The unfolded image presents Skotos Aenaon as a passage between two forms of annihilation. On the left, a black human silhouette hangs in a forest, the body elongated by a chain or rope until it appears partly absorbed into the tree trunks surrounding it. On the right, a violent sea breaks against dark stone ruins beneath a spectral white sky. The water seems to be carrying a skull-shaped apparition within its crest, while the remains of columns or an ancient platform resist the assault below. One panel gives death an individual body; the other gives it an entire landscape. Between them lies the fold, a narrow black seam through which the solitary execution becomes cosmic weather.
The title means “eternal darkness,” and this 2011 edition gives that darkness additional historical depth. Skotos Aenaon was originally released at the end of 2000, but the expanded program reaches backward into recordings made between 1997 and 1999. The main album already represented Naer Mataron’s movement beyond the raw mythological sketches of Up from the Ashes; the three bonus tracks now expose earlier versions and unused material beneath that development. Instead of finishing with the original “Winterwar Memorial,” the disc continues into another small burial chamber containing “Dog’s,” a preliminary “Winter War Memorial” and an earlier “Iketis.” The album ends, then walks backward into its own formation.
“...and Bloodshed Must Be Done” opens with an instrumental escalation whose keyboards and martial rhythm resemble troops emerging through fog. It is less an introduction than a statement of necessity. Bloodshed is not imagined as an accident or regrettable consequence but as an act that “must” occur, already justified before the first full song begins. “Diastric Fields of War” then erupts with fast tremolo guitar, harsh vocals and drums that drive the music toward the colder Scandinavian edge Naer Mataron increasingly embraced. Yet something recognizably Greek remains beneath the speed. The riffs do not simply slice forward; they descend, circle and occasionally widen into ceremonial spaces where keyboards or slower rhythms reveal an older, heavier atmosphere.
“Iketis” is one of the album’s strongest demonstrations of this balance. The Greek word refers to a supplicant, someone who approaches another person or sacred power from a position of vulnerability and requests protection. Naer Mataron turns that vulnerable figure into a forceful piece of black metal, with rolling rhythms and repeated guitar lines producing a strange tension between submission and threat. Morpheas’ additional screams make the voice seem divided between prayer and refusal. The title suggests kneeling, but the song’s momentum keeps attempting to stand.
The title track condenses the record’s atmosphere into less than five minutes. Its darkness is not merely the absence of daylight. It is a permanent condition, something older than the people moving through it and large enough to absorb their struggles without changing. The guitars are clearer and more substantial than on the debut, but the production retains enough roughness to keep their melodic shapes from becoming polished decoration. Aithir’s rasp cuts across the sound rather than sitting majestically above it. The voice appears to be another object caught inside the weather shown on the cover.
“Astro-Thetis-Cosmos” expands the scale dramatically. Its title joins stars, the sea goddess Thetis and the ordered universe implied by the Greek word kosmos. Across more than eight minutes, the music moves between blasting velocity, broad melodic lines and passages whose keyboards suggest immense distance. The composition is not a literal retelling of one myth. It creates a cosmology in which sea, sky and divine ancestry remain connected. The crashing water on the cover begins to look less like ordinary weather and more like a boundary between worlds, with Thetis’ element battering the surviving architecture of human history.
“Hyperion” continues this upward movement through the name of the Titan associated with heavenly light. The irony is important: an album devoted to eternal darkness invokes a figure of illumination without allowing the music to become radiant. Light exists, but it is remote, hostile or already failing. Naer Mataron’s melodic lines rise through the dense rhythm section, briefly outlining a larger sky before the drums pull them back into the attack. Brightness becomes another way of measuring how deep the darkness extends.
The paired wolf compositions shift the album from celestial scale toward animal identity. “Wolf of Ions” and “In Honor of the Wolf” are among the longest pieces, giving their riffs time to become territorial. The wolf is not merely an image of wilderness pinned to the lyrics. Repetition makes the music behave like an animal repeatedly crossing the same ground, marking and defending its range. “In Honor of the Wolf” is particularly effective when the continuous speed yields to colder, marching passages. The animal becomes both solitary predator and emblem of collective discipline, an ambiguity that would become increasingly important in Naer Mataron’s later work.
“Winterwar Memorial” closes the original album with remembrance rather than victory. Winter, warfare and memorialization are joined into a landscape where violence has already ended but continues to organize the present. The title does not specify who is being mourned or which conflict should be remembered, leaving the listener before an ideological monument without a plaque. Musically, the song combines the record’s speed with longer melodic motion, allowing grief to remain audible beneath the hardened surface. It is less a triumphant conclusion than a cold field after the armies have departed.
The 2011 edition then unsettles that conclusion. “Dog’s,” recorded in 1998 but previously unreleased, is brief and rougher than the surrounding album. Its position after the memorial feels almost like discovering a damaged tape beneath a monument. The title is printed with its odd possessive apostrophe intact, another minor irregularity preserved rather than standardized away. The song does not need to compete with the main program’s more developed compositions. Its value lies in exposing a side corridor in the band’s early archive.
The preliminary “Winter War Memorial,” recorded in autumn 1997, changes the listener’s relationship to the finished album track. It is not presented as the improved or inferior choice. It is the same underlying idea at another stage of physical existence, before years of rehearsal, arrangement and studio decisions gave it the form heard earlier on the disc. Hearing it afterward creates reverse chronology. The memorial is first encountered as completed architecture, then as scaffolding. The listener is allowed to walk backward through the building while the finished version remains in memory.
The early “Iketis” performs a related function. Its more primitive recording exposes the composition’s bones, revealing how a song could survive long enough to be reworked into the stronger production of Skotos Aenaon. Together, these bonus tracks turn the reissue into a document of persistence. Naer Mataron did not simply write a batch of songs in one concentrated period and preserve them unchanged. Ideas circulated through rehearsal, preliminary recording, revision and eventual release, collecting different atmospheres as the band’s abilities and intentions hardened.
That historical layering is why this edition stands comfortably on its own. Its importance does not depend upon proving that it sounds better than another pressing. No explicit remastering credit is given, and the principal album remains the recording produced at Studio 5 and mixed in 1999. What changes most clearly is the frame. Azermedoth Records extends the running time beyond seventy minutes, places the earlier material after the completed record and surrounds it with the image of a hanging body facing a sea powerful enough to erase stone.
The sequence also reveals the developing identity of Naer Mataron before the band’s later militarism became completely explicit. Mythological names, Greek language, cosmic imagery, wolf symbolism and war already occupy the record, but they have not yet been compressed into the rigid manifesto language of Discipline Manifesto or the imperial formations of Praetorians. Skotos Aenaon is still spacious enough for supplication, celestial distance and mystery. Its aggression has direction, but the world around that aggression remains larger than any single doctrine.
The cover’s two panels capture this transitional state. The hanging figure is unmistakably human, vulnerable and final. The sea is impersonal, enormous and endlessly active. Naer Mataron’s music exists between those scales. Aithir’s voice and the individual musicians remain physical bodies performing in a studio, but the repeated riffs attempt to connect those bodies to forces imagined as eternal: darkness, war, winter, animal instinct, the stars and the sea. The band’s technical limitations are not erased. They become evidence of finite people trying to produce contact with something immeasurably larger.
The post preserves the Mexican Azermedoth edition as a large lossless digital object, keeping the bonus material attached to the album and reproducing the two-panel design in one horizontal image. The source disc was limited to one thousand copies, but the archive removes that numerical border and allows another circle of listeners to enter. Anyone who owns AZH-CD-78 may be able to add information about its twelve-page booklet, matrix, mastering or whether the scans inside the archive preserve the entire package. What is already visible is a record refusing to remain fixed at one date. Skotos Aenaon rises from 1997, solidifies in 2000, reappears in 2011 and now arrives again as a 640.66 MB file beneath an image of death suspended between forest and sea.
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