The cover places Naer Mataron’s first two albums inside a single vision of punishment. Gustave Doré’s engraving shows the wrathful souls of Dante’s Inferno trapped in the marsh of Styx, striking, biting and dragging at one another while a cloaked figure rises among the mass. The original image is already crowded, but the square crop removes much of its narrative distance. Bodies fill nearly every available surface, the water becomes indistinguishable from mud and flesh, and the central figure seems less like an observer than another soul being pulled into the struggle. “Awaken in Oblivion” is printed below in ornate white lettering, followed by the quieter explanation “Up from the Ashes & Skotos Aenaon.” The title turns this 2CD reissue into more than convenient storage. To awaken in oblivion is to become conscious inside a place that has already forgotten you.
Released in 2004, the set gathers Naer Mataron’s first two full-length albums without compressing them onto one disc or interrupting their original sequences. Up from the Ashes occupies the first CD, followed by the Bathory cover “Equimanthorn,” while Skotos Aenaon receives the entire second disc. Together they preserve almost ninety-five minutes of the band’s early development, from the raw mythological black metal of 1998 to the darker, broader structures completed two years later. The packaging does not force the listener to choose which stage represents the “real” band. Both are allowed to remain intact, like two chambers connected beneath Doré’s black water.
Up from the Ashes begins with Greek antiquity approached as living occult force rather than respectable cultural inheritance. “The Chosen Son” opens the gate before “Faethon” turns the myth of the sun-chariot into six minutes of ascent, danger and catastrophic momentum. The guitars carry strong melodic lines, but the recording does not polish them into heroic metal grandeur. They move through a dry, narrow production where bass, drums and keyboards seem to occupy the ruins of a larger architecture. The music’s limitations create distance. These are not gods standing beneath clean studio light; they are fragments of divine memory returning through damaged electrical equipment.
“Zephyrous” gives the west wind a fast, serpentine motion, while “Ta en Eleusini Mysteria” withdraws into acoustic instruments, percussion and ceremonial atmosphere. The latter is especially important because the historical Eleusinian Mysteries were defined partly by what initiates were forbidden to reveal. Naer Mataron wisely does not attempt a costume reconstruction of the rites. The track creates a threshold, then leaves the central knowledge inaccessible. “Zeus (Wrath of the Gods)” restores direct aggression, “The Silent Kingdom of Hades” expands into a more spacious underworld journey, and “The Great God Pan” closes the original album with a slower, earthier sense of supernatural presence. Across seven pieces, Greek mythology becomes weather, rhythm and geography rather than a list of subjects.
The Bathory cover “Equimanthorn” works as a short appendix to this first disc. Bathory’s influence on European black metal was enormous, but the song also reveals how Naer Mataron understood inheritance. They do not reproduce the original as a museum object. Its primitive charge fits naturally beside their own rough production and historical imagination. Bathory supplied one route through which pre-Christian myth, martial rhythm and underground extremity could be joined. By placing “Equimanthorn” after Pan, the reissue makes that lineage audible without allowing the cover to alter the shape of the original album.
Skotos Aenaon, meaning “eternal darkness,” does not simply repeat the debut with improved execution. The second disc feels larger, heavier and more internally connected. “...and Bloodshed Must Be Done” functions as a dark instrumental mobilization before “Diastric Fields of War” opens the main body through broad riffs, harsh narration and more confident rhythmic movement. The guitars still carry melody, but melody is now embedded inside a thicker atmosphere. Up from the Ashes frequently feels like a set of mythological sites visited one after another; Skotos Aenaon feels like one extended territory whose landmarks are war, supplication, cosmic ancestry and winter.
“Iketis,” the supplicant, introduces one of the album’s most human positions. In ancient Greek culture, supplication placed a vulnerable person under sacred protection, but Naer Mataron’s music makes the gesture sound unstable and dangerous. Morpheas adds screams alongside Aithir’s lead voice, creating the impression that prayer and threat are emerging from the same body. The title track then condenses the album’s worldview into less than five minutes, joining cutting guitar movement with an atmosphere of darkness imagined not as temporary night but as an enduring cosmic condition.
“Astro-Thetis-Kosmos” is the second disc’s great expansion. At more than eight minutes, it joins stellar space, the sea goddess Thetis and the ordered universe implied by kosmos. The composition moves beyond the individualized gods of the debut toward a larger system in which mythology, nature and astronomy overlap. Keyboards and slower passages create distance around the guitars, while repeated melodic figures begin to feel orbital. The music is still made from ordinary metal instrumentation, but its scale has changed. Naer Mataron is no longer merely raising figures from the ashes; the band is trying to place those figures inside an entire cosmology.
“Hyperion” continues upward through the Titan associated with heavenly light, but the album refuses to become radiant. Any brightness is filtered through the eternal darkness named by the title. “Wolf of Ions” and “In Honour of the Wolf” then shift from gods and stars toward animal force. The paired wolf pieces are long enough for repetition to become ceremonial, treating the animal not as decorative wilderness imagery but as a figure of endurance, predation and collective identity. The second disc closes with “Winter War Memorial,” where cold landscape and remembrance replace the debut’s more vivid pantheon. The journey from Phaethon to the winter memorial is also a journey from mythological characters toward abstractions large enough to absorb history.
The same core musicians connect both discs, but the difference in atmosphere is unmistakable. Morpheas’ guitar writing becomes more patient and structurally ambitious, Kaiadas’ bass provides weight beneath increasingly extended songs, Aithir’s vocals gain authority, and Lethe’s drumming supports the transition from relatively concise mythological compositions to broader fields of repetition. Both albums were recorded at Studio 5 in Athens, with the debut mixed in autumn 1997 and its successor in spring 1999. Heard consecutively, the studio becomes another recurring location inside the music. The equipment and room remain part of the same physical world while the band’s imaginative scale increases around them.
Awaken in Oblivion therefore works particularly well as a retrospective portrait. The first disc is rawer, stranger and more visibly assembled from individual fascinations: Zeus, Pan, Hades, Eleusis, wind and solar catastrophe. The second disc does not discard those interests; it binds them into a more continuous darkness. The change can be heard in the longer structures, more assured transitions and greater willingness to let riffs establish an environment rather than rush toward the next event. Neither disc cancels the other. The debut contains the first act of conjuring, while Skotos Aenaon reveals what happened after the summoned world became large enough to inhabit.
The Doré cover gives both albums an afterlife they did not originally share. Up from the Ashes first appeared beneath glowing classical columns, while Skotos Aenaon had its own moonlit black-metal imagery. This edition submerges both in the Styx, where anger keeps the dead conscious but prevents them from moving onward. That is a severe image for a reissue, yet it captures something true about archival listening. Old recordings are awakened inside another time. Their makers have changed, their scene has changed, and the objects that first carried the music may have disappeared into collections or storage. The recording returns, but it cannot return to the world that originally heard it.
The post extends that process once more. Two compact discs released in a limited physical edition now travel as a 715.97 MB FLAC archive beside one square scan. The file preserves the division between the two albums rather than blending them into an anonymous folder of early tracks. That distinction matters because Awaken in Oblivion is not merely a “best of” or assortment of leftovers. It is a double doorway into the period when Naer Mataron was discovering how Greek mythology, Scandinavian velocity, Hellenic ritual weight and underground production could become one sustained language. The bodies on Doré’s cover remain trapped in oblivion, but the music has awakened again.
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