Trhä / Sanguine Wounds - 2023 - Split

 

JEMS – #287  230.57MB FLAC

This split joins two one-person projects that approach fantasy from opposite directions. Trhä creates a private world so thoroughly that even its language refuses immediate entry. Sanguine Wounds uses familiar English words such as blood, eclipse, pain, enchantment, and vampiric hunger, but arranges them into a sealed nocturnal court. One side makes the listener feel like an outsider trying to understand an unknown civilization. The other welcomes us into recognizable Gothic imagery, then reveals how little safety recognition actually provides. The shared territory is not simply raw black metal. It is the transformation of solitude into an entire inhabited realm.

Trhä’s two titles, “Tu ahhshëdlhevu në qevohh idlhvrét nvona” and “Daltrhëndlhaohad,” belong to one of the project’s invented languages. Without an authorized translation, it would be dishonest to assign them convenient meanings. Their unreadability is already meaningful, however. Most music titles provide a frame through which the recording can be interpreted. These words deny that assistance. They establish that the listener has entered a place where language existed before our arrival and does not need to reorganize itself for our benefit.

The first Trhä piece unfolds through the project’s distinctive collision of raw guitar haze, restless percussion, melodic movement, and synthesizer passages that appear to open rooms inside the distortion. The music can feel distant and intensely immediate at the same time. The recording surface suggests an object partially obscured by weather or age, yet the melodies repeatedly push through with startling emotional clarity. Trhä’s rawness is not merely a strategy for sounding primitive. It allows several scales of reality to overlap. A guitar can be an instrument played by one person, a storm crossing an invented country, and a memory already decaying while it is being experienced.

This creates a different kind of fantasy from conventional medievalism. There is no need for named kings, castles, battles, or narrated quests. The invented language implies that a whole culture may exist beyond the recording, but the music reveals it only through sensation. Synthesizers can suggest ceremonial architecture without describing a specific hall. Repeated guitar figures can imply travel without identifying a road or destination. Harsh vocals preserve the presence of a body, but the words keep that body from becoming an ordinary autobiographical narrator. The person making the music disappears into the world being made.

“Daltrhëndlhaohad” deepens this sensation by allowing beauty and abrasion to occupy the same surface without negotiating a compromise. Trhä’s melodies can be bright, wistful, almost childlike, but they are not placed outside the black-metal violence as relief. They arise inside it. This gives the music its peculiar emotional charge. Wonder does not arrive after danger has passed. Wonder is one of the dangerous forces. Nostalgia does not refer securely to an actual past. It may be longing for a place that has never existed except through these sounds.

Sanguine Wounds begins with “Elven Blood,” immediately shifting from Trhä’s private language to a title that appears legible but remains unstable. Elven blood might indicate ancestry, supernatural beauty, stolen vitality, forbidden mixture, or the proof of violence against a supposedly immortal being. The phrase turns fantasy lineage into physical substance. Blood does not merely symbolize identity. It can be inherited, spilled, consumed, contaminated, or used to establish who belongs within a realm and who remains mortal outside it.

Countess Vemphir’s side is shorter and more concentrated, exchanging Trhä’s sprawling world-building for the atmosphere of a vampiric chamber drama. The music feels governed by appetite. Raw guitars and distressed vocals do not stretch toward an enormous unknown landscape so much as circle a specific nocturnal presence. The Countess is not a distant monster accidentally encountered in the woods. She is the organizing intelligence of the environment, the figure whose desire determines what can enter and what condition it will be in afterward.

“The Eclipse of Eternal Pain” gives suffering astronomical scale. An eclipse is temporary, a body passing between another body and its source of light. Eternal pain should not be capable of such interruption, yet the title imagines an alignment powerful enough to darken even what never ends. The composition’s longer duration allows that darkness to feel ceremonial rather than accidental. Pain becomes a kingdom with its own sky, while the eclipse offers no guarantee of relief. It may only be another form passing across the wound.

“Ensorcelled by Her Bloodlust” closes the side by making enchantment and predation inseparable. To be ensorcelled is not simply to be attacked. It means desire has altered judgment before the victim understands the danger. Bloodlust becomes attractive enough to recruit the person it threatens. This is the oldest power of the vampire figure: not physical strength alone, but the ability to make surrender resemble intimacy, privilege, or escape from ordinary life. The song’s compactness gives it the quality of a final bite, a swift conclusion after the eclipse’s more extended suffering.

The cover binds these worlds through an elaborate purple frame surrounding a violently degraded black-and-white image. The border resembles illuminated manuscript ornament, Celtic knotwork, thorny vines, or architecture from a fantasy book whose center has been damaged beyond readability. Inside it, scattered purple figures appear against a blown-out landscape like beings imperfectly transmitted between dimensions. The frame promises order and craftsmanship; the central image delivers interruption, decay, and incomplete visibility.

That structure mirrors the split. Trhä builds an unknown world whose language and emotional laws extend beyond the listener’s understanding. Sanguine Wounds constructs a more recognizable vampiric mythology, but recognition only leads deeper into enchantment and pain. Both artists are alone behind their respective recordings, yet neither side feels socially empty. Each solitary musician invents inhabitants, authorities, memories, victims, languages, and forms of weather until the one-person project becomes a crowded cosmology.

The physical-release history makes that meeting especially appropriate. Trhä’s side was initially withheld from ordinary digital availability, meaning the complete conversation required a cassette, CD, or record to exist as its container. The split could not be fully entered through Sanguine Wounds’ open doorway alone. One had to obtain the object carrying both realms. This tiny forty-copy JEMS edition preserves that conjunction: an invented civilization speaking through inaccessible language, a blood-drinking Countess speaking through familiar Gothic signs, and an ornamental purple border holding them together for as long as the disc continues to circulate.