Winter Funeral - 2010 - Some Thousand Lies

 

Zyklon-B Productions – none  270.36MB FLAC

Some Thousand Lies begins from the suspicion that civilization is not held together by one enormous deception but by thousands of smaller ones, repeated until they resemble unquestionable reality. Religion, authority, identity, morality, history, artistic prestige, and even the stable self can all become structures maintained through collective agreement. Winter Funeral does not investigate these ideas through careful argument. Black metal is used here as counter-liturgy: distortion, repetition, solitary performance, and ritual language are assembled to place the listener outside the approved ceremony, looking back at its architecture from the cold.

The cover makes disappearance part of that challenge. A corpse-like figure seems pinned beneath intersecting lines while a raised skeletal hand blocks or blesses the viewer. On the reverse, another wounded hand appears above the declaration: “We are nothing, nobody, we do not exist! Do NOT try to contact us!” This is more than underground posturing. It refuses the modern expectation that music should lead toward access to the person who made it. No biography, personality, publicity cycle, or friendly explanation is offered as the proper route into the work. Hylgaryss removes himself so that Winter Funeral can function as an atmosphere, voice, or hostile spiritual weather rather than the product of an approachable individual.

That anonymity becomes especially powerful because every instrument and voice comes from one person. The album sounds ceremonial, but there is no congregation. Its drums, guitars, vocals, and atmospheric elements are separate extensions of one isolated consciousness building a rite large enough to surround itself. One-person black metal can create the illusion of an army, but Winter Funeral’s solitude remains audible beneath the accumulated sound. The music does not feel populated merely because several instrumental layers are present. It feels like an abandoned sanctuary in which one person has taken every ceremonial role: celebrant, witness, choir, victim, and desecrator.

The title track establishes the album’s emotional vocabulary through long-form repetition rather than rapid succession. Winter Funeral belongs to the strain of black metal in which coldness is not produced merely by treble-heavy guitars or thin recording. It arises from persistence, from remaining inside the same emotional weather long enough that escape begins to seem irrelevant. Melodic shapes carry grief without becoming consoling, while the vocals appear less like a narrator delivering propositions than a damaged presence attempting to force language through the surrounding storm. “Some Thousand Lies” does not identify each falsehood. It creates the exhaustion of realizing how deeply false structures may extend.

“The Curse of Annihilation” moves from deception toward erasure. Annihilation can sound triumphant in extreme metal, yet a curse complicates that fantasy. To destroy everything is also to lose every witness, enemy, memory, and reason destruction once seemed desirable. The album’s aggression therefore carries a mournful undertow. Hylgaryss has described being drawn to black metal for dark emotion rather than simple brutality, and that distinction is crucial here. Force is present, but force is not the final destination. It is the outer shell around melancholy, estrangement, and the desire to withdraw from a world felt to be spiritually fraudulent.

“Messe for a Mass Grave” contains the album’s sharpest linguistic inversion. “Messe” is the French word for Mass, while the English “mass grave” converts sacred assembly into anonymous death. A religious service ordinarily gathers named individuals into communion; a mass grave removes names and compresses separate lives into collective evidence. The title forces worship and atrocity into the same phrase without explaining their relationship. The music becomes a funeral office for those denied individual funerals, but it also raises the darker possibility that institutions capable of blessing civilization may remain present while civilization manufactures its graves.

The second half reorganizes the album into explicit ceremony. A minute-long “Prologue” acts as a threshold, after which “Ceremonial – Part I” establishes a ritual space rather than another independent song. Significantly, “The One Against Christianity” stands between Parts I and II. It becomes the object placed at the center of the rite, either an invocation of opposition or the human figure around whom the ceremony has been arranged. Within black metal, anti-Christian language can easily harden into inherited costume, repeated because the genre expects it. Winter Funeral’s surrounding structure gives the phrase more psychological weight. “The One” suggests isolation, singular resistance, and the possibility that opposition itself becomes a form of identity requiring its own rituals.

The album need not be accepted as theology for that conflict to remain meaningful. Christianity here can represent doctrine, institutional power, moral surveillance, inherited certainty, or the whole social order from which the solitary black-metal figure imagines exile. The music’s deeper question concerns what happens after refusal. Destroy an inherited spiritual structure and an empty site remains. Something will eventually occupy it: another belief, an individual will, despair, nature, art, or a new ceremony pretending not to be religion. “Ceremonial – Part II” cannot return us to innocence because the ritual has already exposed opposition as another form of devotion. To organize one’s identity entirely against something is still to orbit it.

This tension prevents Some Thousand Lies from becoming a simple document of negation. Beneath its anti-religious titles, skeletal imagery, and deliberately hostile anonymity lies a profound hunger for meaning. A person indifferent to spiritual questions would not need a Mass, a curse, a ceremonial triptych, or an adversary important enough to define an eight-minute composition. Winter Funeral rejects established sacred order while building another sacred enclosure from sound. That contradiction is not a weakness. It is one of black metal’s most durable engines: declaring that nothing is holy while treating the music, solitude, imagery, and act of refusal with unmistakably religious seriousness.

The handmade roughness matters because a polished recording might turn this private ceremony into spectacle. Winter Funeral’s imperfections keep the album near the person constructing it, alone and without institutional protection. The recording sounds less like a professionally staged representation of alienation than an artifact produced from within it. Some Thousand Lies is consequently not grand because it achieves technical perfection. It is grand because one isolated musician attempts to build an entire ruined faith from limited means, then erases his name from the doorway. The final contradiction remains carved into the object: “We do not exist,” says a work that has survived, circulated, and continued demanding witnesses.