Crown & Throne Ltd. – CT050 207.82MB FLAC
A pilgrimage normally moves toward a place whose name gives the journey meaning: a shrine, grave, mountain, relic, or city already made sacred by belief. Journeying Through Nameless Wilderness removes that assurance. Its travellers enter territory without an agreed name and therefore without a map of inherited significance. Nothing promises that the route leads anywhere, that the landscape recognizes human devotion, or that the pilgrims will return with knowledge capable of being translated for others. Celestial Sword and Upir make black metal from this uncertainty. The journey is sacred not because the destination has been certified, but because continuing through the unknown requires its own form of faith.
The subtitle, A Pilgrimage Through Abyssal Frost, deepens the contradiction. Frost ordinarily forms across surfaces, coating branches, stones, windows, and exposed ground. An abyss suggests immeasurable depth. Joining them creates a cold that is both skin and chasm, something encountered on the outer edge of the world but extending downward without visible limit. The music answers with guitars that establish rough forward motion while synthesizer tones open distances beneath and around them. What appears to be a path across snow gradually feels like travel above a buried depth whose bottom cannot be imagined.
This second collaboration does not repeat the immobilization of Frozen by Midwinter Snows. That earlier piece imagined winter acting upon bodies until movement was nearly absorbed into the landscape. Here movement has become the central obligation. The travellers may be cold, obscured, and uncertain, but they continue. C.S.’s drumming supplies the physical fact of that continuation, each strike preserving a pulse beneath the atmospheric accumulation. G.G.’s guitar carries the route forward through abrasive repetition, while Narkisa’s synthesizer makes the surrounding territory seem much larger than the people crossing it.
The voices of Narkisa and B.L. complicate the idea of companionship. They do not sound like two hikers discussing direction or reassuring one another beside a fire. Their cries emerge from different regions of the storm, sometimes appearing to answer, summon, warn, or remember one another. The collaboration creates fellowship without comfort. To know another presence is travelling through the same wilderness does not make the wilderness less severe, but it changes solitude into shared endurance. Each voice becomes evidence that someone else has reached another point within the same impossible landscape.
The word “nameless” also protects the wilderness from possession. Naming can be an act of affection and recognition, but it can also be the first stage of ownership: identify the mountain, draw its border, enter it into a ledger, and make it administratively available. This landscape remains beyond that machinery. It cannot be turned into property, destination branding, or a heroic achievement recorded beneath the conqueror’s name. The pilgrims do not plant a flag. They pass through a place whose identity remains independent of their passage.
That humility distinguishes the piece from metal built around fantasies of mastery over nature. Celestial Sword and Upir do not present winter as a hostile kingdom waiting to be defeated by exceptional strength. The music continually places the human participants inside forces that exceed them. Distortion becomes wind and limited visibility; synthesizer becomes horizon, snowfall, and the deceptive light reflected from frozen surfaces; drums become bodily labor measured against distances that do not care whether the body succeeds. Grandeur belongs to the wilderness rather than the traveller.
The original cassette transforms this idea into an especially elegant physical ritual by placing the same composition on both sides. When Side A ends, flipping the tape does not reveal a sequel, alternate perspective, or safe return journey. The wilderness begins again. The listener discovers that turning the object over has not escaped the territory but only entered it from another edge. A pilgrimage traditionally changes the person who completes it, and therefore the repeated piece cannot be heard identically. The recorded sound returns unchanged, but whoever hears it carries the memory of the first passage.
This duplication also gives the cassette the structure of an impossible map. Side A may be the outward journey and Side B the return, yet both routes sound the same because the travellers can no longer determine which direction leads home. The forest, snow, and darkness have erased the distinction between advance and retreat. Alternatively, the two sides may represent separate pilgrims moving through the same landscape at different times, leaving no trace visible to one another. The tape keeps these possibilities open by refusing to designate one performance as primary and the other as repetition.
The cover offers a landscape whose apparent calm conceals this disorientation. Dark conifers gather beyond still water beneath a sky almost erased by whiteness. An ornamental black border frames the central scene like a devotional illustration, suggesting that the wilderness has already become an icon. Yet the image contains no shrine, road, figure, or supernatural apparition. The frame declares significance while the landscape refuses to explain what should be worshipped. The sacred object may be nothing more than the continued existence of a place beyond human interpretation.
Later, this journey was joined with Frozen by Midwinter Snows as Cold Invocation of Scarlet Night, allowing the collaborations to form a larger movement from entrapment toward pilgrimage. Heard alone, however, Journeying Through Nameless Wilderness remains more ambiguous. It offers no proof that the travellers were previously frozen, no explanation for why they began moving, and no indication that they reached shelter. The bloodpact dedicated to night and northern cold sounds less like a promise of victory than an agreement to remain faithful to the journey even when its purpose cannot be demonstrated.
The piece ultimately treats pilgrimage as devotion without possession. Celestial Sword and Upir enter the wilderness, give it twenty-two minutes of voice and motion, then leave its true name untouched. Flip the cassette and the passage opens again, as though no traveller had ever completed it. The snow preserves no monument, the water reflects no destination, and the forest keeps whatever knowledge may exist beyond its edge. What survives is the act of going onward together when the map, the shrine, and the assurance of return have all disappeared.
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