Robert Fuchs - 2025 - C.O.T.H

 

Usagi  – U14  240.18MB FLAC

Robert Fuchs’s C.O.T.H. begins as though the recording were already running before anyone entered the room. A low electrical presence hangs in the background, neither silence nor a conventional drone, while small abrasions move across its surface. There is no dramatic entrance and no immediate disclosure of where the sounds originate. They simply appear, alter the pressure of the space, and recede. Released by Usagi Productions, this seven-piece CD is the full-length disc debut of Dean Fazzino’s Robert Fuchs project, and it establishes its character through restraint. Instead of confronting the listener with accumulated volume, Fazzino works with incomplete signals, unstable hums, damaged pulses and objects that seem to possess only the shortest possible lifespan.
The album’s slow pace should not be mistaken for passivity. Individual sounds are continually being tested, redirected or allowed to run down. Some hover close to equilibrium, but Fazzino rarely lets them settle completely. A faint frequency develops an irregular tremor; a dry mechanical scrape interrupts a relatively calm field; a cluster of interference briefly suggests rhythmic organization before separating again. The pieces move like systems whose rules are being revised while they operate. This gives C.O.T.H. a dreamlike flow without turning it into ambient music. Ambient music often creates a stable environment in which the listener can remain. These tracks make stability feel provisional, and every apparently empty area contains some small shift in density or direction.
“A Number of Two Figures” provides an effective introduction to this method. Its electromagnetic hum sounds less like a foundation placed beneath the composition than a phenomenon discovered inside it. Fazzino agitates that presence with discrete actions whose consequences are more important than their apparent causes. A slight adjustment produces a fresh vibration; a damaged flicker pushes the piece toward noise; a sudden reduction exposes another layer that had been concealed by the preceding activity. The track repeatedly approaches a steady state without quite arriving there. Its suspense comes from waiting to learn whether the machinery will stabilize, fail, or continue transforming at the same patient rate.
That patience separates C.O.T.H. from recordings that treat minimalism as an opportunity to magnify a single texture. Fazzino does not select one noise and invite us to study it from every angle. His vocabulary remains fragmented and surprisingly changeable, even when the overall motion is slow. Brittle details pass through soft electrical clouds, brief pulses buckle under their own weight, and thin high frequencies appear at the edge of audibility. The changes can be rapid, but they do not announce themselves as edits or virtuoso gestures. They behave more like involuntary reactions within the sound. The album consequently feels active without becoming busy, and sparse without depending on silence as a dramatic effect.
“Small Molecule” increases the friction. Its more abrasive seething suggests pressure escaping through a narrow opening, with crackling discharges repeatedly disturbing the surrounding greyness. Yet even here the album refuses the expected climb toward a large eruption. The rougher material remains contained, and the track’s most aggressive passages seem to reduce themselves as quickly as they arrive. This control is essential. By limiting the scale of each event, Fazzino makes variations in grain and pressure unusually vivid. A brief surge can register as a major disturbance because C.O.T.H. has not numbed the ear with continuous excess.
The production preserves that sense of scale. Each sound occupies a distinct position, but the separation never becomes clinical. There is still enough blur for one layer to contaminate another, enough uncertainty for a scrape to resemble an electrical fault or a pulse to resemble an object rotating somewhere out of view. Headphones reveal fine changes in the edges of the sounds, while louder playback emphasizes the low-level physical tension running beneath them. The recording does not rely on deep bass or piercing treble to prove its force. Its pressure is distributed through the middle ground, where ordinary electronic residue becomes strangely tactile.
On “Allele,” the material seems to undergo a kind of spectral decomposition. Related shapes recur in altered forms, as if the track were reproducing imperfect copies of its own components. A sound may return thinner, rougher or deprived of the frequency that previously gave it weight. This is not repetition in the conventional rhythmic sense. It is resemblance under conditions of decay. The title encourages a genetic reading, but the piece never requires one; the important effect is the feeling that its apparently disconnected noises share an underlying structure. Their relationship becomes audible gradually, through accumulation rather than explanation.
Fazzino’s work as Robert Fuchs has previously appeared largely through cassette-oriented noise labels, including New Forces and White Centipede, as well as his own imprint. C.O.T.H. retains the obscurity and physical immediacy associated with that context, but the CD format suits its uninterrupted inward movement. There is no side break to reset the ear or divide the material into two obvious halves. The seven tracks instead form a continuous descent through related electrical climates. The transitions do not attempt to disguise the pieces as one composition, yet each track seems to begin with traces of energy left behind by the previous one.
The album also makes the difference between Robert Fuchs and Fazzino’s Spate project more pronounced. Where Spate can pursue denser, harsher and more visibly complicated constructions, C.O.T.H. turns toward reduced activity and shadowed detail. That reduction does not make Robert Fuchs a quieter version of the same idea. It changes the nature of the listening. Instead of following collisions among multiple sources, one listens for the moment a modest sound begins to behave unpredictably. Instead of being overwhelmed by information, one becomes suspicious of apparent emptiness. The smallest disturbance starts to feel consequential.
Human presence is deliberately difficult to locate. Knobs are presumably being turned, sources switched and structures arranged, but the album avoids presenting those actions as performance. Its sounds often appear incidental, as though a collection of devices had continued operating after their intended purpose was forgotten. That impression is one of C.O.T.H.’s most compelling illusions. The music may resemble autonomous machinery, but its autonomy is carefully composed. Fazzino determines how long uncertainty can be sustained, when a texture has exhausted its interest, and how much additional information a track can accept before its delicate balance collapses.
The unexplained title reinforces this refusal of context. C.O.T.H. offers an acronym without supplying a stable meaning, leaving the letters to function like the sounds themselves: suggestive, exact in outline and resistant to identification. The album does not need an elaborate fictional framework or technical inventory. Its emotional ambiguity arises directly from the material. It can feel cold because the sources seem impersonal, yet the care with which their weaknesses are exposed gives the recording an unexpected intimacy. At moments it is eerie, but it never resorts to horror-music imagery. Its unease is closer to encountering a familiar device producing an unfamiliar signal.
C.O.T.H. is ultimately a noise record concerned less with impact than depletion. Its sounds arrive partially damaged, expend their limited energy and vanish before they can become dependable. Fazzino’s achievement lies in making that process absorbing across an entire album. Every fragment appears to contain several possible directions, even when it lasts only seconds, and every quiet interval retains the memory of what has just disappeared. The result is restrained but never decorative, abstract but not emotionally blank. It asks for close attention, then rewards it by revealing how unstable apparently simple sound can be. Rather than forcing open a sealed environment, C.O.T.H. lets us hear the machinery inside slowly forgetting how to continue.

VA - 2024 - Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2 2xCD

 

Ferns Recordings – stem_20  1.26GB FLAC

1-1   MSBR – Live Pepper Land - Okayama 13 Dec 1995 21:03

1-2   Monde Bruits – Live At Bears - Osaka 11 Dec 1995 11:38

1-3 Aube – Live At Bears - Osaka 11 Dec 1995 17:48

2-1 Daniel Menche – Live At Bears - Osaka 11 Dec 1995 34:01

2-2 Small Cruel Party – Live At Pepper Land - Okayama 13 Dec 1995 28:28

The opening MSBR performance does not ease the listener into Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2. Recorded at Pepperland in Okayama on 13 December 1995, Koji Tano’s twenty-one-minute set immediately establishes a dense, unstable field of distortion. Feedback streams collide with rough electronic pulses, metallic eruptions and frequencies that seem to scrape against the limits of the recording. Yet this is not an indiscriminate wall. Tano continually changes the pressure, allowing individual layers to rise through the mass before swallowing them again. The sound moves in waves, each escalation exposing a different internal texture. Its force comes not only from volume but from the impression that the entire space is being shaken into participation.
That physical relationship between sound and room runs through this two-CD collection. The five performances were recorded to DAT by Akifumi Nakajima, better known as Aube, during Daniel Menche and Small Cruel Party’s 1995 Japanese tour. Three sets come from Bears in Osaka on 11 December, while MSBR and Small Cruel Party were captured two nights later at Pepperland. Nakajima did not record sterile signals taken directly from mixing desks. The venue remains audible as a resonant body: low frequencies spread outward, feedback acquires distance, and louder passages seem to alter the dimensions of the room. Paul Lavigne’s mastering preserves this spatial information while giving the material enough weight to retain its intended impact.
MSBR’s set is the most openly aggressive performance on the first disc. Tano works through compressed blocks of noise, but his transitions can be unexpectedly sharp. A grinding formation collapses into thinner electronic whines; a heavy surge is interrupted by flickering signals; distortion that initially appears static begins rotating through several shades of abrasion. There is an architectural intelligence beneath the violence. Tano does not simply increase intensity until the available twenty-one minutes expire. He constructs, overloads and demolishes several temporary structures, ensuring that the ear is repeatedly forced to adjust. The result captures MSBR at a point where Japanese harsh noise could be overwhelming without sacrificing detail.
Shohei Iwasaki’s Monde Bruits follows with an eleven-minute Osaka performance that feels less frontal and more disorienting. Feedback and reverberation produce layers that appear to move independently through the venue. Sounds approach, recede and return in altered form, leaving smears behind them. The comparative brevity of the set gives it a concentrated shape: there is little preliminary activity, only an immediate immersion in a churning environment whose depth is difficult to judge. Harsh frequencies remain present, but they are dispersed rather than compacted. Where MSBR pushes a mass of sound toward the audience, Monde Bruits seems to place the audience inside a vibrating enclosure and then interfere with its boundaries.
The distinction is important because Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2 is not merely five variations on extreme volume. Each artist reveals a different way of organizing noise in real time. The recording conditions create continuity, but the performances retain markedly individual proportions. Monde Bruits favors unstable depth, MSBR uses collision and compression, and Aube turns repetition into gradual transformation. Daniel Menche concentrates on accumulation and bodily resonance, while Small Cruel Party leaves enough open space for uncertainty to become part of the composition. Heard together, the sets describe an experimental noise culture far more varied than the familiar image of uninterrupted distortion suggests.
Aube’s seventeen-minute Bears set is the collection’s central axis. Nakajima was known for building each work from a restricted source, although the source used here is not identified. That absence encourages attention to the process rather than a guessing game about origins. A cyclical body of sound slowly changes color, with pulses, filtered friction and sustained frequencies folding into one another. Aube’s control is evident in the pacing. Instead of producing a sequence of dramatic contrasts, he allows small adjustments to accumulate until the material has crossed into a new state. The repetition is never exact; each return carries a different density, emphasis or halo of distortion.
The performance demonstrates why Aube’s work can seem austere and sensuous at the same time. Its structure is disciplined, but the resulting sound has substantial physical presence. Frequencies bloom through the room, contract into narrow bands and expand again with their edges newly roughened. The set does not imitate machinery so much as establish a system whose behavior can be observed. Nakajima intervenes carefully, permitting the source to retain its identity even as processing makes that identity increasingly difficult to locate. Since he also made the original DAT recordings, his presence extends beyond his own performance: artist, organizer, listener and documentarian overlap across the release.
Daniel Menche occupies the first thirty-four minutes of the second disc and uses that duration to create the collection’s most imposing ascent. The performance begins with comparatively exposed vibrations and contact-microphone textures. These are gradually multiplied, stretched and forced into deeper resonance. Menche’s development is patient but not smooth. Each apparent plateau becomes material for another transformation: the sound is assembled, pulled apart and reconstructed at a larger scale. Percussive friction becomes sustained pressure, while small tactile noises acquire an almost architectural breadth. By the set’s later stages, the room seems saturated, yet the separate movements that created this density remain perceptible.
Menche’s performance benefits particularly from the live recording. The spaciousness prevents its long build from becoming a single flattened crescendo. Resonance travels beyond the immediate sound source, creating a second layer made from the venue’s response. The most powerful passages feel less like amplification than occupation, as though the performance were filling every available cavity. Even at maximum density, however, Menche continues to shape the mass. Frequencies are withdrawn as purposefully as they are added, and the set’s momentum depends on this continual exchange between concentration and release.
Small Cruel Party’s twenty-eight-minute Pepperland recording closes the collection by reversing that logic. William Key Ransone’s work develops as a carefully distributed soundscape in which events are separated by intervals large enough to alter how they are perceived. Scrapes, resonances and indistinct mechanical gestures enter without explaining their source. Some vanish before their implications are clear; others remain long enough for the surrounding room tone to become part of them. The performance is not quiet in any simple sense, but its power lies in withholding. After the density of Menche’s set, this openness changes the listener’s scale of attention.
The sequencing of the second disc is especially effective. Menche builds upward through bodily vibration and accumulation, while Small Cruel Party disperses energy across a more ambiguous field. One performance makes the venue feel filled; the other makes its empty areas audible. Together they resist the assumption that a historical live-noise document is valuable mainly for capturing aggression. These recordings preserve decisions about duration, placement and spatial response that are difficult to reconstruct from studio releases. Audience noise is largely subordinate, but the existence of an audience still matters: every delay, escalation and abrupt change occurs within shared time.
Released by Ferns Recordings in a six-panel digisleeve limited to 250 copies, Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2 marks thirty years since the original 1994 Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. cassette box, which gathered material associated with Nakajima’s G.R.O.S.S. label. This is not a straightforward sequel to that compilation, despite the title. It is a set of previously unheard performances connected by Nakajima’s recording activity and by a short period of exchange between Japanese and American experimental artists. The dedication to Koji Tano, Akifumi Nakajima and Shohei Iwasaki gives the first disc an unavoidable additional weight, since all three died before these tapes were issued.
That knowledge never needs to carry the music by itself. The performances remain immediate, varied and unusually well preserved. They reveal five artists using comparable materials to produce radically different experiences of pressure, movement and space. MSBR attacks the room, Monde Bruits destabilizes it, Aube regulates its internal currents, Menche fills it, and Small Cruel Party opens it again. Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2 succeeds because it retains those differences while making the two concerts feel like parts of one extended investigation. Nearly three decades after the DAT tapes were made, their noise has lost none of its ability to rearrange the air around it.

Winterblood - 2022 - Graue Magie

 

Self-released – none  151.17MB FLAC

Graue Magie opens with a small group of synthesizer tones suspended in an expanse that seems much larger than the sounds themselves. There is no beat to establish distance, no field recording to identify a physical location and no dramatic chord change announcing where the music intends to go. The tones simply remain, slightly blurred at their edges, while another layer gradually becomes perceptible beneath them. This is the working method of Winterblood at its most concentrated. Stefano Senesi does not build an environment by adding a great number of details. He establishes a narrow harmonic field and stays within it until repetition changes the listener’s perception of scale, color and movement.
Released digitally in September 2022, Graue Magie consists of seven untitled pieces identified only by Roman numerals. The first six last between four and seven minutes, while “VII” extends beyond twenty-one. That division gives the album a shape not immediately obvious from its deliberately consistent surface. The shorter pieces function as separate chambers, each organized around a modest melodic figure or sustained cluster. The final track removes the remaining sense of enclosure and allows the album’s central atmosphere to continue at immersive length. It is less a conclusion than a prolonged state in which the preceding material appears to lose its boundaries.
Winterblood describes its music as “polar ambient,” a term more useful here than either dark ambient or dungeon synth. Graue Magie does not possess the ominous low-frequency machinery often associated with dark ambient, and it has little interest in dungeon synth’s medieval imagery or compact melodic storytelling. Its coldness is created through distance, limited movement and pale keyboard timbres. Long notes drift across one another without generating conventional tension and release. The music can be melancholic, but it does not behave like a lament. It holds emotion at a distance, producing the sensation of sadness remembered after its immediate cause has disappeared.
“I” introduces this balance through layered chords that seem to brighten and darken without moving very far harmonically. The upper register carries a fragile melodic suggestion, while the deeper tones form a continuous grey foundation. Changes arrive slowly enough to resemble variations in light rather than compositional events. A chord becomes marginally fuller, an overtone grows clearer, or a repeated note begins to feel more isolated as the surrounding layer thins. Senesi’s restraint is severe, yet the piece is not static. Its movement is simply distributed over a timescale that discourages anticipation. Listening becomes less about waiting for the next section than noticing how the present one has quietly altered.
“II” feels more openly melodic. Its repeated figure possesses a subdued emotional pull, but Senesi avoids developing it into a theme with a destination. Instead, the phrase circles within the same narrow region until it ceases to function as a sequence of individual notes. Repetition turns it into texture. This is one of the album’s defining transformations: material that initially sounds melodic gradually becomes environmental, while drones listened to closely reveal an internal melodic contour. The distinction between foreground and background remains unstable. What appears to be accompaniment in one moment can become the piece’s emotional center simply because attention has shifted.
The middle tracks continue this process with slight but consequential differences in density. “III” has a more veiled character, its harmonies appearing through a soft layer of electronic haze. “IV,” the longest of the shorter pieces, gives its tones more room to overlap, producing a deeper and faintly ceremonial resonance. “V” contracts the scale again, allowing a simple recurring pattern to hang in comparative isolation. “VI” seems almost weightless, as though the sustained notes were gradually separating from the instrument that produced them. These distinctions are subtle, and casual listening may reduce the six tracks to a single continuous wash. The album requires attention to timbre rather than incident.
That demand is also Graue Magie’s principal risk. Senesi openly treats monotony as part of his aesthetic, and the record offers few concessions to anyone who needs pronounced contrast. There are no percussive interruptions, sudden eruptions or conspicuous changes of technique. Even the transitions between tracks can feel like adjustments to one extended composition. Yet calling the music uneventful misses the way it manipulates duration. Repetition exhausts the ordinary meaning of a phrase, leaving behind its emotional temperature. After several minutes, a progression no longer sounds like something being performed. It seems to exist independently, cycling at a pace that might continue whether anyone is present or not.
The title, which translates as Grey Magic, describes this effect with unusual precision. The magic is neither radiant nor sinister. It occupies an intermediate condition in which familiar oppositions—light and darkness, warmth and cold, comfort and unease—begin to overlap. Grey is not treated as an absence of color but as the product of several muted colors becoming inseparable. The synthesizer layers work in the same way. Individual voices can sometimes be followed, yet their greater effect comes from mixture. Soft attack and long decay erase the joins between notes, allowing harmonies to emerge as slowly changing clouds rather than sequences of deliberate gestures.
This distinguishes the album from purely functional sleep or relaxation music. Graue Magie can certainly recede into a room, and its smooth dynamics make it possible to hear without concentrated effort. Close listening, however, reveals a persistent ambiguity that prevents complete comfort. Some chords possess a faintly dissonant edge; certain high tones remain too exposed to become soothing; passages that initially feel spacious can gradually seem airless. Senesi does not dramatize these tensions, but neither does he resolve them. The album offers stillness without safety, beauty without reassurance. Its desolation is gentle precisely because nothing arrives to explain or interrupt it.
“VII” magnifies all of these qualities. At twenty-one minutes, it abandons the compact dimensions of the earlier tracks and gives the central drone enough time to alter the listener’s sense of duration. The opening establishes a broad, subdued harmonic field. New layers enter so gradually that their arrival is difficult to locate, while earlier tones fade without leaving obvious gaps. A minimal figure returns, but the extended length weakens any expectation that it will lead elsewhere. The track does not build toward a climax. Instead, it deepens through persistence, becoming increasingly detached from clock time as its repetitions accumulate.
The success of this final piece depends on the six that precede it. They have already taught the ear to register slight changes in tone, spacing and harmonic weight. Consequently, “VII” can sustain a much longer span without introducing a new vocabulary. It feels like entering the same landscape after distance has been removed: what appeared as a sequence of views is revealed as one uninterrupted territory. The track also clarifies why Senesi’s use of analog and digital equipment matters less than the continuity he creates between them. No particular synthesizer sound is displayed for its own sake. Each is softened, layered and absorbed into the overall climate.
Graue Magie belongs to a large Winterblood catalogue built from closely related methods and recurring images of coldness, forests, darkness and spiritual withdrawal. That consistency can make individual releases difficult to separate, but this album distinguishes itself through proportion. The six shorter studies provide definition and pacing; the long final immersion supplies the depth that those studies imply. It is concise enough to retain focus yet spacious enough for monotony to perform its intended work. Rather than attempting to prove how much variation can be extracted from minimal material, Senesi asks how little variation is necessary to keep perception active.
The answer is: very little, provided every shade is placed carefully. Graue Magie does not transport the listener through a succession of imaginary landscapes. It fixes attention on one obscured horizon and lets time alter what can be seen there. Its synthesizers are simple, its structures nearly motionless and its emotional language deliberately restricted. From those limitations comes an atmosphere at once sorrowful, tranquil and faintly estranging. The album’s grey magic is the slow disappearance of distinction—the point at which melody becomes weather, repetition becomes suspension, and apparently empty space begins to feel inexhaustible.

Witches Moon - 2017 - A Swing Of Sickle To Summers Dawn CDr

Not On Label – none

“Change upon the Horizon” begins with keyboards that could have come from a faded fantasy-game soundtrack, their ceremonial melody sounding both triumphant and slightly uneasy. When the guitars enter, they do not replace this atmosphere so much as tear a rough opening through it. Tremolo-picked lines surge beneath the synthesizer, programmed drums establish an urgent forward motion, and distant shrieks turn the piece from medieval reverie into raw atmospheric black metal. This combination defines Witches Moon’s A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn, a 2017 debut whose homemade CDr presentation matches its music: ambitious in imagination, modest in means and unconcerned with making its contrasting elements appear seamless.
Witches Moon was a one-person project initially based in Raleigh, North Carolina, with the anonymous musician credited simply as the Witch. Across these six tracks, guitar, voice, keyboards and percussion are arranged less like a conventional band than parts of a miniature supernatural theatre. The keyboards supply painted scenery, the guitars create weather, and the vocals appear as a figure moving through both. The album’s identity depends on the friction between them. Its melodic black metal passages have the speed and abrasion expected from the form, but the prominent synthesizers refuse to remain atmospheric decoration. They frequently carry the main theme, redirect a riff or expose a brighter emotional color beneath the distortion.
This is immediately apparent in “Change upon the Horizon.” The opening melody has a folk-like simplicity, relying on a memorable sequence rather than dense orchestration. As the metal instrumentation gathers around it, the same figure acquires a different meaning. What first suggests the arrival of daylight begins to sound like a warning. The guitar tone is thin and buzzing but articulate enough for its melodic movement to survive, while the drum programming has a conspicuous artificial snap. Neither quality damages the track. The record’s appeal lies partly in hearing one musician force limited sounds into a much larger imagined space. Its castle walls may be painted canvas, but the shadows falling across them are persuasive.
“Gatekeeper” is heavier and more direct. The keyboards still provide harmonic depth, although the guitar occupies more of the foreground with minor-key riffs alternating between rapid tremolo and slower, almost doom-like movement. The harsh vocals are embedded in the mixture rather than placed clearly above it. Their words are less immediately important than their texture: a ragged human element cutting through instruments that otherwise sound stylized and remote. The lack of a strongly audible bass leaves open space between the thin guitar and the broader synthesizer tones. This unusual balance can make the music feel simultaneously raw and ornate, with no thick middle layer smoothing over the difference.
The medieval character of A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn does not arise from historical accuracy. There is little attempt to imitate an actual early-music ensemble or reconstruct a specific period. Instead, Witches Moon uses the familiar vocabulary of fantasy medievalism: synthetic choirs, modal-sounding phrases, processional rhythms, natural imagery and occult titles. “Through the Veil” makes particularly effective use of this language. Its shifts between floating keyboards and black-metal acceleration suggest passage between two connected worlds. The transitions are sometimes blunt, but that bluntness gives the music the unpredictable logic of a dream. A pastoral phrase can become hostile within seconds, then reappear unchanged after the turbulence has passed.
Much of the album’s charm comes from this refusal to choose between dungeon synth and black metal. It is not a black metal recording with short keyboard interludes attached, nor a dungeon synth album periodically disturbed by guitars. The two styles are woven into the same compositions. Synth melodies often continue through the most aggressive sections, while riffs retain a lyrical quality that connects them to the quieter passages. The Witch would explore fully synthesizer-based music on subsequent releases, but this debut captures the point where the project’s different impulses are still colliding. The result is less polished than a carefully unified hybrid, but also more lively.
The title track forms the album’s nine-and-a-half-minute center. Its extended duration allows Witches Moon to move through several degrees of intensity without treating them as separate episodes. Keyboard themes establish an enchanted, faintly mournful atmosphere before the guitars roughen their edges. Repetition is important here. Riffs and melodic figures remain in place for long stretches, seeking immersion rather than surprise. At times they persist beyond the moment when their direction has become obvious, exposing one of the album’s limitations. Yet the repetition also permits the strange tonal mixture to settle. The synthetic grandeur and abrasive guitar gradually stop sounding incompatible, becoming two surfaces of the same imagined landscape.
The phrase “a swing of sickle to summer’s dawn” condenses the record’s central tension. The sickle can signify harvest, seasonal change or death, while dawn implies renewal and approaching warmth. Witches Moon repeatedly places those ideas together rather than resolving their opposition. The album is full of bright melodies heard through a damaged recording surface, energetic motion shadowed by archaic images of mortality. Even its most aggressive moments rarely feel hateful. There is wonder within the harshness, as though the shrieked voice were responding to something immense rather than simply expressing hostility.
“Wyrm” leans further into the record’s fantastical side. Its riffs have a circular, quest-like momentum, and the keyboard writing enlarges the song without giving it the bombast of symphonic metal. The production keeps everything at a human scale. Choir sounds remain recognizably synthetic, drums retain their programmed stiffness, and layers occasionally compete for the same space. Those qualities make the piece feel like an individual construction rather than a genre exercise assembled from professional presets. The arrangement is busy, but its central melody stays clear enough to guide the song through changes in pace.
The closing “Dance with Lightning” is the shortest track and one of the most animated. Its title accurately suggests movement: rhythms feel springier, melodic turns arrive more quickly, and the keyboards introduce flashes of color against the guitar’s persistent rasp. After the longer title piece and the denser “Wyrm,” its compactness provides an effective release. The album does not conclude with a solemn ambient recession or an enormous final chord. It ends in motion, retaining the playful quality that has been present beneath its occult imagery from the beginning.
That playfulness distinguishes Witches Moon from atmospheric black metal built primarily around solemnity and scale. A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn certainly invokes veils, gatekeepers, serpents and elemental forces, but it does so with the enthusiasm of someone assembling a private mythology in real time. The Tarot-derived artwork and archaic language frame the music without making it forbiddingly serious. One can hear affection for old fantasy soundtracks, second-wave black metal, folk melody and the solitary craft of dungeon synth. Their coexistence feels intuitive rather than theoretical.
The CDr format suits that sensibility. This is music conceived within an independent digital and handmade physical culture, where a release can exist as both an album and a personal artifact before any larger label becomes involved. A limited vinyl edition from His Wounds followed in 2020, but the original 2017 version preserves the immediacy of the project’s arrival. The comparatively clear separation of keyboards and guitar prevents the rawness from becoming unintelligible, while the unevenness remains essential to its atmosphere. Improving every sound might have made the music heavier, but it could also have erased the precarious balance that makes it distinctive.
A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn is not flawless. Several riffs repeat longer than their development warrants, the programmed percussion occasionally flattens changes in intensity, and the missing low-end weight can make the faster passages feel fragile. These are noticeable weaknesses, not secret virtues. Yet the record survives them because its melodic imagination is strong and its personality immediate. Witches Moon understands that atmosphere is not produced by obscurity alone. It requires recognizable shapes within the fog.
The album’s lasting appeal comes from hearing those shapes repeatedly transform. A keyboard melody becomes a black-metal riff; a harsh passage reveals an almost pastoral core; a cheap synthetic choir briefly acquires genuine majesty. Witches Moon does not conceal the joins between these elements. The music lets them scrape against one another, creating a debut that feels raw without being primitive and whimsical without becoming slight. A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn builds its own small world from limited resources, then fills that world with enough movement, color and mystery to make its painted horizon seem real.

Witches Moon - 2017 - The Grim Botanical

 Witches Moon Self-released – none

“The Craft” opens The Grim Botanical with chiming keyboards and the sound of an imaginary book being opened. Lasting only ninety seconds, it establishes the album less as a black metal recording than a small theatrical world in which black metal is one of several available forces. The melody has the bright artificial color of early dungeon synth, but a darker undertone keeps it from becoming decorative fantasy music. By the time “Call upon Your Name” arrives, Witches Moon has already constructed the room in which the rest of the album will occur: part woodland shrine, part amateur stage and part private studio crowded with keyboards, guitars and disembodied voices.
Released independently in October 2017, The Grim Botanical was the third Witches Moon full-length to appear during the project’s remarkably active first year. The anonymous Raleigh, North Carolina musician known as the Witch had introduced a mixture of raw melodic black metal and medievalist synthesizer music on A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn, then moved toward instrumental dungeon synth on Azazel Bedazzle. This album brings those directions together again, but the balance has changed. Keyboards no longer seem like an atmospheric layer placed around the metal instrumentation. They lead the arrangements, determine the melodic character and often control when the guitars are allowed to intensify the music.
“Call upon Your Name” demonstrates that development immediately. Its synthesizers move with a fluidity absent from much of the debut, carrying a melody that is whimsical without losing its ceremonial quality. Guitar and percussion enter as reinforcement rather than interruption. The most striking addition is the vocal arrangement. Harsh cries remain part of the project’s vocabulary, but they are joined by clean, harmonized lines that give the song the character of a pagan invocation. The voices do not sound polished in a conventional sense; their slight awkwardness adds to the ritual illusion, as if several figures had gathered around the same melody without attempting to become a formal choir.
This expanded vocal range gives The Grim Botanical much of its personality. On the debut, the distant shriek functioned primarily as another abrasive surface within the guitars. Here, voices can become characters. They chant, harmonize, cry from the background or rise into a high register that sounds deliberately strange. “7, Here Comes the Piper” makes particularly vivid use of this approach. Its elevated vocal line has an eccentric, almost storybook quality, less concerned with menace than enchantment. Against the swirling keyboards, it suggests a figure whose friendliness and danger cannot be separated. The song is playful, but its playfulness carries the uncertainty of a folk tale in which following the music may be a serious mistake.
“Weave a Wreath of Halo Harmful” occupies the darker side of the album’s garden. The title itself typifies the Witch’s language, joining beauty and injury within the same image. Synthesizers form a layered melodic canopy while the metal instrumentation supplies heat and forward movement underneath. The guitars are still comparatively thin, and the programmed percussion retains a synthetic attack, but the arrangement uses those limitations more confidently than the debut. Rather than trying to simulate the weight of a full band, Witches Moon treats the instruments as contrasting colors. The keyboard can sound lush because the guitar remains narrow; a harsh vocal can cut clearly because the rhythm section is not overloaded with low-end density.
That approach helps the album move rapidly between moods. The Grim Botanical is only thirty-three minutes long, and most of its nine tracks fall between three and five minutes. Songs therefore have little reason to prolong one atmosphere after its central idea has been established. An ominous synth passage may suddenly yield to a bright melody, while an aggressive black metal section can open into something serene without a lengthy transition. These changes occasionally feel abrupt, but abruptness is integral to the record’s appeal. Witches Moon presents the supernatural not as a single dark climate but as a place where delight, absurdity and threat coexist.
“Succulent Egg” may have the album’s most conspicuously peculiar title, and its music shares that sense of grotesque humor. The piece swells through keyboard figures, vocal entrances and stronger rhythmic accents, periodically sounding grand before some unexpected texture unsettles the impression. It illustrates why “botanical” is more than decorative wording. The album’s structures resemble unnatural growths: a simple melodic stem produces several incompatible branches, ornamental synth tones curl around distorted guitar, and voices emerge like unfamiliar flowers. The compositions grow outward from compact themes rather than following the verse-and-chorus discipline of ordinary metal songs.
The title track turns this garden into a complete environment. “The Grim Botanical” balances darkness and light more evenly than the surrounding pieces, with ominous harmonic shading beneath melodies that could otherwise seem almost cheerful. Witches Moon’s greatest skill is this ability to make brightness suspicious. The keyboards are frequently colorful and openly synthetic, yet their cheerfulness never guarantees safety. A major-sounding flourish may be followed by a blackened rasp; a gentle phrase may repeat until it feels like entrapment. The record does not depend on thick fog or continuous dissonance to communicate unease. It allows beauty to generate unease from within.
“As of Cain” introduces a more biblical shadow, although the album never settles into a single narrative. Its titles draw from witchcraft, plants, ritual language, folklore, scripture and Arthurian imagery without explaining how they connect. This looseness works because the musical identity is so coherent. Each piece belongs to the same theatrical landscape even when its reference points differ. The songs feel like scenes selected from a larger mythology whose missing parts must be imagined by the listener. Rather than laying out a concept, the Witch supplies objects—a wreath, a piper, an egg, Cain, a lake—and lets the sounds determine their relationships.
“Harlot of the Lake” is the clearest example of that mythological compression. Its title appears to distort the Lady of the Lake into a more dangerous and morally ambiguous figure, replacing chivalric distance with accusation and desire. The music similarly bends courtly or folk-like melody through black metal texture. Synth lines suggest elegance, while vocals and guitar prevent the piece from becoming stately. This is not historical medieval music, and Witches Moon makes no attempt at authenticity. The medieval quality comes from a modern fantasy vocabulary: modal melodies, synthetic choirs, archaic phrasing and the suggestion of ceremonies occurring outside recorded history.
The record’s production is cleaner than its raw reputation might imply. Individual keyboard lines remain audible even when the guitars and vocals are active, and the quick mood changes do not dissolve into an indistinct mass. At the same time, nothing sounds excessively corrected. Drum programming can be stiff, vocal layers do not always merge smoothly, and some transitions expose the solitary construction behind the music. These features preserve the project’s scale. The Grim Botanical sounds like the work of one person building an elaborate world with whatever is close at hand, and its imagination is enlarged rather than diminished by the visibility of that process.
“Call of the Void” closes the album without guitar or vocals, returning to the instrumental language of “The Craft.” The piece is brief, celestial and oddly welcoming. Instead of presenting the void as terror, it renders it as an opening beyond the crowded garden. Synthesizer tones float with a calm that feels slightly unreal after the record’s many voices and abrupt turns. The symmetry is effective: a book opens, nine scenes unfold, and the final instrumental leaves the listener at a threshold rather than providing a firm conclusion.
The Grim Botanical is more confident than A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn because it no longer needs to prove that black metal and dungeon synth can occupy the same song. It treats their coexistence as a starting point and adds folk melody, clean vocal harmony, theatrical characterization and a surprisingly broad emotional range. Not every experiment is elegant. The high voices can sound eccentric, the programmed rhythms remain limited, and some songs change direction before fully developing their best ideas. Yet elegance would be the wrong standard for music this curious.
What matters is the coherence created from so many unlikely details. The Grim Botanical can be aggressive, peaceful, sinister, comic and genuinely beautiful within a few minutes, but it never loses the distinctive Witches Moon atmosphere. The Witch approaches genre as a collection of materials rather than a set of borders, cultivating each sound until it tangles with the next. The resulting garden is artificial, overgrown and occasionally poisonous. It is also alive with melody. Among the project’s rapid sequence of early releases, The Grim Botanical stands out as the moment Witches Moon’s private mythology began to speak in several voices at once.

Witches Moon - 2020 - An Olde Goat's Game Of Stars

 The Radio Church Of Saint Toad – 008

An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars begins with forty seconds of synthetic fanfare, a modest doorway into an album that immediately feels more measured than Witches Moon’s early work. The keyboard melody is bright but antiquated, like a damaged title theme from a forgotten fantasy film, and its brevity gives it purpose: the curtain rises, the scene is established, and “A Storm of Rosen Mare and Black Chalice” enters before the atmosphere can become self-satisfied. Guitars scrape against broad keyboard chords, programmed percussion pushes the music forward, and the Witch’s voice appears as another unstable character within the arrangement. Witches Moon’s familiar collision of dungeon synth, folk melody and black metal remains intact, but the parts now move with greater confidence.
Released independently in May 2020 and issued on vinyl by Death Kvlt Productions that November, An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars arrived after the astonishing burst of recordings Witches Moon produced between 2017 and 2018. Those earlier albums often sounded like separate doors being opened in quick succession: raw atmospheric black metal on A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn, synthesizer-led fantasy on Azazel Bedazzle, theatrical genre mixing on The Grim Botanical and more isolated keyboard experiments elsewhere. The 2020 album does not choose one of those directions. It gathers them into a relatively concise forty-minute sequence in which the shifts feel like parts of a single journey rather than demonstrations of how many styles the project can attempt.
“A Storm of Rosen Mare and Black Chalice” announces this retrospective quality even in its title, which echoes the earlier A Storm of Golden Mare and Black Cauldron. It is not simply an act of self-reference. The altered phrase suggests Witches Moon revisiting its private vocabulary and changing the objects within it, as though the same deck of symbolic cards had been shuffled into a new reading. Musically, the track establishes the album’s main balance. Synthesizers carry much of the melodic and emotional information, while guitar and drums supply momentum and abrasion. Neither side is reduced to an interlude. The fantasy atmosphere continues through the metal passages, and the blackened edge remains perceptible even when the arrangement opens into calmer space.
“Burning the Seal” is tighter and more urgent. Its compact structure keeps the Witch from dwelling too long on any single figure, a recurring strength throughout the album. Earlier Witches Moon songs sometimes repeated a good riff until its enchantment began to weaken. Here, ideas are more carefully rationed. A keyboard line is introduced, reinforced by guitar and then redirected before familiarity turns into stagnation. The programmed drums still possess an artificial stiffness, but the album uses that quality as part of its clockwork character. This is not music pretending to be a conventional band in a room. It sounds like one person animating a cast of instruments and assigning each a role.
The vocals contribute strongly to that animation. The Witch moves between black-metal rasping, cleaner declarations and layered ceremonial passages without treating any single voice as the project’s natural center. “Bring Dishonor” uses those changes to make its title feel more dramatic than descriptive. Harshness arrives as accusation, while melodic voices seem to answer from another position within the composition. The vocal production is not polished enough to erase the seams between these identities, and that is precisely why they remain interesting. They sound less like studio harmonies than figures appearing from different corners of the same imagined ritual.
Witches Moon’s eccentric titles are essential to the album’s tone. “The Lament of Two Fish” risks absurdity before a note is heard, but the music does not explain or apologize for the image. Its mournful melody allows the title to remain funny and strangely touching at once. This coexistence separates Witches Moon from fantasy-oriented black metal that treats solemnity as proof of commitment. The Witch’s world can contain grief, occult symbolism, talking creatures and nursery-rhyme logic without ranking one as more legitimate than another. Its seriousness lies in the care given to the atmosphere, not in maintaining a severe expression.
“Bag of Tricks and Arts” makes that playfulness especially audible. The song moves briskly, arranging its melodic ideas like objects pulled from the title’s imaginary sack. Keyboard flourishes, guitar figures and vocal gestures appear in rapid succession, yet the piece does not collapse into randomness. Its recurring tonal color holds everything together. The synthesizers favor sounds that are openly artificial—choirs, small fanfares, glassy leads and soft orchestral approximations—but their lack of realism is an advantage. They belong to a world produced through suggestion. A convincing horn sample would not necessarily improve music whose charm depends on cardboard scenery becoming magical through belief.
The first half of the album moves with consistent economy, each proper song lasting between three and five minutes. This pacing gives the sequence a stronger album shape than some of Witches Moon’s more sprawling releases. There is enough time for individual themes to establish themselves, but little room for extended ambient wandering. The original vinyl division is sensible: side one closes after “Bag of Tricks and Arts,” having presented the record’s more animated, story-driven material. Side two begins with “Pvre Ecstasy” and gradually turns toward slower, more contemplative territory.
“Pvre Ecstasy” retains rhythmic force, but its spelling and atmosphere point toward the project’s mixture of mock archaism and genuine longing. Witches Moon often uses antiquated language the way it uses synthesizers: not to reconstruct history but to create distance from ordinary speech. The substituted “v” is visually theatrical, a small piece of typographic costume. Underneath it, however, the music’s yearning is direct. Repeated melodic phrases reach upward while the rougher instrumentation prevents them from becoming sentimental. Ecstasy here sounds less like pleasure than escape—a momentary departure from a fixed identity or physical place.
“Has the Wind Always Blown So Slow?” is the album’s longest track and its emotional center. The question contains weariness, wonder and a subtle disturbance in the perception of time. Appropriately, the music gives its central ideas more space than the surrounding songs. The tempo feels less insistent, and sustained keyboard tones allow the melody to hover rather than march forward. This is where Witches Moon’s dungeon-synth side functions most effectively, not as an ornamental pause between black-metal tracks but as a way of changing the listener’s sense of duration. The song does not become empty or purely ambient; traces of the album’s roughness remain around the edges, keeping its beauty from settling into comfort.
The title track then restores a more compact theatrical movement. “An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars” is an excellent Witches Moon title because it joins the rustic, satanic, comic and cosmic without clarifying which quality should dominate. The goat could be the Devil, a woodland animal, an aged trickster or all three at once. The stars may be pieces in a game whose rules remain hidden. The music similarly refuses a single emotional reading. Melodies can feel celebratory while the vocals darken them; aggressive passages carry an undercurrent of delight; synthetic grandeur is repeatedly made intimate by the homemade production.
This ambiguity is not merely decorative lore. It determines how the album handles black metal. The guitars are important, but they are not asked to provide an uninterrupted atmosphere of hostility. They intensify passages, sharpen melodic contours and give physical resistance to the smooth keyboard surfaces. The drum programming supplies propulsion without pretending to possess the dynamics of a live player. Bass weight remains less important than middle-register interaction among guitar, voice and synth. As a result, An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars does not sound massive, but it does sound densely inhabited. Its scale resembles a puppet theatre whose limited stage somehow accommodates storms, rituals, animals and constellations.
“Carousel of Dawn” closes the record instrumentally, mirroring the short “Intro” while expanding its function. The carousel image is appropriate for music built from circular melodies and returning symbols. Its keyboard figures rotate with a mixture of brightness and melancholy, suggesting morning without presenting it as a simple victory over darkness. Dawn merely reveals that the strange game has continued through the night. Ending without vocals also changes the apparent distance of the album. The characters retreat, leaving the mechanism turning by itself.
The production, mixing and mastering were all handled by the Witch, and the consistency of the sound supports the album’s unity. This is cleaner than the most primitive Witches Moon recordings but not polished into anonymity. Synthetic percussion remains visibly synthetic; layered voices occasionally rub against one another; guitars have texture without becoming an opaque wall. The record knows what needs clarity and what benefits from roughness. Its melodies remain legible, which is crucial because they carry far more of the album than sheer intensity does.
The limited vinyl edition—one hundred copies on black 140-gram vinyl with an insert, poster and Will-Helm Arts cover—gives the album’s two-part structure a physical expression, but An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars works because the sequence was already carefully shaped. Its songs are concise, the reflective second half follows naturally from the animated first, and the instrumental bookends prevent the journey from feeling arbitrarily cut off. Compared with the restless experiments of 2017, this is a more settled record, though never a conventional one.
Witches Moon’s achievement is not technical perfection. The programmed drums can still feel rigid, some vocal choices remain deliberately peculiar, and listeners resistant to synthetic medieval color will find little accommodation. The achievement is personality. Few projects could place “The Lament of Two Fish” beside “Bring Dishonor,” or end a black-metal album with something called “Carousel of Dawn,” without seeming merely cute or self-conscious. Witches Moon makes those gestures feel natural because its world has always been spacious enough for menace and whimsy to coexist. An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars is the sound of that world becoming more disciplined without losing its oddness: a nocturnal game played with familiar pieces, rearranged beneath a larger and clearer sky.

Woods of Infinity - 2005 - Ljuset

 

Total Holocaust Records – THR 91  427.83MB FLAC

“Genever” enters with a melody that seems to have wandered in from a damaged folk record and become trapped inside black metal. The guitar does not settle into a clean tremolo pattern; it circles, staggers and accumulates additional lines while programmed drums keep an inflexible pulse beneath it. Ravenlord’s voice arrives crammed with syllables, screaming across the phrasing rather than conforming to it. Within minutes, Ljuset establishes why Woods of Infinity remains difficult to place. The Swedish duo uses familiar black-metal materials, but its melodies, vocal cadences, samples and emotional contradictions obey rules that belong almost entirely to the band.
Recorded between April and July 2005 by Ravenlord and Melkor, Ljuset was the second Woods of Infinity album released that year, following Hejdå. Melkor handled guitar, bass and drum programming, while Ravenlord supplied vocals and samples; both contributed lyrics. The arrangement is skeletal in personnel but dense in execution. Multiple guitar lines overlap until apparently simple melodies develop hidden counter-movements, while keyboards and sampled fragments appear inside the mixture without converting the music into conventional symphonic black metal. The production is raw, yet it is not empty. Its narrow, abrasive surface conceals a remarkable amount of activity.
That contradiction becomes one of the album’s principal pleasures. Ljuset can initially sound cheap and almost careless. The programmed drums are dry, guitars sometimes blur into a brittle midrange mass, and the voice appears to have been recorded with little concern for conventional balance. Repeated listening reveals how precisely those elements have been arranged. A melody partly buried during one passage may return in clearer form later; an accompanying guitar can quietly change the emotional meaning of the dominant riff; a keyboard line may add brightness without reducing the surrounding desolation. The record does not reward attention by exposing technical polish. It reveals additional instability.
Woods of Infinity’s melodic language draws heavily from folk forms, but not from the heroic or pastoral style frequently attached to Scandinavian metal. These themes often have a crooked, itinerant quality, turning through unexpected notes while remaining immediately memorable. At moments, the band resembles a village ensemble playing too quickly and through the wrong equipment. Melkor takes the circular motion of a folk dance and subjects it to repetition, distortion and rhythmic rigidity. The result can sound celebratory and lifeless at once: music whose body remembers dancing even after its emotional reason has vanished.
“Ett förlorat barn,” meaning “A Lost Child,” demonstrates how uncomfortable that ambiguity can become. Its melodic content carries traces of innocence, but the sound surrounding it is cold and damaged. Woods of Infinity does not merely place a sad lyric over mournful music. The band creates conflict between what the melody appears to remember and what the recording allows it to become. “Tankeväckande självömkan”—roughly “Thought-Provoking Self-Pity”—pushes the contradiction further. Even the title questions whether suffering is profound or merely indulgent. This is depressive music with enough distance to examine its own performance of despair.
That distance separates Ljuset from the more standardized depressive black metal that would become increasingly common later in the decade. Ravenlord does not present himself as a solitary figure dissolving into pure anguish. His delivery is confrontational, literary and frequently grotesque. He forces long lines into spaces that do not seem designed to hold them, producing the sensation of a monologue continuing while the music follows an unrelated internal logic. The voice can sound desperate, contemptuous or absurd, occasionally within the same passage. It refuses the listener the comfort of a single, sincere emotional posture.
The lyrics are essential to Woods of Infinity’s reputation and also the reason many listeners reject the band. They move among death, spiritual disgust, sexuality, childhood, self-loathing, provocation and intentionally offensive humor. Some texts are disturbing in ways that should not be softened into generic “darkness.” For listeners who do not understand Swedish, Ravenlord’s diction may register primarily as another extreme texture, concealing how specific and confrontational the words can be. That linguistic barrier has helped produce conflicting interpretations of the group as painfully sincere, sarcastic, nihilistic or merely determined to violate taste. Ljuset never resolves the question because instability of intent is part of its method.
“Summon the Lord of Blasphemy,” originally present on the 1999 Trollhämnd demo, links the album to the project’s primitive beginnings. Surrounded by the stranger writing of 2005, its direct black-metal language sounds almost like a traditional invocation recalled from another life. Yet Woods of Infinity refuses to present even this older material straightforwardly. The folk-shaped phrasing, processed atmosphere and Ravenlord’s peculiar relationship to rhythm make the track impossible to mistake for ordinary second-wave imitation. The band understands black metal’s basic vocabulary but speaks it with an accent nobody else possesses.
The middle of Ljuset increases the density rather than dividing the album with an ambient pause. “A Love Story” carries an almost deceptively simple title, while “Tvåfaldig vikt är en styggelse för herren” borrows its phrase about false or double weights being an abomination to the Lord from the Swedish Bible. At more than eight minutes, the latter becomes one of the album’s most engulfing constructions. Layers accumulate without turning into a clean crescendo. Instead, the track seems to grow inward, placing melodic movement, vocal narration and raw texture into increasingly close quarters. The effect is claustrophobic despite the expansive length.
The biblical title is typical of the album’s approach to inherited language. Woods of Infinity uses religious phrases neither as straightforward belief nor as routine satanic reversal. Scripture becomes another unstable object that can be quoted, distorted or applied to human hypocrisy. A false balance is also an apt image for the music. Beautiful melody and ugly subject matter are deliberately given unequal weights; apparent sincerity is countered by mockery; musical warmth is undermined by the inhuman repetition of the percussion. Ljuset continually tips its scales without allowing either side to settle.
“Epigram” and “Metamorfos” bring the album’s more reflective tendencies forward, though reflection here does not mean calm. The guitar writing becomes increasingly hypnotic as small figures recur beneath Ravenlord’s crowded voice. “Metamorfos” is especially effective because transformation occurs through accumulation rather than obvious sectional changes. The material stays recognizably connected to its opening form while additional lines gradually make that form harder to perceive. Woods of Infinity’s density is never simply heaviness. It is a way of obscuring the route by which one state becomes another.
The cover of Edge of Sanity’s “Across the Fields of Forever” initially appears to be an unexpected progressive-death-metal reference, yet it belongs naturally within the sequence. Melkor and Ravenlord do not treat the song as an opportunity for faithful tribute or technical display. Its melancholy and forward-reaching melody are absorbed into the album’s thinner, harsher vocabulary. The cover reveals that Woods of Infinity’s influences extend beyond black metal and folk music, but more importantly, it shows how thoroughly the duo can impose its own proportions upon outside material. By this point, even a recognizable composition enters the same dislocated emotional climate.
“Kroppen var mitt fängelse”—“The Body Was My Prison”—serves as the original CD’s major closing statement. Its title condenses many of the album’s preoccupations: physical existence as confinement, identity as an unwanted structure and release imagined through disappearance. The piece is long enough for its melodies to become obsessive, but it retains movement beneath the repetition. Ravenlord’s vocal flood makes the track feel less like a funeral than a final argument conducted against the body itself. It is bleak without the stately pace or purified sorrow usually associated with depressive music.
The concluding “Eksynyt,” whose Finnish title means “Lost,” extends the ending into a separate state. The piece lets the record recede without suddenly purging its unease. Rather than resolving the preceding hour, it leaves the listener beyond its most verbal and densely layered regions, still surrounded by their residue. Its placement matters because Ljuset is a lengthy album—eleven tracks and slightly more than sixty-six minutes—and a conventional climax would make that duration feel too deliberately shaped. “Eksynyt” allows it to end as something abandoned rather than completed.
The original Total Holocaust Records CD appeared in October 2005. A 2006 gatefold double-LP added “En höst” and “Etwas besonderes im Sauna,” while a later cassette also included the latter piece. Those expansions suit a record already resistant to a single definitive boundary, but the original CD sequence has a severe internal arc: intoxicated opening, increasingly dense confrontation, transformation, borrowed song, imprisonment and loss. Its length is demanding, yet the variety inside its raw surface prevents it from becoming a uniform wall.
The title means “The Light,” which may seem ironic for an album so saturated with disgust and psychic enclosure. Yet light is present throughout the music. It appears in the upper guitar melodies, the strange folk turns and the flashes of almost childlike beauty that survive inside the distortion. Woods of Infinity does not use that brightness as redemption. Light exposes rather than heals. It illuminates details one might prefer to leave indistinct and makes the album’s ugliness harder to dismiss as theatrical shadow.
Ljuset remains powerful because it cannot be reduced to its provocations, its depressive atmosphere or its eccentricity. Its real achievement is the tension among all three. Melkor’s layered folk-derived writing creates beauty without consolation; Ravenlord’s vocals convert language into pressure without surrendering its specificity; the raw production makes the record initially impenetrable while preserving the details that reward return visits. Woods of Infinity produced a black-metal album that sounds emotionally damaged but compositionally alert, ridiculous at one moment and genuinely harrowing the next. The light it offers is cold, uneven and mercilessly revealing.

Woods of Infinity - 2010 - Forintelse & Libido

 

Those Opposed Records – Tor 026  370.32MB FLAC

“Förlorad” begins with almost no preparation. A thin guitar figure pushes forward against stiff percussion while Ravenlord’s voice arrives as a stream of hoarse, overfilled phrases. The instruments seem to have been recorded at different distances and then forced into the same narrow space. Nothing settles into the balanced violence of an ordinary black-metal production. Guitar lines overlap without blending, the voice ignores convenient rhythmic openings, and the entire performance threatens to pull itself apart. Förintelse & Libido sounds less like a finished album than a collection of private compulsions that happened to become music, which is precisely where its disturbing fascination begins.
The material originated as a self-released 2002 cassette before Total Holocaust Records reshaped it into a thirteen-track CD in 2004. The 2010 Those Opposed edition restores that CD program in a handmade gatefold digisleeve with an embossed cover and a twelve-page booklet containing the lyrics in Swedish and English. It runs seventy-four minutes, substantially longer than the point at which most raw black-metal records have exhausted their vocabulary. Woods of Infinity survives that length by refusing to maintain one sound, mood or degree of seriousness for very long. The recording is uneven, abrasive and frequently excessive, but repetition never becomes its only strategy.
The title joins two impulses often treated as opposites: annihilation and desire. “Förintelse” can mean destruction or extermination, while libido names the appetite that creates attachment, fantasy and continued life. Woods of Infinity does not arrange these as a philosophical argument. The album lets them contaminate one another. Sexuality becomes grotesque, destruction becomes animated by pleasure, and despair is interrupted by jokes, samples or oddly beautiful melodies. The result is not simply nihilistic. Nihilism would provide too stable an explanation for music this contradictory.
Melkor’s guitar writing already contains the crooked melodic instinct that would become more controlled on Hejdå and Ljuset. Riffs circle through minor-key patterns, but their phrasing is rarely symmetrical. Notes seem to stumble over bar lines, and additional guitars sometimes enter as if they had misunderstood the first part. On “Jorden är Satans hora”—“The Earth Is Satan’s Whore”—this instability creates an atmosphere more unsettling than straightforward aggression. The song lurches between recognizable black-metal motion and something closer to a damaged folk procession. A small melodic turn can sound mournful in one repetition and malicious in the next.
The primitive production magnifies those contradictions. Certain passages are crowded and painfully sharp; others suddenly become hollow, leaving the voice exposed above guitar and mechanical rhythm. Instead of one consistent wall, Förintelse & Libido presents a succession of differently damaged rooms. Media samples appear without warning. Violin and harmonica are credited alongside guitar, but neither is used to provide respectable folk ornamentation. They belong to the same collection of unstable colors, entering the music as another interruption rather than proof of expanded musicianship.
“Raping the Hexagram” is among the album’s more compact examples of this method. Its riffing is direct enough to be memorable, yet percussion, vocal cadence and guitar do not lock together in the reassuring way expected from an aggressive metal track. Each element seems to pursue its own version of the song. The resulting friction can resemble incompetence on first contact, and parts of the album undeniably are clumsy. What gives the clumsiness value is its consistency with the record’s larger character. Woods of Infinity is not attempting virtuosity and failing. It is using musical misalignment to produce discomfort.
“Tribut till självmördare,” or “Tribute to Suicides,” makes the album’s collision of ugliness and cultural debris especially explicit. It opens with a sample of “New York, New York,” then breaks into raw black metal before introducing a passage from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” These references are not smoothly integrated or transformed into clever genre fusion. They are dropped into a hostile environment where their familiar emotional meanings become unstable. Sinatra’s public confidence and Beethoven’s inherited melancholy are briefly treated as found objects, exposed to the same deterioration as everything else. The original lyrics were reportedly lost in a 2001 fire, leaving the track’s surviving form even more fragmented.
“Excrucior” stretches beyond seven minutes and gives the album’s riffing time to become obsessive. Its Latin title suggests torment, but the music does not rely on the slow, solemn repetition later associated with depressive black metal. It keeps shifting its weight. Vocal lines crowd the guitar; rhythmic emphasis changes without warning; abrasive motion yields to a phrase whose melancholy seems almost accidental. Woods of Infinity can be emotionally powerful because the band does not always appear to be aiming directly at emotion. Beauty emerges through a crack in the arrangement and disappears before it can be framed.
The forty-four-second “Flicka”—“Girl”—interrupts the sequence rather than providing relief. Short samples and spoken fragments throughout the album make the outside world feel invasive. They are not atmospheric field recordings establishing a forest, ritual or historical setting. They sound like pieces of ordinary media and human life inserted where they do not belong. Their presence makes the black metal less self-contained. The music cannot retreat into a fantasy of autonomous darkness because scraps of popular culture, speech and recognizable melody keep breaching its walls.
“Den eviga natten,” meaning “The Eternal Night,” is comparatively concise and closer to conventional melancholy, but even here Ravenlord’s performance prevents stability. His delivery is neither a sustained shriek nor a clearly articulated narration. He tries to force sentences through the music as though the words have accumulated faster than they can be released. At moments, he sounds enraged; elsewhere, exhausted or grotesquely amused. The voice’s indifference to elegant phrasing becomes one of Woods of Infinity’s signatures. It places language under pressure without reducing it to an abstract rasp.
The 2010 booklet makes that language harder for non-Swedish listeners to ignore. Woods of Infinity’s lyrics use murder, sexuality, childhood, self-destruction, satanic imagery and deliberately transgressive humor in ways that range from bleak to repellent. Translation removes the protective distance that Ravenlord’s Swedish delivery may provide. These are not merely occult poems decorating abrasive music, and describing them as generic misanthropy would conceal their specificity. The band repeatedly tests whether disgust can be made aesthetically productive. Sometimes it can; at other points, provocation becomes an end in itself and leaves the music carrying more weight than the words.
“Vid kedjan av kommande år”—approximately “At the Chain of Coming Years”—is the album’s eleven-minute center of gravity. Its duration allows the guitar figures to move beyond simple repetition and become a kind of confinement. The title’s chain is temporal: year attached to year, continuation experienced as restraint. This is where the album’s annihilation half feels most persuasive. The track does not explode toward destruction; it remains trapped inside duration. Melodies return with slightly altered emphasis while Ravenlord continues his pressured monologue, giving the impression of consciousness unable to stop reproducing itself.
“Framtid” and “Dystopia” are among the record’s more accessible songs, though accessibility is relative. Their structures are clearer, and their recurring guitar lines have an immediate pull. Placed after the extended “Vid kedjan,” they briefly suggest that the album has found a more disciplined shape. This is deceptive. Samples, vocal excess and awkward instrumental collisions remain, but the songs reveal that Woods of Infinity could write memorable black metal without abandoning its peculiar identity. The later albums would refine this capacity, building richer folk-derived melodies and denser arrangements from the same basic instinct.
“Brutalt mord” returns to blunt language and raw attack, while “Missfostret Tellus” expands its disgust toward the earth itself. The latter had previously appeared on a 2002 split with Armagedda and is one of this edition’s strongest culminations. Its seven minutes contain the project’s early personality in concentrated form: primitive aggression, bitter melody, social revulsion and a strange undercurrent of theatrical exaggeration. The hostility is so excessive that it can register as dark comedy, but the music never supplies a clear signal indicating where mockery ends and conviction begins.
“Bortom tveksamheten”—“Beyond Doubt” or “Beyond Hesitation”—closes the 2010 program without making the preceding sprawl feel resolved. That lack of resolution is appropriate. Förintelse & Libido is not shaped like a single journey toward revelation. It is a repository of material produced during the band’s formative period, retaining the abruptness and internal imbalance of its cassette origins. The 2002 tape contained a somewhat different and longer selection, while the later CD editions created a new sequence from those sessions. The 2010 release does not disguise that history by polishing the material into a retrospective album.
As a seventy-four-minute listen, it is undeniably bloated. Several ideas would become more effective through reduction, the recording quality changes distractingly, and some provocations wear out before the songs containing them do. Yet shortening the record too drastically would misrepresent its appeal. Excess is not incidental here. Woods of Infinity sounds as if it does not yet know which of its impulses will matter, so it preserves nearly all of them: folk melody, raw black metal, media collage, despair, ugliness, satire, harmonica, violin and obsessive narration.
Compared with Ljuset, the craft is less developed and the transitions far rougher. What Förintelse & Libido possesses instead is the excitement of an identity forming without supervision. The later Woods of Infinity sound is already present but has not learned to contain itself. Melkor’s melodies repeatedly reach beyond genre convention, Ravenlord treats vocals as an unruly literary stream, and familiar samples are used to contaminate rather than decorate the atmosphere. The 2010 edition presents this early disorder with unusual clarity of context while leaving the recordings themselves abrasive and unresolved. It is not the band’s most coherent album, but coherence would have made it less truthful to its title: appetite and destruction locked together, each preventing the other from reaching completion.

Woods Of Infinity - 2011 - Forlat

 

Obscure Abhorrence Productions – OAP008  456.46MB FLAC

Förlåt begins with a joke that also functions as a compositional instruction. In Swedish, the title means “sorry” or “forgive me,” but the opening instrumental is called “För-låt”: literally something like “before-song.” Its two and a half minutes introduce the album with sweeping keyboards, bright orchestral colors and a melody closer to a winter fantasy soundtrack than orthodox black metal. The hyphen pulls the word apart, revealing another meaning hidden inside it. Woods of Infinity proceeds to do the same thing musically, taking its established language apart and exposing symphonic pop, Swedish folk music, childhood nostalgia, sexual vulgarity, collage and strangely radiant melody inside the blackened exterior.
Recorded during 2009 and 2010 and released by Obscure Abhorrence Productions in December 2011, Förlåt was Woods of Infinity’s final full-length album. Melkor again handled guitars, bass and programmed drums, while Ravenlord supplied voices and samples. The division of labor had changed little since their earliest recordings, but the result is far removed from the hostile disorganization of Förintelse & Libido. The sound remains raw enough to preserve friction, yet the arrangements are clearer, more melodic and more elaborately colored. Woods of Infinity had not become a symphonic black-metal band in the usual sense. Orchestral sounds do not inflate the music into bombast; they make it more theatrical, romantic and emotionally ambiguous.
“Förbjuden frukt,” or “Forbidden Fruit,” demonstrates that shift immediately. Guitar, keyboard and programmed rhythm work as coordinated parts rather than competing layers. Ravenlord still refuses a stable vocal identity, moving among high shrieks, heavy declarations, chanting and cleaner melodic phrases. His transitions can feel startling, but they no longer sound accidental. Each voice enters like a different character stepping onto a small stage. Melkor’s riffs retain the project’s crooked folk-derived motion while becoming unusually catchy. The track can sound inviting and suspicious at once, which is one of Förlåt’s governing contradictions.
“Mörkrädd”—“Afraid of the Dark”—pushes that contradiction into openly melodic territory. The title reverses black metal’s usual theatrical relationship with darkness: instead of mastering or worshipping it, the speaker fears it. The music has a cold, romantic sweep, with guitar figures and symphonic textures carrying a sense of movement through an imaginary winter landscape. Yet Woods of Infinity never allows that landscape to become dignified fantasy scenery. Ravenlord’s eccentric delivery, abrupt tonal changes and occasional samples keep puncturing the illusion. Beauty is present, but the album continually catches itself believing too deeply in beauty and responds with a grimace or joke.
This tension is particularly effective in the cover of Howard Blake’s “Walking in the Air,” the central song from the animated film The Snowman. The original is almost weightless, bound to childhood wonder, flight and the knowledge that the magical experience cannot last. Woods of Infinity does not select it as an ironic novelty. Its snowbound melancholy already belongs in the band’s world. The arrangement draws out the unease beneath the familiar melody, where innocence and disappearance have always been connected. Heard between “Mörkrädd” and the bluntly titled “Slicka fitta,” it also becomes part of the album’s unstable movement between childhood imagery and adult obscenity.
That sequencing is deliberately abrasive. “Slicka fitta” replaces lyrical enchantment with an explicit sexual command, refusing any graceful transition between the two. Woods of Infinity has always used sexuality as provocation, obsession and grotesque humor, and the effect remains divisive. At its least interesting, such material can feel like an easy way to contaminate whatever beauty Melkor has created. On Förlåt, however, contamination is part of the larger structure. The record repeatedly prevents nostalgia from presenting itself as pure. Innocence, desire, disgust and sentimental memory are not placed in separate rooms; they intrude upon one another.
“Underbart,” meaning “Wonderful,” contains some of the album’s richest symphonic writing. Its title could be sincere, sarcastic or both, and the music sustains that uncertainty. Keyboard colors give the track a majestic breadth without overwhelming the guitars, while its memorable melodic core remains recognizably Woods of Infinity. The emotional tone is unusually warm, but Ravenlord’s voices ensure that warmth never becomes uncomplicated uplift. His performance can move from delight to mockery so quickly that the distinction seems artificial. The album’s blackness increasingly resides in this ambiguity rather than continuous aggression.
The first nine tracks form a remarkably concise forty-minute album on their own. Most last between three and five and a half minutes, and each introduces a strong identity without exhausting it. Compared with the seventy-four-minute sprawl of Förintelse & Libido, the writing is disciplined. Melkor’s melodies no longer need extended repetition to establish atmosphere, and Ravenlord uses vocal variation to sharpen the songs rather than simply overcrowd them. The programmed drums remain conspicuously mechanical, but their rigidity suits the album’s storybook motion. They resemble the machinery beneath a carousel: audible, slightly unnatural and necessary to keep the painted figures moving.
“Gånglåt från Valhallavägen” deepens the connection to Swedish musical culture. A gånglåt is a traditional walking tune, generally played at the relaxed tempo of a stately procession. Valhallavägen is also an actual avenue in Stockholm, allowing the title to join mythological Valhalla to an ordinary modern street. That overlap describes Woods of Infinity’s folk influence more accurately than images of ancient forests and warriors would. The band hears archaic forms surviving inside contemporary Sweden, where myth, popular entertainment, urban life and private memory remain tangled together.
“De vilda vågornas piran”—“The Piranha of the Wild Waves”—returns to the duo’s peculiar storybook language. The phrase sounds like a creature from a children’s adventure distorted into something predatory. Its music maintains the album’s quick movement between vigorous black-metal riffing and broader melodic passages, never remaining in one emotional register long enough to become predictable. “Ursprung,” or “Origin,” follows with a more searching character. As the last conventional song before the album’s enormous collage, it feels like an attempt to trace the record’s sounds backward toward their sources.
Then comes “Våt ängsmark,” a twenty-six-minute-and-fifty-second construction occupying nearly forty percent of Förlåt. A superficial description might call it a random chain of samples, but the collage has a clear organizing obsession. It assembles dozens of short excerpts from Swedish folk songs, comedy recordings and popular music of the late 1960s through the 1980s, many connected by the recurring word or image “flicka”—girl. Identified sources include Fred Åkerström, Lill Lindfors, Ola Magnell, Alf Robertson, Mörbyligan, Totte Wallin, Göran Fristorp and numerous others.
The excerpts arrive rapidly, often surviving for only ten or twenty seconds before being replaced. Male and female voices, sentimental ballads, humorous songs, orchestral arrangements and folk performances form a compressed tour through several decades of Swedish cultural memory. Removed from their original contexts and forced into close proximity, the clips reveal recurring attitudes toward girls and women: idealization, desire, nostalgia, vulgarity, comedy and possession. The title literally means “Wet Meadow,” though its wording also participates in the sexual wordplay running through the album. What first sounds like a radio being restlessly retuned gradually becomes an obsessive linguistic and cultural inventory.
Whether “Våt ängsmark” succeeds as music is a different question. At nearly twenty-seven minutes, it overwhelms the album’s proportions and halts the momentum established by the preceding songs. The repetition of very short excerpts can become exhausting, particularly for listeners unable to recognize the Swedish performers or understand the verbal connections. Yet reducing it to a brief interlude would eliminate its point. Obsession requires excess. The collage needs to continue past novelty, past easy amusement and into discomfort before its accumulating pattern becomes fully apparent.
It also clarifies Ravenlord’s role throughout the Woods of Infinity catalogue. Sampling was never merely a method of adding cinematic atmosphere between riffs. It connected the band’s supposedly isolated black-metal world to the ordinary culture surrounding it. Sinatra and Beethoven disrupted Förintelse & Libido; Barry Manilow entered Hejdå; Howard Blake appears here alongside an enormous archive of Swedish popular voices. Woods of Infinity treats black metal not as a sealed tradition but as one contaminated region within a much larger listening life.
The final untitled minute acts as a small aftershock. Following the vast collage, any conventional metal finale would sound artificial, so Förlåt ends with a brief fragment rather than trying to recover its earlier grandeur. The sequence leaves the listener amid residue: remembered melodies, severed words and media voices whose original sources have blurred together. Forgiveness, if the album’s title truly requests it, is neither granted nor clearly deserved.
Förlåt is Woods of Infinity’s most melodic and outward-looking album, but it is not necessarily the easiest. The first forty minutes contain some of the duo’s most controlled writing, balancing raw guitar, symphonic color, folk-derived melody and Ravenlord’s extraordinary range of voices. “Våt ängsmark” then deliberately breaks that album apart and replaces it with cultural collage. Listeners may reasonably regard the track as either the record’s conceptual center or an enormous obstruction attached to an otherwise concise work.
That division is appropriate for a band whose music consistently resists a settled interpretation. Förlåt can be funny, repellent, beautiful, childish, sophisticated and exhausting without those qualities canceling one another. It does not abandon black metal so much as demonstrate how many foreign memories had always been concealed inside Woods of Infinity’s version of it. As a final album, it offers no summation and no apology simple enough to accept. It opens the band’s private world onto Swedish popular culture, lets everything rush inside, and closes before the resulting disorder can be cleaned up.