split whose artists politely occupy separate territories. Before Arkha Sva’s own side begins, its vocalist Ur Èmdr Œrvn has already entered Winter Funeral’s “Fallen from Grace,” carrying another personality into Hylgaryss’s solitary construction. The border has been crossed before the record can establish it. This makes the release less a meeting of French and Japanese black metal than a ritual of contamination, with one voice passing between two musical bodies and revealing how differently each responds to possession.
“Fallen from Grace” is an ideal title for Winter Funeral because falling implies movement away from an established spiritual order without guaranteeing liberation. Grace is not simply innocence. It is a condition of belonging, protection, and relation to something higher. To fall from it may mean revolt, exile, abandonment, or the terrible discovery that no protective order existed in the first place. Hylgaryss constructs the track with the mournful persistence heard throughout Winter Funeral: raw guitar movement, repetitive melodic shapes, and an atmosphere that feels less triumphant than spiritually exhausted. This is black metal after the act of rebellion, when the grand gesture has ended and the solitary figure must inhabit the country beyond forgiveness.
Ur Èmdr Œrvn’s voice changes that country. Arkha Sva’s vocal identity is famously volatile, moving beyond the standard black-metal rasp into shrieks, ceremonial declarations, strangled theatrical tones, and flashes of almost operatic exaggeration. Placed within Winter Funeral’s comparatively inward music, that voice feels like an external intelligence breaking into a private lament. It does not merely intensify the track. It complicates who is speaking. “Fallen from Grace” becomes less the confession of one isolated musician than a scene involving the fallen person, the accusing spirit, the tempter, and the priest of a new ceremony, all potentially using the same mouth.
This collaboration also exposes a hidden similarity between the two projects. Winter Funeral and Arkha Sva sound very different, but both treat black metal as more than guitar music. Each uses it to build an alternative liturgy. Winter Funeral’s method is solitary and funereal, turning repetition into the architecture of withdrawal. Arkha Sva is more feverish and theatrical, as though a secret rite has escaped containment and begun changing shape in front of its participants. One project enters darkness through isolation; the other multiplies voices inside it.
“Bringer of Hate Plague” arrives with the directness of a title carved into a warning tablet. Hatred is not presented as an individual emotion but as contagion, something carried between bodies until nobody can identify the first infection. Arkha Sva’s music suits that idea because its parts appear to incite one another. The guitars are melodic without becoming reassuring, rushing forward in jagged formations while the vocals continuously disturb the expected emotional register. A scream can suddenly become a high ceremonial cry; an apparently severe passage may reveal a strange flamboyance beneath its surface. The performance refuses the belief that evil must sound humorless to be convincing.
That theatrical instability is one of Arkha Sva’s great strengths. Black metal often depends upon a narrow mask of authority: the performer must sound unwavering, inhuman, and certain of the doctrine being proclaimed. Arkha Sva allows the mask to crack, multiply, and occasionally appear delirious. This does not weaken the atmosphere. It makes the ritual more dangerous because the officiant may no longer control what has been summoned. “Bringer of Hate Plague” feels animated by a force that keeps changing the body through which it speaks.
“Skhisma” completes the release with rupture encoded into its title. A schism is not an attack arriving from outside a religious body. It is a division produced within something that once claimed unity. Members share a language, ancestry, scripture, or sacred history, then discover that the disagreement separating them has become more powerful than everything they retain in common. This makes schism an especially suitable subject for black metal, a genre repeatedly dividing itself into stricter definitions of authenticity while claiming allegiance to an original revolt against authority.
Arkha Sva turns this fracture into motion. Melodic lines seem to pull in related but incompatible directions, and the voice moves among several modes of extremity rather than maintaining one dependable identity. The music does not depict a clean break followed by independence. It remains inside the painful instant when one structure is becoming two. Connections persist after unity has failed. The severed parts continue defining themselves through opposition to what they once belonged to.
Taken together, the three titles create a compact spiritual narrative. First comes the fall from grace, an individual separation from sacred order. Hatred then spreads from that wound as a plague, making private estrangement contagious. Finally schism turns the infection into structure, dividing an entire body into opposing claims. The record moves from exile to transmission to institutional fracture in less than nineteen minutes. Its brevity gives the sequence the force of a ritual text whose missing explanations are assumed to be known by initiates.
The artwork intensifies this impression. An aged, robed figure emerges from dense grey shadow, caught somewhere between hermit, sorcerer, corpse, and religious authority. The highly elaborate logos and archaic typography make the packaging resemble a damaged manuscript written in a language whose ceremonial purpose survives even when its meaning does not. The title itself contributes to that atmosphere. Mikalp Khis Bia Ozongon resists immediate translation and functions as a private formula, something that may be a name, command, invocation, or verbal key. Its opacity prevents the listener from reducing the object to a neatly explained concept.
The several hand-numbered CD, digibook, and colored-vinyl editions extend that sense of private transmission. The record looks less like a mass-market release than an occult text reproduced in several physical forms, each copy granting access to the same short disturbance. Yet the deepest collaboration is not visible in the formats or logos. It happens when Arkha Sva’s vocalist enters Winter Funeral’s music and makes the apparent split inseparable from within.
Mikalp Khis Bia Ozongon is therefore not simply a transitional item between Winter Funeral’s early work and Some Thousand Lies, nor merely another artifact from Arkha Sva’s prolific period of splits. It is a compact record about boundaries being violated: between artists, countries, voices, doctrines, and supposedly separate sides. Winter Funeral supplies the fall; Arkha Sva brings the plague and names the resulting fracture. By the time the final note withdraws, the division printed onto the record has already proved impossible to maintain.
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