Self-released – none 174.68MB FLAC
Frozen by Midwinter Snows is written in the passive voice. Nobody commands the season, crosses it victoriously, or summons it as a decorative backdrop. The figures inside this music have been acted upon. Snow has accumulated until movement, identity, and ordinary time are no longer available in their former condition. That distinction gives the collaboration between Celestial Sword and Upir unusual gravity. This is not black metal pretending to conquer winter. It is music made from inside the moment when winter has already won.
The two projects do not divide the nineteen-minute composition into separate territories. Celestial Sword’s vocals and synthesizer enter Upir’s guitar, drums, and voice as additional weather, making authorship difficult to separate once the storm has gathered. This is collaboration as convergence rather than exchange. One musician does not simply provide an atmospheric introduction before the other supplies the metallic body. Synth, distortion, percussion, and voices seem to affect one another continuously, producing a single climate whose individual elements become increasingly hard to isolate.
The guitar establishes movement, but the movement feels obstructed. Riffs advance through a surface that pushes back against them, while the drums retain enough urgency to suggest that something living is still attempting to cross the landscape. This creates the track’s central tension. The music is frozen, but not motionless. Freezing is presented as a process happening to movement, the gradual conversion of struggle into stillness. Every repeated passage resembles another layer falling across tracks that were visible moments earlier.
The synthesizer enlarges that process beyond the immediate bodies producing it. It supplies horizon, sky, distance, and the pale atmospheric pressure surrounding the harsher instruments. Rather than softening the black metal, it makes the guitars appear smaller and more exposed. A riff may carry considerable force, yet the sustained tones around it suggest a landscape capable of absorbing that force without changing. The human sound becomes intense precisely because the environment remains indifferent.
This is where the collaboration’s vampyric identities become more interesting than simple Gothic decoration. Upir’s name reaches toward the revenant, while Celestial Sword is presented as a vampyric entity. Both concern forms that continue after ordinary life should have ended, but Frozen by Midwinter Snows removes them from crypts, castles, and bloodlit chambers. The undead are placed outside beneath an enormous sky, exposed to a force older and less personal than death. Vampirism may overcome the grave, but it does not necessarily overcome climate, distance, or the long arithmetic of winter.
The voices consequently feel less like rulers issuing proclamations than signals struggling across open ground. Harsh vocals are already distorted forms of human communication, but here the surrounding atmosphere makes them seem further displaced. They may be calls between two figures, competing invocations, or the last audible evidence of bodies disappearing beneath weather. Their words matter less than the fact that voices are still being attempted. Expression continues even when reception cannot be guaranteed.
Midwinter itself is a beautifully unstable setting. It marks the deepest region of the season, when darkness has reached its greatest extent, yet it also contains the first almost imperceptible movement back toward light. The cold may intensify after the solstice even as the days begin lengthening. Frozen by Midwinter Snows inhabits that contradiction. The music sounds completely enclosed, but its sustained melodic motion contains a thin suggestion that enclosure is not identical with finality. Something may survive beneath the apparent stillness.
Snow preserves as well as buries. It conceals bodies, roads, ruins, seeds, and animal tracks, but it can also protect what lies below from harsher fluctuations. To be frozen is therefore not necessarily to be destroyed. It can mean being suspended between life and death, held beyond decay while awaiting conditions that may never return. The composition repeatedly approaches this suspended state. Its melodies do not resolve into triumph or collapse. They remain present, trapped inside recurrence.
The official description places the collaboration beneath the Hunter’s Moon and the Cold Moon, joining two different nocturnal conditions. The hunter’s moon implies pursuit, exposed fields, and the gathering of provisions before winter. The cold moon belongs to the season after preparation has ended, when survival depends upon what was carried into darkness. The track seems to move between those conditions. Its rhythmic force still remembers the hunt, while its atmosphere already knows that the world has closed.
The cover transforms a snowy ravine into a ceremonial entrance. Dark rock and trees rise on either side of a white path that disappears toward an overexposed center. Decorative columns frame the landscape as though the mountain pass were also a temple doorway. Yet nothing visible waits beyond it. The destination has been erased by brightness rather than hidden by darkness. Travelling forward means entering an absence so complete that snow, sky, and path become indistinguishable.
That image also captures the collaboration’s musical architecture. Upir provides the rough walls and forward path; Celestial Sword opens the impossible white space toward which everything moves. Neither function remains completely separate, but their meeting creates a threshold larger than either project alone. The track does not tell us whether the white center represents death, transcendence, exhaustion, or another world. It only makes continuing toward it feel inevitable.
When this piece was later paired with Journeying Through Nameless Wilderness, it became the first half of a larger cold invocation. Yet it remains complete on its own because it ends where its title promised: not with escape from the snow, but with identity absorbed into it. The collaboration begins with two entities converging beneath moonlight and concludes with the sense that the landscape has become the only remaining entity.
Frozen by Midwinter Snows finds grandeur not in defeating nature but in allowing human and vampyric drama to become very small inside it. The riffs struggle, the drums continue, the voices call, and the synthesizer keeps widening the sky. Eventually the distinction between traveller, apparition, and storm begins to dissolve. What survives is not victory. It is the faint evidence that something once moved here, preserved beneath a surface already becoming smooth.
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