Nastrond - 2010 - Toteslaut

 

Frostscald Records – FS49  312.01MB FLAC

The 2010 cover seems to answer the 1995 artwork by removing almost everything that once made Toteslaut immediately theatrical. The original presented a purple cavern, enthroned skeleton, gigantic scythe, descending 666, ritual altar, candles, skulls and red script. Fifteen years later, the album returns as a black square containing a single wheel constructed from pale bones. Nåstrond’s name floats above in widely spaced gold letters, while Toteslaut is printed below with equal restraint. Death is no longer staged as a ruler occupying a crowded supernatural chamber. It has been reduced to geometry.

The central object resembles an ossuary mandala, flower, sun-wheel or organism assembled from ten radiating limbs. Small skull-like forms appear around its perimeter, while the bones meet in a dense knot at the center. Its tenfold structure creates an intriguing visual correspondence with the album’s ten tracks, although the surviving release information does not confirm that this was intentional. The wheel might represent the sequence itself: ten separate excursions into plague, burial, vampirism, necromancy, predation and ritual returning to one shared center. What looked like a cabinet of different occult fascinations in 1995 now appears as one system.

That change is the real reason to preserve both editions. The 2010 disc does not replace the original recording with cleaner performances or modern production. It changes the frame through which the same forty minutes are encountered. The copyright remains attached to Nåstrond in 1995, while the phonographic release belongs to the two reissue labels in 2010. The old music has been transferred into another visual philosophy. Its youthful excess remains audible, but the new sleeve asks the listener to perceive structure beneath it.

The removal of “666” is particularly noticeable. Nåstrond had originally displayed the number directly through the band logo, making the debut look like a provocation before anyone heard a note. By the time of this edition, Karl NE had developed a more complex relationship with the group’s early imagery and would later describe some of its conventional blasphemy as belonging to a younger stage. The redesigned cover does not become less concerned with death or occult transformation. It simply no longer needs the most familiar black-metal code to announce them. Bones are sufficient.

That restraint also changes “Xolotl,” the forty-six-second opening invocation. On the original cover, the psychopomp entered a chamber already crowded with symbols. Here the guide of the dead seems to activate the wheel itself. The brief electronic and ritual sounds become a turning mechanism, conducting the listener into the sequence before “En sång från en pestbesmittad grav” allows the grave to speak. The music remains raw, low and peculiarly warm, but the new visual austerity makes its underlying repetition easier to notice. Riffs rotate. Percussion returns with nearly mechanical regularity. Voices emerge, disappear and return in altered forms.

Toteslaut has always depended upon this friction between organic decay and rigid construction. Karl’s guitars sound humid, granular and almost fungal, while Arganas’ unusually exposed percussion can resemble bones being struck together. The drums were among the album’s most criticized qualities because they sit awkwardly near the surface, but the 2010 artwork almost vindicates them retroactively. The music is not trying to conceal its skeleton beneath flesh. Its joints are the point. Every abrupt transition and dry impact exposes how the object was assembled.

“Lord of the Woods” and “Akhkharu (The Grave Dweller)” demonstrate how memorable the record can be without adopting the melodic precision that defined much Swedish black metal of the period. Their melodies remain partly buried within chords, emerging gradually through repetition rather than announcing themselves as elegant lead figures. The music feels inhabited rather than performed. Something appears to be moving inside the guitar tone, while Karl’s theatrical voice resembles an intelligence using the vocalist’s body temporarily rather than a singer presenting a stable personality.

The new artwork is especially appropriate for “May the Rotten Bones Absorb Life Again.” The phrase can almost serve as an instruction for the reissue itself. Material created in 1995 is gathered, given a new body and returned to circulation fifteen years later. Nothing has been reanimated into pristine youth. The recording retains its rot, imbalance and strange room dimensions. What returns is recognizably old matter, but old matter capable of exerting force again. A reissue becomes a modest technological form of necromancy.

“Jai Ma Kali” remains the great interruption, replacing ordinary black-metal movement with voices, percussion and a plucked Eastern-sounding texture. Its cross-cultural occult collage deserves caution, since Kali cannot responsibly be reduced to a Hindu counterpart of Satan or folded neatly into European black-metal symbolism. Yet within the album, the piece opens death beyond the Christian opposition of salvation and damnation. Destruction becomes maternal, temporal and transformative. The 2010 wheel accommodates this more effectively than the original throne scene. It suggests several traditions arranged around a shared but unstable center rather than one demonic king ruling them all.

The title track closes the album with percussion, chant and German speech instead of a decisive metallic conclusion. The wheel therefore does not break at the end. It completes a rotation. Toteslaut, an invented or irregular compound suggesting the sound of death or dead-sound, becomes something cyclical rather than terminal. The dead speak, bones absorb life, the hearse moves, the ritual opens and the listener is returned to the black field of the cover.

Frostscald and Silenced Voices issued the repackage during a period when overlooked 1990s black-metal recordings were beginning to receive more systematic rediscovery. Toteslaut had never disappeared completely, but its unusual combination of Bathory-like directness, Hellenic ceremonial weight, industrial contamination and ritual ambience had prevented it from fitting comfortably into the standard Swedish narrative. The 2010 edition offered another entrance, one less dependent upon the visual vocabulary of the original moment.

The post preserves that second entrance specifically. Placed immediately after the 1995 edition, it allows the two covers to function almost as before-and-after photographs of an idea. The first shows the creators building a physical shrine around death. The second shows what remains after the candles, room, costumes and proclamations have vanished: bones arranged into a durable pattern. The audio may be essentially the same, but the act of listening is not. One edition invites us into a youthful necromantic chamber; the other asks us to examine the anatomy of the ritual itself.

The 312.01 MB FLAC archive extends that reanimation once more. A Russian compact-disc reissue of a Swedish album recorded in the mid-1990s now travels through an American upload into another private listening room. The wheel continues turning because each format supplies another temporary body. Owners of the original 2010 CD could add details from the eight-page booklet, including whether it restores any elements from the Napalm artwork or develops the bone-wheel imagery across the interior. Those missing pages may explain who designed the new cover and how deliberately its structure corresponds to the ten-song sequence.

This edition does not make Toteslaut more refined, modern or respectable. It makes the album look inward. The black field removes historical clutter, the gold lettering gives the object funereal calm, and the circular bones reveal organization inside apparent decay. Fifteen years after its first appearance, death no longer needs to sit on a throne. It has become the wheel beneath everything.