Xenoglossie feels like a book of short supernatural scenes whose pages have been scattered across several languages, centuries, and states of consciousness. Grabesmond’s second and final album is rooted in the Austrian black metal underground, yet very little of it behaves like a conventional metal recording. Guitars appear only as one possible color among synthesizers, bells, sampled voices, martial rhythms, choral textures, and small neoclassical figures. Most of its fifteen tracks are instrumental, and many last less than two minutes, giving the album the structure of an occult cabinet rather than a continuous symphonic journey. Open one drawer and there is a blood-dark procession; open another and a music box is turning inside an abandoned nursery; the next contains a ruined city, a black angel, a wolf, a dead god, or dancers moving around a grave.
The title refers to the supposed ability to speak or write in a language one has never consciously learned. That idea provides a useful way into the album. Xenoglossie does not settle into one stable musical vocabulary. It moves among English, German, Swedish, Latin, medieval imagery, Norse myth, Gothic horror, dark ambient, neoclassical composition, and the residual atmosphere of black metal without treating any single language as its permanent home. The album seems to speak through borrowed tongues, but those tongues emerge from one imagination. Lucia-M. Fåroutan-Kubik composed and performed everything, transforming the project from its earlier underground origins into a highly personal form of miniature musical theatre.
“Screams of the Past” opens with less a scream than the afterimage of one. Bells, echoes, and distant synthetic tones create the impression of sound surviving after its source has vanished. The past is not presented as a sequence of remembered events. It is an active acoustic presence, returning through architecture and repetition. The piece lasts under two minutes, yet it establishes the album’s entire method: suggest a location, allow a few details to become visible, then close the scene before the listener can determine exactly what happened there.
“Multiscum Lacrimis” introduces a more mournful and classically shaped melody. The Latinized title appears to invoke many tears, and the music carries grief without becoming grandly tragic. Its keyboard line is small, almost intimate, as though sorrow has been reduced to a private ritual repeated in an empty room. Grabesmond’s synthetic instrumentation is important here. The sounds do not convincingly imitate a real chamber orchestra, but that slight artificiality creates emotional distance. The music resembles an old ceremony reconstructed from fragments rather than performed intact by living musicians.
“Night’s Dominion” is one of the album’s longer vocal pieces and gives darkness something resembling political authority. Night does not merely fall across the landscape; it governs it. The rhythm grows more forceful, and the layered voices make the track feel populated by figures moving beneath a single nocturnal law. Yet even at its most dramatic, Grabesmond avoids the massed grandeur of symphonic metal. The arrangement remains strangely hollow, leaving enough space around its components for the listener to feel the darkness between them.
The brief “Isis-Noreja” adds another symbolic system without explaining how it connects to the others. This refusal to create a clean mythology is part of the album’s fascination. Egyptian, Germanic, Christian, folkloric, and invented images coexist like objects collected by a dream rather than organized by a historian. Xenoglossie is not a lesson in comparative religion. It is an atmosphere produced when unrelated sacred languages begin echoing inside one another.
“Min svart ängel,” or “My Black Angel,” gives the album one of its most recognizably Gothic forms. The black angel can be a fallen protector, an intimate embodiment of death, a corrupted guide, or the shadow side of the self. The music does not settle the image. Melody and darkness remain balanced, with enough beauty to make the figure attractive and enough unease to prevent trust. This ambiguity is central to Grabesmond’s work. Horror is rarely presented as pure ugliness. It arrives beautifully dressed, carrying a familiar face.
“D’helle phat wirt im entrant” is another tiny doorway, its archaic or deliberately distorted language adding to the album’s linguistic dislocation. Words throughout Xenoglossie often seem less important for their exact translation than for their age, texture, and foreignness. They behave as sonic relics. The listener recognizes that language is present but may not possess the key to unlock it, reproducing the condition suggested by the album’s title.
“Spectacle of Death” gives mortality a public stage. The piece is stately rather than savage, suggesting procession, display, and ritualized observation. Death becomes something arranged for witnesses, perhaps a funeral, execution, dance, or theatrical pageant. The music’s synthetic dignity recalls the old danse macabre tradition in which every rank of society is eventually drawn into the same procession. Grabesmond repeatedly treats death not as an isolated biological event but as a social and aesthetic structure built around the dead.
“Blodström,” or “Bloodstream,” is among the album’s darkest passages. Deep synthesizer tones and more abrasive textures create the sensation of movement through an interior channel. The title turns blood into landscape, allowing the listener to travel inside the body rather than merely observe it from outside. Its darkness is unusually physical for an album often concerned with ruins, myths, and spectral distance. Here the environment pulses, circulates, and carries life while remaining inseparable from injury and death.
“Fabula” briefly opens a lighter medieval space. Its melody resembles a tale told in a few illuminated panels rather than a full narrative. The Latin word can mean story, fable, or dramatic plot, and the track feels aware that the entire album may be a collection of fabricated histories. Grabesmond does not ask the listener to believe these scenes literally. Their truth lies in how quickly they produce an emotional world.
“Vom Wolfe” summons the wolf through another compressed instrumental. The animal is never fully pictured, but its cultural weight enters immediately: wilderness, appetite, danger, exile, pack loyalty, and the boundary between human settlement and whatever watches beyond it. The piece works because it does not overdescribe. The wolf remains partly outside the music, moving parallel to it in darkness.
“Obscene Obsession” is the album’s longest track and one of its most developed vocal compositions. The title joins fixation with violation, suggesting desire that has crossed beyond socially permitted form. Its length allows the arrangement to gather dramatic weight, and the vocals give the obsession a human center absent from many of the shorter instrumentals. Yet the song remains less confessional than theatrical. The speaker appears as another figure in Grabesmond’s gallery, consumed by an appetite whose object is never fully revealed.
“At the Edge of Our World” creates a threshold rather than a destination. Its placement late in the sequence suggests that the preceding tracks have gradually carried the listener toward a border where ordinary geography and language begin to fail. The piece is brief and suspended, offering no assurance about what exists beyond that edge. It may be death, dream, myth, or simply the point where known forms no longer organize experience.
“Totgeboren,” meaning stillborn or born dead, gives that threshold a brutal human image. Birth and death occur in the same word, eliminating the interval in which identity ordinarily develops. The instrumental treats this contradiction with restraint. It does not become melodramatic or graphically horrific. Instead, the music creates a cold vacancy, a place prepared for life that remains unoccupied.
“Balder’s Sturz” invokes the fall of Balder, the radiant Norse god whose death signals cosmic disorder and contributes to the coming of Ragnarök. At barely more than a minute, the piece does not attempt to narrate the myth. It presents the fall as a symbolic flash: beauty struck down, divine immunity failing, and an apparently stable world revealing the fatal weakness already hidden inside it. The use of Balder also connects Grabesmond to the mythological interests of the Austrian black metal circle, but the musical treatment remains more like dark chamber music than metal.
“Totentanz” closes the album with the dance of death. After so many isolated images, the finale gathers them into movement. The dead are no longer silent objects arranged in crypts and memories. They dance, and through dancing briefly regain social form. The melody is dark but not hopeless, carrying an almost bittersweet quality. Death becomes the one language every preceding fragment has been approaching, the common tongue beneath Latin, Swedish, German, English, mythology, and dream.
That conclusion clarifies the title. Xenoglossie may describe speech in languages never learned, but music itself is the album’s deeper foreign tongue. Synthesizers allow Lucia-Mariam Fåroutan-Kubik to speak as choirs, bells, orchestras, ghosts, wolves, gods, dancers, and ruined architecture without requiring those things to exist physically. The artificial sounds do not conceal their artificiality. They transform it into evidence that imagination can inhabit forms unavailable to the body producing them.
Compared with Mordenheim, this album is darker, more fragmented, and more willing to approach ambient unease. It retains the earlier record’s medieval and neoclassical beauty, but that beauty is repeatedly interrupted by harsher rooms. The short tracks make the experience resemble turning through an illustrated manuscript whose pictures have been damaged, reordered, and partially translated. There is continuity, but it comes from mood rather than narrative.
Xenoglossie also captures a particular late-1990s underground freedom. A project connected to black metal could release an album largely composed of keyboards, programmed textures, and miniature instrumental scenes without needing to resolve whether it belonged to dungeon synth, darkwave, neoclassical music, dark ambient, or something else. Those categories can help listeners locate it now, but the record itself feels less interested in genre than in permission. It uses whatever sound will open the next chamber.
Grabesmond ended after this album, leaving only a small body of work. That brevity strengthens Xenoglossie’s aura. There was no long career in which its strange decisions became ordinary habits, no sequence of later albums explaining what every symbol meant. The record remains a closed object filled with partial languages. Its ruins have not been restored, and its dead have not stopped dancing. Listeners who know more about the recording, the titles, the Austrian circle around the project, or the exact meanings hidden in its multilingual fragments may be able to illuminate further rooms, but some doors are probably better left half-open.
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