Oranssi Pazuzu - 2009 - Muukalainen Puhuu

 

Violent Journey Records – VJR020  293.78MB FLAC

Muukalainen puhuu begins with a crow circling somewhere beyond the edge of the atmosphere. “Korppi” emerges through a thin psychedelic guitar figure, pulsing bass and keyboards that seem to illuminate an abandoned landscape from below. The rhythm moves with deliberate simplicity, allowing each repetition to loosen the music from ordinary time. Then Jun-His enters with a scorched rasp that belongs unmistakably to black metal, but the world surrounding him has already drifted far beyond the forest.
Oranssi Pazuzu’s debut did not sound like a metal band cautiously adding psychedelic decoration to an established style. The five musicians approached black metal as one unstable element among several. Tremolo guitar, harsh vocals and blast beats could appear beside krautrock repetition, dub-like bass, primitive synthesizers, surf guitar, free-form noise and the glowing organs of late-1960s psychedelic rock.
The band’s name announces the collision. “Oranssi” means orange in Finnish, while Pazuzu is the ancient Mesopotamian wind demon made famous to modern audiences by The Exorcist. Color and demonology, sunlight and possession, cheap brightness and ancient dread are welded together before the record even begins.
“Korppi” establishes the method with unusual confidence. Its central groove is almost relaxed, built from bass and drums moving in a circular pattern rather than charging toward a conventional climax. Guitar lines appear at the edges like signals caught by damaged receivers. The harsh vocal does not dominate the arrangement. It moves through the sound as another hostile frequency.
Black metal traditionally places nature outside civilization, using mountains, snow and forests as symbols of purity or isolation. Muukalainen puhuu looks upward instead. Its landscapes are planetary, chemically altered and psychologically unstable. The wilderness is no longer a remote Finnish woodland. It is the distance between recognizable human thought and whatever may be speaking through it.
“Danjon Nolla” increases the motion without abandoning hypnosis. The bassline carries a dark psychedelic swing, while guitars repeat short figures until they begin bending around the rhythm. Keyboards glow behind the band rather than supplying grand symphonic atmosphere.
The title refers to the Danjon scale used to measure the darkness of a lunar eclipse, with zero indicating an exceptionally dark moon. That astronomical idea fits the music’s peculiar light. Muukalainen puhuu is not completely black. Orange, violet and poisonous green seem to leak through its darkness, creating the impression of an eclipse viewed through contaminated glass.
Jun-His’ vocals are essential because they prevent the album’s psychedelic drift from becoming comfortable. His voice sounds dry, distant and badly damaged, as though transmitted from a body that cannot survive the environment containing it. The words are Finnish, but their emotional function remains clear even when their literal meaning is unavailable. They arrive as warnings, observations or involuntary communications.
“Uraanisula” moves closer to radioactive blues. Its title suggests molten uranium, and the guitar has a liquid, corrosive quality. The riff does not cut with black metal’s usual frozen sharpness. It bubbles, stretches and leaves residue.
Ontto’s bass repeatedly becomes the album’s central instrument. Rather than remaining underneath the guitars, it supplies many of the most memorable movements. Its warm, rounded tone connects the record to psychedelic rock and dub, giving the music a bodily pull even when keyboards and guitars are attempting to leave the planet.
Korjak’s drumming is similarly resistant to genre discipline. Blast beats appear, but they are only one available form of motion. He uses tom-heavy patterns, rock grooves and steady motorik repetition, allowing the songs to build pressure without depending upon constant speed.
“Kuolleen Porton Muistolle” makes the dub connection explicit. Its title translates roughly as “In Memory of a Dead Whore,” but the music is less interested in narrative shock than diseased atmosphere. Bass and drums create a hollow nocturnal pulse while echo seems to open chambers around the instruments.
Dub production traditionally removes expected elements, leaving bass, percussion and reverberation to expose the skeleton of a song. Oranssi Pazuzu performs a related operation upon black metal. The guitars occasionally retreat, revealing how much threat can be generated by low frequencies and empty space.
The track feels like music leaking from a club whose occupants disappeared several hours earlier. Rhythm continues after the social purpose of rhythm has vanished. Echo repeats gestures nobody remains to answer.
“Muukalainen puhuu” gives the alien its voice. The title track begins with a patient, almost ceremonial movement before harsher guitar and vocals enter. The alien does not arrive through a cinematic spacecraft or electronic special effect. It speaks through the band’s existing instruments, taking possession of bass, organ and distorted guitar.
This is one of the album’s central ideas. The extraterrestrial is not necessarily a creature outside humanity. It may be the voice produced when consciousness becomes unfamiliar to itself. Psychedelia has always used outer space as an image of inner transformation. Oranssi Pazuzu turns that voyage hostile.
Evil’s keyboards and percussion are especially important here. His sounds do not imitate expensive analog grandeur. They hiss, wobble and flicker with the unstable charm of old science-fiction equipment. A note can resemble an organ, laboratory oscillator or warning system without settling into one identity.
The title track gradually gathers intensity, but its climax remains strange rather than triumphant. The rhythm tightens, vocals become more urgent and the guitars rise, yet the song never offers the clean release expected from a rock crescendo. The transmission simply becomes stronger.
“Myöhempien Aikojen Pyhien Teatterin Rukoilijasirkka” carries the album’s most enormous title, translating approximately as “The Praying Mantis of the Theatre of Latter-Day Saints.” It is absurd, occult and faintly comic, a combination Oranssi Pazuzu handles better than solemn cosmic language.
The track is also among the record’s most violent. Tremolo guitars and rapid drumming drag the music closer to traditional black metal, but keyboard flashes and shifting rhythms prevent the attack from becoming straightforward. The praying mantis is an ideal creature for the band: alien in appearance, patient, devotional in posture and violently efficient once it moves.
Oranssi Pazuzu’s humor matters. Cosmic and occult music can easily become self-important, especially when song titles suggest galaxies, demons and altered consciousness. Muukalainen puhuu maintains enough weirdness to puncture its own grandeur. The band sounds genuinely committed to its atmosphere without behaving as though every synthesizer noise has revealed a sacred universal truth.
“Suuri Pää Taivaasta” translates as “A Great Head from the Sky,” an image that belongs equally to religious vision, hallucination and cheap horror cinema. The track begins with slow, ominous movement, allowing the title’s gigantic head to remain suspended above the listener before the band grows more forceful.
The atmosphere here is less an open space voyage than a psychedelic horror film. Organ tones hover, guitars scrape and the rhythm seems to move through fog. The great head does not explain its presence. It simply occupies the sky, large enough to reorganize everything beneath it.
This refusal to explain gives the album its power. Later Oranssi Pazuzu records would become more elaborate, heavier and more compositionally controlled, but the debut retains the unsettling quality of musicians discovering a language while already speaking it.
“Kangastus 1968” directly invokes psychedelia’s historical period. “Kangastus” can mean mirage, and 1968 functions as both a year and a compressed cultural symbol: political revolt, psychedelic expansion, communal dreams and their approaching collapse.
The music does not imitate one specific 1968 band. It creates a mirage of the era through organ, loose guitar, repeated bass and studio haze. The past appears in distorted form, viewed across four decades and filtered through Finnish black metal.
This is not nostalgic revivalism. Oranssi Pazuzu does not attempt to restore psychedelic rock’s lost innocence. The band assumes the dream has already curdled. The bright colors remain, but they illuminate paranoia, environmental danger and mental disintegration.
“Kerjettiläiskirkko” closes the album with its longest journey. The title means “Beggar Church,” joining religious architecture to poverty and exclusion. The track begins with a slow, stalking bass movement while keyboards build a dim sanctuary around it.
The church does not sound grand. It feels assembled from scraps, occupied by people denied entrance elsewhere. Guitars growl and shimmer above the rhythm, occasionally opening into wider psychedelic space before collapsing back into the central pulse.
As the piece develops, the album’s opposing forces stop behaving like separate genres. Black metal is no longer the violent material and psychedelia the atmospheric material. The repetition itself becomes oppressive. The keyboards become threatening. Even the groove begins to feel like entrapment.
The album cover captures this fusion through a landscape that appears biological, planetary and painted under chemical influence. Its orange and dark tones suggest sunset on an unfamiliar world, but forms within the image resist stable scale. They might be mountains, tissue, smoke or organisms growing across the surface.
Nothing on Muukalainen puhuu appears fully solid. Guitar riffs bend, rhythms circle, voices arrive through haze and the landscape seems capable of breathing. The record’s relatively rough production strengthens that instability. Instruments overlap, edges blur and certain sounds appear to leak through the walls of the mix.
Later Oranssi Pazuzu albums would achieve much greater sonic depth. Kosmonument expanded the cosmic narrative, Valonielu sharpened the songwriting and Värähtelijä transformed repetition into immense psychedelic architecture. Muukalainen puhuu is smaller and less controlled, but its uncertainty cannot be recreated through refinement.
The band already possessed its essential identity in 2009. Black metal could provide hostility without establishing boundaries. Psychedelia could offer expansion without becoming gentle. Krautrock repetition could create trance, while dub could turn absence and bass into forms of menace.
The alien does not speak in a language humanity has never heard. It uses familiar materials incorrectly. A black-metal scream drifts across a bass groove. A blast beat interrupts an organ meditation. A surf-like guitar line bends beneath radioactive clouds.
By the end of “Kerjettiläiskirkko,” the transmission has not been translated. It has changed the receiver. The orange demon remains somewhere inside the machinery, speaking through static while the instruments continue circling an unfamiliar sun.

The Haters - 2025 - New York About The Polywave

 

Troniks – TRO-361  380.17MB FLAC

New York About the Polywave begins with a clock being attacked by tools designed to move earth. “Digging Through Time (#436)” documents The Haters at TV Eye in Queens on February 22, 2025, with GX Jupitter-Larsen scraping a shovel against a large wooden clock while John Wiese and Crank Sturgeon scratch and sand their own shovels. The resulting sound is immediately harsh, but describing it as harsh noise captures only the acoustic wreckage. The real composition is the collision between objects, actions, history, audience and the absurdly literal idea of digging through time.
A shovel normally enters soil. A clock measures the interval during which the digging occurs. The Haters force both tools into the wrong jobs. The shovel does not excavate earth; it abrades the clock. The clock does not measure the performance from a safe distance; it becomes the material being worn down.
That reversal belongs completely to GX’s world. Since forming The Haters in 1979, he has treated noise less as a musical genre than as the audible residue of actions performed upon objects. Grinding, scraping, punching, sanding, drilling, tearing and breaking are not methods used to create expressive textures afterward. They are the event itself. The sound proves that surfaces met and neither remained unchanged.
The first track runs for more than seventeen minutes, long enough for the scraping to lose its identity as one action. At first the ear follows the scrape of metal against wood. Gradually, those sources widen into abrasive bands of sound, bursts of lower impact and unstable friction. The clock and shovels stop behaving like props and become an electrical weather system created through physical resistance.
John Wiese’s presence adds density and quick internal change. His work often turns noise into an accelerated field of cuts, pressure shifts and sharply articulated detail, but here he submits that instinct to the action’s simple material logic. Crank Sturgeon brings his own long history of amplified objects and homemade performance systems. Three distinct approaches meet around the shovel, one of humanity’s oldest practical tools.
The crowd is not merely listening. After GX throws the oversized clock into the packed room, the audience smashes it. That destruction completes the piece by removing the division between performer and witness. The clock passes from controlled abrasion into collective demolition.
Noise performance often praises participation while keeping the important equipment safely onstage. The Haters hands over the central object and accepts whatever form the action takes next. The audience does not improvise a tasteful response. It destroys the thing placed within reach.
“Digging Through Time Encore (#436)” exists because the audience demanded another round. An encore is usually a repetition of pleasure after the official performance has ended, a familiar song returned as reward. Here the encore extends a destructive process whose primary object has already been damaged.
This produces a peculiar problem. Destruction does not reset between performances. A song can be played again using the same chords. A smashed clock cannot be restored to its earlier condition for a clean second pass. The encore therefore begins with altered material and a changed social atmosphere. The crowd now knows it can intervene.
The eleven-minute recording sounds rougher and less ceremonially contained. The action has crossed the threshold from presentation into aftermath. Scrapes and impacts no longer announce a new object under examination. They continue working upon whatever survived.
The numbered performance titles give these events an archival precision that contrasts beautifully with their physical disorder. “#436” places the Queens show inside a sequence extending across decades. The number does not explain what happened, but confirms that the action belongs to an ongoing practice rather than a spontaneous outbreak.
This is one meaning carried by the album’s title. “Polywave” is part of GX’s private vocabulary of measurements, forms and conceptual units. The exact term resists ordinary scientific definition, but its function is clear enough inside The Haters’ universe: reality can be measured through systems invented specifically to expose the instability of ordinary measurement.
New York is “about” the polywave rather than simply located inside it. The title makes the city sound like evidence offered in support of an impossible theorem. Three venues, three decades and several generations of objects become coordinates in a personal system whose units include decay, repetition and audience behavior.
“Dirwyn (#284)” jumps backward to June 7, 2001. This variation of the Dirwyn performance was staged at Scrape & Pry gallery and used an amplified calculator pressed against a small fan, with GX’s Untitled Title Belt providing additional sound.
The objects are smaller than the clock and shovels, but the conceptual mechanism is similar. A calculator represents exact operation, numerical certainty and the transformation of input into answer. A fan produces repeated mechanical movement without arriving anywhere. Pressing the calculator against the fan places calculation inside a cycle of impact.
The contact microphone enlarges that interaction until small plastic mechanisms become violently present. What might look pathetic from across a room becomes enormous through amplification. Buttons, housing and spinning blades generate a coarse mechanical vibration that sounds more industrial than the objects deserve.
That mismatch between source and result is one of The Haters’ great pleasures. The work does not require expensive machinery, military hardware or an abandoned factory. A calculator and fan contain sufficient violence once their intended functions are interrupted and their friction is amplified.
The title belt adds theatrical authority. Professional wrestling has long occupied GX’s conceptual universe because it treats performance, conflict, costume, physical impact and invented measurement as one system. A title belt certifies victory inside a contest whose rules are both real and theatrical.
Calling it the Untitled Title Belt creates another useful contradiction. It grants status while withholding the name of the achievement. The belt has authority without a stable category, much like the polywave itself.
The recording’s fifteen minutes accumulate through repetition rather than narrative progression. The calculator keeps contacting the fan. The action becomes rhythm without agreeing to become music. Mechanical cycles appear, distort and wear their sources.
The physical deterioration is important. Repetition in electronic music can be theoretically endless because a loop remains identical. The Haters’ repetitions change because objects wear down. Plastic cracks, paper tears, metal dulls and motors strain. Entropy edits the composition from inside.
“Clici-clic (#155)” returns to December 8, 1991, when three members of The Haters performed the first clici-clic action at Generator Gallery in Chelsea. Each used a handheld hole punch fitted with a contact microphone to pierce hundreds of holes through paper and cardboard.
The hole punch is nearly perfect Haters technology. Its purpose is to remove small circles from a surface. Every use creates emptiness while producing a tiny piece of material as evidence. The object does not draw or build. It subtracts.
Amplification turns each subtraction into a blunt, snapping impact. Three performers repeating the action generate a dense pulse that resembles primitive machinery while remaining visibly connected to office supplies and manual labor.
The title copies the action’s sound like a word invented by the tool itself. “Clici-clic” is childish, mechanical and exact enough to enter GX’s private lexicon. It names neither an instrument nor a genre. It names a repeated event.
Over sixteen minutes, the piece creates rhythm more openly than the others. The punches fall at irregular but accumulating intervals, producing a collective choreography of pressure, release and perforation. Paper gradually becomes less capable of remaining a sheet.
Every hole increases the surface’s vulnerability. Eventually the object carrying the action begins losing the structural continuity required for more holes. Destruction creates its own limit.
This early recording also shows how consistent The Haters’ practice has been. The objects and venues change, but the essential grammar remains intact: choose a simple action, amplify its physical consequences, repeat it until deterioration becomes visible and allow sound to function as evidence rather than decoration.
New York About the Polywave is therefore not merely a live compilation. It is a thirty-four-year comparison of the same conceptual organism adapting to different rooms. Chelsea in 1991, a gallery in 2001 and a packed Queens venue in 2025 become three stages of one extended erosion.
The album also preserves the changing relationship between The Haters and their audience. “Clici-clic” presents performers carrying out a disciplined action. “Dirwyn” centers a compact object system. “Digging Through Time” throws the main object directly into the crowd and allows collective destruction to become the ending.
The performances grow more socially porous while retaining their severe simplicity. No elaborate explanation is needed once the clock enters the audience. The crowd understands what to do because the object has already been framed through scraping and noise as something available for transformation.
The CD turns those physical events into fixed recordings, creating a contradiction The Haters has always carried. Entropy is temporary and irreversible, but documentation can be replayed. The clock is gone, the paper remains punctured and the calculator may have stopped functioning, yet the sounds begin again whenever the disc is played.
That repetition does not restore the objects. It produces another layer of distance between action and residue. The recording becomes a second surface upon which the event continues wearing itself down.
The New York setting matters because the city has repeatedly offered The Haters spaces where art, noise, spectacle and participation overlap without requiring comfortable boundaries. Galleries and clubs become laboratories for actions too blunt for conventional concert language and too loud to remain private conceptual gestures.
Yet the album does not romanticize New York underground history. The earliest recording is not presented as a sacred relic, and the newest is not treated as proof of triumphant survival. All three are materials placed beside one another to show that time itself can be scraped, punched and handed to a crowd.
The Haters has lasted because the work was never dependent upon technical novelty. A better synthesizer cannot make a hole punch obsolete. Digital production cannot replace the specific fact of a wooden clock being destroyed by people in a room.
New York About the Polywave makes that fact audible. Numbers become titles, tools lose their assigned functions and simple actions grow enormous through repetition. The clock measures nothing after it enters the crowd. The calculator produces no answer. The hole punch keeps making emptiness.
Across thirty-four years, the surfaces change. The polywave continues.

Dungeon Sorcery - 2025 - Arcane Writ of the Damned Warlock

 

Gladivs Records – none  323.09MB FLAC

Arcane Writ of the Damned Warlock does not open a dungeon door cautiously. “Chants Beneath Her Hollow Crown” throws the entire occult library down the stairs at once: Latin invocations, crypt smoke, serpents, blood keys, black opal tears, broken seals, celestial venom and a crown splitting open to reveal portals of ash. Dungeon Sorcery understands that restraint is useful only after excess has established its kingdom. The album’s first minutes arrive illuminated, crowded and feverish, sounding less like a solitary warlock whispering over one candle than an entire forbidden temple catching fire during the ceremony.
Dungeon Sorcery is the one-person work of Zaubergeist von Nebenwelt, operating from Vojvodina, Serbia. Every instrument and voice belongs to the same hand, but Arcane Writ of the Damned Warlock rarely feels solitary. Guitars, keyboards, shrieks and possessed clean vocals are stacked until the music suggests a congregation appearing around its creator.
This is symphonic black metal, though not the polished cinematic variety where orchestration smooths every rough surface. The keyboards brighten and enlarge the songs, but they do not civilize them. Their role is closer to stained glass struck by lightning. Color floods the chamber while the stone continues cracking.
“Chants Beneath Her Hollow Crown” establishes the album’s most distinctive element: the clean singing. Instead of appearing as a gentle contrast to the harsh voice, it often sounds equally unstable, rising into drawn-out declarations that hover somewhere between traditional heavy metal, ritual theater and private possession. The clean passages do not lead the listener out of the darkness. They give the darkness a ceremonial language.
The harsh vocals remain familiar black-metal weapons, dry and elevated above the riffs, but their relationship with the clean voice creates the impression of several identities occupying the same body. One voice commands. Another interprets. A third seems to be suffering the result.
“In the Power of Darkness” continues through broad, rushing guitar movement and keyboards that keep pushing upward behind the attack. The title is almost aggressively uncomplicated. Dungeon Sorcery does not hide evil behind psychological ambiguity or treat darkness as a vague metaphor for personal discomfort. Power is being requested, recognized and placed at the center of the music.
That directness could easily become childish, but the album’s conviction makes it useful. Black metal has always depended upon the ability to treat impossible declarations as immediate facts. A song does not need to prove that ancient forces are moving through the room. It needs to behave as though doubting them would be foolish.
Zaubergeist’s arrangements rely heavily upon accumulation. A guitar pattern establishes movement, keyboards add scale, vocals multiply and drums accelerate until each song resembles a wave carrying too many objects at once. The music does not always separate its ideas cleanly. It prefers overflow.
“A Hymne for the Fallen Star” gives that overflow a more mournful shape. The misspelled “hymne” lends the title an antique ceremonial quality, while the fallen star connects infernal rebellion to cosmic collapse. Melody remains prominent, but it is never allowed to become reassuring.
The guitars frequently carry a brightness associated with 1990s melodic black metal, where coldness and grandeur could occupy the same phrase. Dungeon Sorcery draws from that tradition without sounding interested in historical reconstruction. The production is too full, the vocal layering too strange and the keyboards too eager to remain background decoration.
The fallen star may be Lucifer, a destroyed celestial body or the last surviving light of an exhausted world. The album does not narrow the image. It keeps the star available as symbol, character and source of poisoned illumination.
“Keepers of the Obsidian Chalice” moves into heavier ceremonial territory. Obsidian is volcanic glass, dark enough to suggest emptiness while sharp enough to become a blade. A chalice made from it would contain ritual liquid while threatening the hands holding it.
The track carries that combination of vessel and weapon. Keyboards provide a broad processional atmosphere, but guitars keep cutting through it. The keepers are not passive guardians standing around a museum object. They sound like an order built around drinking, protecting and perhaps becoming whatever the chalice contains.
Dungeon Sorcery’s song lengths matter. Most tracks pass six minutes, allowing the arrangements to circle their subjects rather than striking once and leaving. Repeated vocal phrases behave like spells whose effectiveness depends upon duration.
That repetition is occasionally exhausting. The album can feel as though every torch, rune, gate and infernal choir must remain visible throughout the entire ceremony. Some sections would strike harder with fewer layers or a quicker exit.
Yet clutter is also part of the record’s identity. Arcane Writ of the Damned Warlock is not elegant occultism. It is a chamber stuffed with scrolls, melted candles, animal bones, rusted blades, smoke and robes dragged through blood. Cleaning the room would destroy the atmosphere.
“Magicalize Blackphetamine” is the album’s most memorable title because it crashes ritual language into chemical slang. “Magicalize” turns magic into an active process, while “Blackphetamine” suggests black metal experienced as stimulant, compulsion and artificial acceleration.
The song embodies that collision. It pushes forward with an almost manic energy, treating sorcery not as slow contemplation but as chemical ignition. Keyboards and guitars rise together until the track feels overclocked, every frequency attempting to enter the bloodstream at once.
The title also reveals Dungeon Sorcery’s underlying humor. The album is serious about its occult theater, but not humorless. “Blackphetamine” is too ridiculous to be accidental, a word that understands how black metal can operate as both spiritual system and addictive sensory product.
The final three songs originated earlier and appear here as bonus tracks, but they fit the album’s world closely enough to avoid feeling like unrelated leftovers. “Sacrifice to the Void” is more direct, built around disappearance rather than ornate celestial mythology. The void receives the offering without confirming that it noticed.
“In the Heart of the Sacred Crypt” contracts the album’s enormous imagery into one interior location. The crypt is sacred because something has been preserved or imprisoned inside it, but the song never clarifies which. Its atmosphere is less triumphant and more enclosed, as though the elaborate ritual has finally descended beneath the structure that contained it.
“Rituals of the Flesh” closes the album by bringing all the cosmic language back into the body. Flesh is temporary, penetrable and easily damaged, yet every ritual requires bodies to perform it. Voices must speak the words. Hands must lift the chalice. Blood must come from somewhere.
This bodily ending prevents the album from disappearing completely into decorative fantasy. Beneath every crown, star, serpent and forbidden seal is the physical fact of one musician performing every part, forcing breath through multiple voices and building an entire order from a single room.
The cover artwork presents the album as an artifact rather than a casual collection of songs. Its occult figure, arcane detail and severe symmetry suggest a page torn from a forbidden manuscript whose illustrations have started generating sound. The sixteen-page booklet extends that feeling, giving the release enough physical space to resemble a small grimoire.
The title itself promises writing with consequences. A writ is an official command, a document whose authority produces action in the world. Making it arcane removes that authority from ordinary law and places it inside hidden knowledge. The damned warlock is not simply writing down spells. He is issuing decrees to forces that may or may not obey him.
Arcane Writ of the Damned Warlock is strongest when those forces seem barely controllable. The clean vocals stretch beyond conventional beauty, keyboards flare too brightly and riffs begin tripping over the amount of atmosphere attached to them. The album’s imperfections make its sorcery feel volatile.
This is not a disciplined royal court of symphonic black metal. It is the warlock’s private order during its first major convocation, still learning which invocations open gates and which merely fill the chamber with smoke.
Dungeon Sorcery does not leave the listener outside waiting for permission. The seal breaks immediately. The hollow crown ignites, the chalice is raised and the entire crypt begins singing in voices that should not fit inside one throat.

Exclipsect - 1999 - Delicate Piece Of Machinery

Slave Indvstries – SI002  211.97MB FLAC

 

Delicate Piece of Machinery begins by treating delicacy as a mechanical tolerance rather than softness. “Hexterity” enters with percussion assembled from clipped metal strikes, compressed kicks and small digital movements locked together so tightly that the whole track seems capable of seizing if one component slips. Exclipsect does not build a machine in order to admire its polished exterior. Mason Yarnell opens the casing, increases the speed and listens to the parts punish one another.

Released in 1999 as a limited CDr on Slave Indvstries, the record belongs to a moment when industrial rhythm was being dismantled and rebuilt through digital editing. The straight military certainty of earlier rhythmic industrial music had begun splintering into IDM, breakcore, power noise and an entire borderland of projects that retained physical impact while abandoning dependable grids. Exclipsect sits directly inside that fracture.
The beats are heavy enough to suggest machinery, but they are not simple factory loops. Each rhythm contains secondary impacts, tiny hesitations and rough fragments packed around the central pulse. A kick lands, then appears to shed particles. A metallic strike repeats with slight differences in pressure. Distortion fills the gaps until the beat and the damage surrounding it become inseparable.
“Hexterity” is a perfect title for that method. It suggests dexterity reorganized through hexadecimal code, human coordination translated into machine language. The track sounds precise, but the precision is hostile. Every element has been placed exactly where it can create the most friction with the next.
The machinery on this record is delicate because it is complicated. A hammer is not delicate. It either strikes or does not. A tightly programmed rhythmic system can fail through one misplaced event, timing error or overloaded frequency. Exclipsect continually approaches that failure without allowing the structure to collapse.
“The Standard” turns the title into a challenge. Standards establish compatibility, quality and expected behavior, but the track refuses stable measurement. Its rhythm begins with something close to an industrial march, then fills the route with broken percussion and abrasive electronic residue.
Yarnell’s strongest programming does not merely add more sounds. He makes separate rhythmic layers interfere with how the listener perceives the main beat. One pattern suggests a steady count while another arrives slightly across it. The body begins following one route, then discovers that the track has been building a second route underneath.
This is where Delicate Piece of Machinery escapes the rigid stomp that weakened so much late-1990s industrial dance music. The record has force, but force is not confused with simplicity. These tracks can hit hard while remaining mentally unstable.
The CDr format strengthens the release’s workshop quality. In 1999, a recordable compact disc still carried the atmosphere of direct manufacture. It could be duplicated in small quantities, labeled by hand or assembled through modest means without waiting for a pressing plant. The format looked futuristic and provisional at the same time.
That contradiction suits Exclipsect. The music is intensely digital, yet it does not sound like frictionless technology. It has grit, overload and the coarse edge of equipment being pushed beyond polite operation. The computer is not presented as a clean instrument of infinite possibility. It is another machine capable of heat, error and exhaustion.
“Delicate Piece of Machinery” makes the title physical. Its rhythm is among the release’s most punishing, with heavy kicks and rough upper percussion forming a compact moving block. Yet the details prevent the track from becoming one long impact. Small programmed events flicker through the pressure, briefly exposing the internal construction before being swallowed again.
The title track resembles a device seen through vibration. The listener cannot hold the complete shape still because every component is moving too quickly. What appears solid from a distance becomes a swarm of individual collisions when examined closely.
This is one of the record’s central pleasures. It can function as blunt rhythmic music at high volume, but close listening reveals an obsessive concern with arrangement. Distortion is layered rather than sprayed indiscriminately. Percussion is crowded but not arbitrary. The tracks possess a clear sense of where pressure should gather and where a small opening will make the next impact feel heavier.
“Watch the Gap” changes the album’s behavior most clearly. The title comes from transit warnings, where a calm recorded voice reminds passengers that a dangerous empty space exists between platform and train. Exclipsect turns that gap into the track’s main compositional territory.
The rhythm is looser and almost funky, though funk here has been damaged by mechanical repetition and digital abrasion. Layered percussion pulls in several directions, leaving pockets of air that the earlier tracks would have filled with another strike. A cryptic vocal sample moves across the surface, offering language without reliable explanation.
The voice changes the scale of the music. Until this point, Delicate Piece of Machinery can be imagined as an autonomous system operating in an empty room. The sample introduces human presence, but only as recorded residue trapped inside the mechanism. It does not control the track. It worms through it.
“Watch the Gap” also reveals how effectively Exclipsect uses absence. The project is usually described through bombardment, speed and weight, but the altered spaces between beats matter just as much. A missing impact creates anticipation. A brief reduction in distortion exposes the roughness of whatever follows.
Industrial music has always depended upon fantasies of machinery, but Exclipsect’s machine is not the gigantic steel press of nineteenth-century manufacturing. It belongs to the late twentieth century: electronic, compressed, modular and increasingly invisible. Its violence occurs through information moving too quickly, systems synchronized beyond human comfort and labor reduced to command sequences.
The artwork and title carry that atmosphere without requiring an elaborate concept. Delicate Piece of Machinery sounds like language printed on a technical label, warning the handler that the object contains sensitive parts. The phrase usually asks for care. Exclipsect responds by shaking the package.
There is humor in the contradiction. Nothing about the record’s main rhythmic attack feels delicate in the ordinary sense. The kicks are blunt, distortion is coarse and the pace repeatedly approaches physical intimidation. But the title becomes more accurate the longer the music is heard. Beneath the bludgeoning surface is an intricate structure whose violence depends upon careful assembly.
The project’s relationship to IDM is therefore complicated. The acronym promises intelligent dance music, a label that often elevated detailed programming above bodily function. Exclipsect keeps both. These tracks are intellectually constructed but remain unwilling to become polite headphone puzzles.
The beats demand physical response even when their internal details resist easy movement. A body may locate the main pulse while the mind follows the smaller events tearing around it. Dance and analysis happen simultaneously, neither completely controlling the experience.
There is also a strong connection to power noise, though Delicate Piece of Machinery is less monolithic than the genre’s most familiar forms. The percussion carries power noise’s weight and distortion, but Yarnell keeps introducing enough variation to disturb the military grid. The machine marches, stutters, recalculates and resumes.
That sense of recalculation gives the mini-album narrative movement despite its instrumental focus. The record begins with a system displaying its speed and dexterity, attempts to establish a standard, names itself as machinery and finally arrives at the gap where the system’s human and mechanical elements begin slipping against one another.
The limited length works in its favor. Exclipsect does not stretch the central vocabulary across an hour merely because digital media permits it. The release behaves like a concentrated demonstration, introducing a machine, running several stress tests and ending before familiarity can soften the impact.
Its roughness also preserves the period beautifully. Later rhythmic industrial production often became larger, cleaner and more standardized. Drums gained enormous low-end polish, editing became nearly invisible and distortion could be shaped with laboratory precision. Delicate Piece of Machinery still sounds connected to discovery.
The edges are coarse enough to reveal the tools. Programming feels handmade even when no hand could physically execute the rhythms. The CDr carries the sense of music leaving the workstation quickly, before the process could be buried beneath professional finish.
That immediacy matters because Exclipsect’s later work would continue refining the same territory. The project’s identity is already present here: relentless rhythmic weight, digital complexity, industrial texture and the desire to make programmed percussion feel less like obedient sequencing than controlled structural damage.
The record does not require a large mythology. There are no ruined cities, military samples or declarations about technological apocalypse. The machine itself supplies the subject. Its rhythm, tolerance, repetition and potential failure contain enough drama.
Delicate Piece of Machinery is therefore less a portrait of technology than an argument with it. Exclipsect constructs a system precise enough to operate, then keeps feeding it distortion, speed and competing instructions. The pleasure comes from hearing how much punishment the structure can absorb without losing its shape.
The warning label remains attached. The casing vibrates. Something inside is clearly fragile, but the machine keeps striking the floor with the confidence of an object that has mistaken its own damage for fuel.

Tómarúm - 2025 - Beyond Obsidian Euphoria

 

Prosthetic Records – PROS106292  526.19MB FLAC

Havukruunu - 2025 - Tavastland

 

Svart Records – svart350CD  385.77MB FLAC

Tavastland begins with a song refusing to die. “Kuolematon Laulunhenki,” the immortal spirit of song, rises through acoustic guitar, distant choir and a melody that seems to have survived several winters before the full band arrives. The opening is not merely atmospheric preparation. It establishes music itself as one of the album’s characters, an old force carried through memory, landscape and voices until somebody finds the courage to release it again.
When the distorted guitars enter, Havukruunu sounds enormous without becoming polished into weightlessness. Stefa and Bootleg-Henkka layer tremolo lines, heavy-metal harmonies and broad chords until the music feels both airborne and rooted. Kostajainen’s drums drive beneath them with blasts, gallops and rolling tom patterns, while Humö’s bass remains loud enough to rattle inside the arrangement rather than disappear under the guitars.
Havukruunu has always been called pagan black metal, but Tavastland makes the limitation of that label especially obvious. Black metal supplies the rasped voice, speed, cold guitar movement and hostility toward Christian authority. Traditional heavy metal supplies much of the record’s emotional muscle. These songs do not merely howl into forests. They charge, crest, salute fallen figures and return to riffs designed to be remembered.
“Yönsynty” moves through several of those identities in less than six minutes. Its title suggests something born from night, and the track begins with the feeling of darkness producing movement rather than silence. Guitars climb in tight harmony while the rhythm pushes forward with an almost heroic force.
The heroic quality remains complicated. Havukruunu’s melodies can sound victorious even when the lyrics concern loss, forgotten history and spiritual estrangement. The triumph exists inside the act of remembering rather than in any clear historical victory. A melody rises because the past has not been completely erased.
This tension separates Tavastland from metal that uses paganism as costume. The album is filled with forests, ancestors, rebellion and pre-Christian imagery, but it is equally concerned with modern disconnection. Stefa’s concept links old religious conquest to the contemporary figure who has become frightened of darkness, enclosed at home and surrounded by devices while the land outside grows increasingly unfamiliar.
“Havukruunu ja Talvenvarjo” makes that conflict personal. The title joins the band’s conifer crown with the shadow of winter, placing identity beside the season that threatens to swallow it. The song erupts through one of the album’s fastest passages, but its central melody carries a wounded, almost homesick quality.
Acoustic guitar briefly enters against distorted movement, not as a peaceful interlude but as another layer of memory. Havukruunu does not divide electric violence from folk reflection cleanly. Both can occur at once because the past is not a quiet refuge outside the present. It continues pressing through it.
The title track is the album’s public banner. “Tavastland” refers to Häme, the historical region associated with the Tavastians, but Havukruunu transforms geography into an imagined territory of resistance. The song’s video uses archival imagery to place this mythology against actual Finnish faces, landscapes and labor, grounding the record’s larger gestures in ordinary bodies.
Musically, “Tavastland” is among the album’s most immediate tracks. Its chorus rises through massed voices and bright guitar lines, creating the sensation of a community gathering around a melody older than any individual singer. Stefa’s harsh vocal remains at the center, but the choir turns private proclamation into collective force.
That choir is essential throughout the album. Group singing can suggest celebration, ritual, drinking hall, funeral or army depending upon the surrounding rhythm. Havukruunu moves easily among those meanings. The voices often sound proud, but pride here is inseparable from mourning.
“Kuoleman Oma” means something close to belonging to death. The phrase does not describe death as a distant event approaching from outside. It describes possession, a person already claimed even while still moving through the world.
The track is darker and heavier, allowing the guitars to descend from the open sky into more enclosed movement. A strong heavy-metal riff anchors the song while higher lines continue circling above it. Stefa’s voice sounds less like a narrator than the thing announcing ownership.
Havukruunu’s production gives every layer enough room to remain physical. The guitars are broad but not overly smooth. Cymbals retain rough edges. The bass has a clanking attack that brings cold air into the lower frequencies. The recording feels carefully built while preserving the sense that human beings are striking strings and drums hard enough to hurt.
“Unissakävijä,” the sleepwalker, introduces one of Tavastland’s most unsettling figures. Sleepwalking involves movement without full consciousness, the body navigating familiar space while the mind remains elsewhere. It becomes an effective image for cultural alienation: people continuing inherited routines without understanding the landscape, history or belief systems beneath them.
The song moves in a dreamlike arc despite its considerable weight. Repeated guitar figures create forward motion while also suggesting that the walker is circling the same terrain. The chorus widens the space, but no awakening arrives.
This is one of the album’s most successful combinations of melancholy and propulsion. Havukruunu does not slow down whenever sorrow enters. Grief can gallop. Confusion can produce momentum. A person may travel quickly without moving closer to consciousness.
“Kun veri sekoittuu lumeen,” when blood mixes with snow, places Tavastland’s red and white imagery directly on the ground. The title could describe battle, hunting, sacrifice or an ordinary body injured during winter. Snow makes blood spectacular because it provides a clean surface upon which violence becomes immediately visible.
The track is among the album’s most dramatic, moving from hard-charging blackened metal into broad melodic passages that feel almost ceremonial. The guitars do not imitate falling snow or flowing blood. They create the emotional distance from which the image becomes historical, something witnessed after the living bodies have disappeared.
Tavastland is fascinated by the way history becomes landscape. A rebellion occurs, people die, organized religion changes the stories told afterward, and centuries later the land appears silent. Forest and snow conceal events while also preserving the imagination of them.
Havukruunu approaches that silence with deliberate mythmaking. The album should not be mistaken for a neutral historical document. Its Tavastians are shaped through anger, folklore, personal searching and resistance to Christian conquest. The point is not academic reconstruction. It is the recovery of emotional possibility from a past whose official story feels insufficient.
“De Miseriis Fennorum” closes the album by taking its title from Latin, the language of church authority, scholarship and written history. “On the Miseries of the Finns” sounds like the heading of a chronicle produced by somebody standing outside the people being described. Havukruunu takes that formal distance and fills it with voices from within.
At nearly eleven minutes, the track has room to gather every major element of the album. Acoustic reflection, black-metal acceleration, heavy-metal harmony, choir, sorrow and battlefield momentum move through one extended structure. A central tremolo melody is repeatedly recontextualized by changing drums, proving how much motion can be created without abandoning the same notes.
The song does not end Tavastland through one clean victory. Its scale feels closer to historical exhaustion. The voices have spoken, the dead have been named and the land remains, but the freedom described throughout the album is not restored simply because a chorus has demanded it.
That refusal prevents the record from becoming uncomplicated nationalist pageantry. Havukruunu’s Finland is not a pure ancestral paradise waiting to be reclaimed from outsiders. It is scarred by conversion, violence, lies, isolation and the modern willingness to trade difficult freedom for illuminated comfort.
The cover reflects this tension. A dark figure stands beneath a vast sky within a landscape that seems both earthly and mythological. The image promises grandeur, but the human presence remains small. Tavastland is larger than whoever attempts to possess or define it.
This scale runs through the songs. Choirs suggest community, yet individual grief remains audible. Riffs sound triumphant, yet the lyrics return to death and lost connection. Nature offers freedom, but it also contains darkness that modern people have learned to fear.
Compared with Uinuos Syömein Sota, Tavastland feels more direct and structurally controlled. The earlier album often moved like an extended invocation, rich with atmosphere and melancholy. Here the riffs strike harder, choruses arrive more clearly and traditional heavy metal stands openly beside the black-metal foundation.
The record is not streamlined. Several songs still change direction abruptly, and the constant heroic guitar language can make separate tracks share the same emotional weather. But Havukruunu understands variation within that weather. One melody becomes a march, another a lament and another the sound of something returning through the trees.
Tavastland succeeds because it treats freedom as a difficult inheritance rather than a slogan. The old rebellion cannot be repeated exactly. The pre-Christian world cannot be reconstructed from records, ruins and longing. The forest does not automatically heal anyone who walks into it.
What remains possible is attention: listening to the land, questioning inherited consolation and recognizing how easily fear converts living people into prisoners of artificial light.
The immortal spirit of song enters at the beginning because music can cross the gap where certainty fails. It does not prove what happened in 1237 or restore the voices erased from official history. It gives imagined breath to the silence.
By the end of “De Miseriis Fennorum,” Tavastland has become less a province than a condition. It is the place where memory, rebellion, sorrow and heavy-metal glory meet beneath the same winter sky. The fires burn low, the forest waits beyond the windows and the old song continues because nobody has succeeded in killing it.

Thron - 2023 - Dust

 

Listenable Records – POSH688  459.47MB FLAC

Dust begins in the mud rather than among the stars. A low guitar movement and rolling drums open “Dying in the Mud” with the patience of something heavy crawling toward the surface. The riff has the dark ceremonial weight of early-1990s extreme metal, but Thron does not remain inside the introduction long enough for atmosphere to become shelter. The guitars accelerate, Samca’s voice tears across the arrangement, and the song begins shifting between blackened speed, death-metal force and melodic leads that seem to illuminate the battlefield only long enough to reveal how many bodies are still sinking.
The title Dust suggests the smallest possible remains. Flesh, monuments, wealth, belief and entire civilizations eventually lose their recognizable form and return to particles. Thron approaches that fact without surrendering to quiet philosophical reflection. Dust is an aggressive record about insignificance, using enormous guitars and dramatic structures to insist that even the loudest human declaration will eventually disappear.
That contradiction gives the album its character. Thron sounds grand while repeatedly questioning grandeur. Guitar solos rise like banners. Drums push songs toward victory. Choruses acquire the scale of public proclamation. Yet the lyrics keep returning to death, false belief, failed authority and the certainty that every ruler, martyr and god constructed by human hands will be reduced to the same material.
“Return…” sharpens the attack. Its riffs carry the cold melodic precision associated with Swedish blackened death metal, but Thron has begun allowing traditional heavy metal to enter more openly. The twin guitars do not merely create icy tremolo walls. They harmonize, answer one another and occasionally break free into leads whose purpose is pleasure rather than punishment.
That pleasure does not weaken the darkness. It gives the darkness motion. A memorable guitar line can carry menace farther than a shapeless eruption because it remains inside the listener after the song ends. Thron understands that the most effective extreme metal does not always erase melody. It teaches melody to bare its teeth.
Samca’s vocals remain harsh but unusually legible. His rasp has enough low weight to avoid the papery thinness of orthodox black metal, and he shapes phrases with the timing of a frontman who understands where a word should strike against a riff. He sounds accusatory rather than spectral, less like a spirit hovering above the instruments than a figure walking through their destruction.
“The True Belief” slows the album into one of its most controlled songs. The title immediately raises suspicion. Which belief is true, who possesses the authority to name it, and how many bodies have been sacrificed to preserve that claim? Thron does not answer through doctrine. The music builds tension by refusing the uncomplicated rush of the previous track.
Guitars ring with a darker melodic patience while the rhythm gradually gathers force. When the song finally accelerates, the speed feels like fanaticism becoming action. Belief has moved from private conviction into machinery capable of crushing whoever stands outside it.
“The Golden Calf” makes the religious target explicit. The biblical idol represents worship redirected toward wealth, image and immediate material power. Thron treats the story less as ancient moral instruction than as a pattern civilization keeps repeating under new names.
The track stretches past six minutes, giving its riffs enough room to change from temptation into judgment. A strong central groove anchors the song while melodic guitars circle above it. The music sounds seductive because false gods cannot operate through ugliness alone. They must offer radiance, certainty and something polished enough to kneel before.
The guitar work throughout Dust is the album’s greatest strength. PVIII and SII build songs from recognizable influences without sounding satisfied to reproduce one historical style. Dissection-like melodic sharpness meets the broader drama of classic heavy metal, while occasional progressive turns complicate arrangements that might otherwise become predictable.
“Monologue” contracts the album’s scale. Where “The Golden Calf” addresses public worship, “Monologue” suggests a voice trapped inside itself. The track is comparatively concise and direct, its riffs repeatedly closing around Samca’s vocal rather than opening into wide heroic space.
A monologue can be confession, performance or evidence that dialogue has failed. Nobody answers because nobody else is present, or because the speaker has decided that no answer could matter. Thron turns that isolation into momentum, allowing the song to move quickly without creating a sense of escape.
“The Eve” restores the album’s larger architecture. Its title can indicate the first woman, the night before catastrophe or the threshold separating one historical condition from another. The music holds all three possibilities. Female symbolism, temptation and approaching disaster gather inside one of Dust’s most melodic structures.
The guitars repeatedly climb toward a bright upper register while the rhythm beneath them remains severe. The effect is almost beautiful, but beauty on Dust is rarely trustworthy. It is the polished face placed over whatever is about to collapse.
“Into Oblivion” appears as a bonus track on the CD and digital editions, but it does not sound disposable. Chiming guitar and a more spacious opening briefly suggest release before the band drives the song into blasting violence. Oblivion is not presented as peaceful disappearance. It arrives as something enormous and active, erasing identity through force.
“The Tyranny of I” is even more ambitious. The title turns the self into a ruling power, suggesting that individual identity can become another oppressive system. Desire, memory, fear and pride begin issuing commands from inside the body, while the person obeying them continues believing those commands are freedom.
The track’s progressive movement suits that internal conflict. Riffs change direction without losing the song’s center, and melodic passages rise into something almost majestic before the rhythm pulls them back into darker terrain. The self builds its own palace, installs itself on the throne and discovers that it has also constructed a prison.
“Face of Despair” strips away some of that complexity. The title gives suffering a visible surface, and the song responds with a more immediate blackened attack. Samca’s voice is especially forceful, sounding less like philosophical narration than direct confrontation with the figure in front of him.
The riffs remain melodic, but their movement is narrower and more urgent. Despair does not receive a long atmospheric introduction. Its face is already close enough to recognize.
“The Wrong God” returns to Dust’s interest in belief and authority. Mercyful Fate’s influence becomes especially visible in the twisting guitar movement and theatrical sense of danger. Thron does not imitate King Diamond’s vocal drama, but the song shares that band’s understanding that evil can arrive through precise musicianship and a riff that seems delighted by its own corruption.
The “wrong” god may simply be the god worshipped by somebody else. The title exposes how religious certainty depends upon perspective, geography and inherited power. Every believer can become an infidel when the border moves.
“Martyr” closes the album with nearly seven minutes of blackened grandeur. A martyr’s death is supposed to transform defeat into proof, giving belief greater power through the body destroyed in its name. Thron places that transformation beside the album’s title and asks what remains after even the martyr’s story has been forgotten.
The song builds patiently, moving between heavy rhythmic passages, melodic guitar expansion and faster attacks that feel less like triumph than history accelerating toward another grave. Bass and drums give the track a physical foundation while the leads continue reaching upward.
Dust is produced with enough clarity to expose every layer. The guitars remain distinct, the bass retains weight and the drums strike with natural force rather than artificial clicking. This polish may repel listeners who believe black metal must hide behind poor fidelity, but Thron is not attempting to recreate an anonymous rehearsal tape from 1993.
The band uses clarity to display structure. These songs depend upon the listener hearing how a secondary guitar line changes a riff, how the bass supports a transition and how the drums shift from heavy-metal gallop into blast-beat violence. Dirt remains in the performance rather than being artificially spread across the recording.
The cover by Khaos Diktator Design gives the album’s philosophy a monumental image. A skeletal or ruined figure stands amid a landscape of decay, suggesting that authority and identity have already begun breaking apart. The artwork is grand enough for the music but refuses the comforting fantasy that grandeur protects anything from time.
Dust does not reinvent melodic blackened death metal. Dissection, Necrophobic, Mercyful Fate and the more adventurous end of 1990s Scandinavian metal remain visible throughout. Thron’s achievement is recognizing that those traditions were never separated by impenetrable walls. Black metal could carry heroic guitar harmony. Death metal could become progressive. Traditional heavy metal could sound sinister without hiding its hooks.
The album works best when all those histories enter the same song and stop behaving like references. “The Golden Calf,” “The Eve,” “The Tyranny of I” and “Martyr” feel less like exercises in style than complete Thron compositions, dramatic without becoming bloated and melodic without surrendering their hostility.
Everything turns to dust eventually, including the records made to proclaim that fact. Thron cannot defeat that process, but Dust gives impermanence a magnificent noise while the structure still stands. The guitars rise, the false gods crack and the final martyr falls into the same earth as everyone else.

Rotting Christ - 2024 - Pro Xristou

 

Season Of Mist – SOM 777  438.09MB FLAC

Pro Xristou arrives wrapped in one of those black-metal covers that makes the record feel dangerous before the first note. Thomas Cole’s Destruction is not a contemporary piece of metal artwork imitating nineteenth-century Romantic painting. It is the genuine article, painted in 1836 as the fourth panel of The Course of Empire, Cole’s enormous five-part warning about civilization rising, becoming intoxicated by its own power and tearing itself apart. Rotting Christ does not merely borrow an old battle scene because swords and burning temples look wicked on a gatefold. The painting contains the entire album’s argument.
The city is collapsing in every direction. Classical buildings burn while soldiers and civilians jam a broken bridge above violent water. Columns have snapped, ships are sinking, bodies lie around fountains and a massive heroic statue has been decapitated. Its stone torso still lunges forward, but the head that gave the gesture meaning has fallen onto the pavement. Empire remains trapped inside its own pose after authority has literally lost its face.
Cole crowds the painting so densely that the eye cannot find safety. Every pathway leads toward another disaster. Flames spread through architecture built to advertise permanence. Water churns beneath overloaded crossings. Red fabric, bronze armor, pale bodies and dark storm clouds compete inside a scene where civilization’s accumulated beauty has become fuel.
That is exactly the visual scale Rotting Christ wants for Pro Xristou. This is not the crypt-bound black metal of narrow corridors and private blasphemy. It is imperial music, full of massed voices, deliberate marching rhythms and guitar lines broad enough to carry banners. Sakis Tolis has spent decades expanding the band from the raw nocturnal violence of Thy Mighty Contract into a form of blackened heavy metal built around ritual repetition, historical conflict and enormous public choruses.
The brief title track opens like a procession approaching the ruined city. Drums strike slowly beneath voices and atmosphere, establishing the ceremonial pace that governs much of the album. “Before Christ” is not treated simply as a date. It becomes an imagined spiritual territory, the world before one religious system extended itself across older gods, local traditions and competing forms of sacred authority.
“The Apostate” turns that conflict into one of the album’s strongest riffs. The guitars advance at a measured pace while choir and keyboards enlarge the surrounding space. Sakis does not scream as though fleeing persecution. He sounds like somebody standing before a court and refusing to recant.
The apostate is defined by departure from accepted belief, but Rotting Christ treats the figure as guardian rather than betrayer. Abandoning official faith becomes the means of protecting something older beneath it. The song’s repetition gives that refusal ceremonial force. Each return of the central phrase sounds less like argument than an oath being renewed.
“Like Father, Like Son” is even more direct. Its rhythm is nearly martial, with Themis Tolis keeping the song inside a firm, forward-moving stomp while guitars rise around Sakis’ voice. The title normally describes inherited behavior, often with a shrug that suggests repetition is inevitable. Here inheritance becomes responsibility. Knowledge, defiance and identity pass between generations because forgetting would complete the conqueror’s work.
Rotting Christ’s current music depends upon this kind of simplicity. The riffs are not technically crowded, and the song structures rarely hide their destination. Sakis builds through repetition, trusting a strong melodic phrase to gather power each time it returns. That can make Pro Xristou feel predictable, especially across ten tracks operating within similar tempos and ceremonial dimensions. It also makes the record unusually physical. These songs are designed to be shouted by rooms full of people rather than admired as intricate diagrams.
“The Sixth Day” uses the language of creation while surrounding it with ominous grandeur. In Genesis, humanity is created on the sixth day. Rotting Christ hears threat inside that arrival. The human creature capable of worship, empire and historical memory is also the creature capable of burning the city painted on the cover.
That connection makes Cole’s artwork more than a pagan-versus-Christian illustration. Destruction depicts no simple victory of one faith over another. The attackers may sack the temples, but they inherit only a city on fire. Human beings repeatedly confuse conquest with permanence, erect monuments to themselves and then discover that stone remembers violence better than glory.
“La Lettera del Diavolo” shifts into Italian and draws upon the story of a letter supposedly written by the Devil through a seventeenth-century Sicilian nun. Female voices move around the song while the guitars establish another dark procession. The track feels closer to ritual theater than attack, but its layered vocals create genuine unease.
Language becomes contested territory. Is the letter revelation, possession, fraud, illness or a desperate woman attempting to speak through the only supernatural vocabulary her world allowed? Rotting Christ does not settle the question. The song gives the forbidden writing enough ceremony to stand beside scripture without asking permission.
“The Farewell” is broader and more mournful. Its six-minute structure allows melody to carry emotional weight that the blunt choruses elsewhere sometimes flatten. The farewell may be spoken by a ruler, a culture, a god or an entire historical age watching its temples become ruins.
This is where Pro Xristou’s slower pace works best. Rotting Christ is no longer trying to reproduce the frantic hunger of its earliest albums. The band uses age as scale. The music walks because it expects the ground to shake beneath every step.
“Pix Lax Dax” leans heavily into incantation. Repeated syllables, choir and pounding rhythm make the voice function less as explanation than percussion. Rotting Christ has increasingly treated language this way, drawing words from several traditions and allowing their sound to establish authority even when their meaning remains partially concealed.
“Pretty World, Pretty Dies” gives the album its sharpest title. The phrase compresses Cole’s entire five-painting cycle into four words. A world may become beautiful because a civilization has reached its height, but that beauty does not protect it. Ornament can disguise structural weakness until destruction arrives.
The music balances melancholy with another large chorus, making the death of beauty sound almost celebratory. That contradiction is deeply metal. Ruin horrifies, but it also liberates the imagination. Burning palaces look magnificent because power has finally become visible as something temporary.
“Yggdrasil” moves north toward the world tree of Norse cosmology. Its roots and branches connect multiple realms, turning existence into one living structure rather than a hierarchy governed from a single throne. Rotting Christ uses the image as another surviving pre-Christian system, though the song’s strength lies more in its dark melody than in detailed mythology.
The album’s paganism is deliberately broad. Greek, Roman, Italian, Norse and Celtic references stand beside one another as forms of resistance. Historically, those cultures were not one unified spiritual front, and Pro Xristou occasionally compresses immense differences into a single heroic idea of ancestral wisdom. The simplification is obvious, but it belongs to the album’s epic-metal method. This is invocation, not a university lecture.
“Saoirse,” meaning freedom in Irish, provides the natural conclusion. Its slower beginning gathers voices around a final statement of independence before the full arrangement rises. Freedom here is not presented as peaceful self-realization. It must be protected against conversion, empire and the official stories written after victory.
The deluxe tracks extend the record, but the standard sequence reaches its proper end with that word. After apostasy, inheritance, farewell and ruined worlds, freedom remains the one ideal that cannot be preserved inside a statue. It survives only through continued action.
That returns the listener to Cole’s fallen stone hero. The statue was built to make power permanent. Its body is muscular, confident and larger than any person moving beneath it, but its head lies severed on the street while ordinary human beings fight, flee and die around the pedestal.
Rotting Christ’s logo hangs above this destruction like tangled gold ripped from the ruined palace. The ornate border of the sleeve frames the catastrophe as a sacred relic, a miniature altar to the moment empire realizes it is mortal. “Pro Xristou” is printed below in stately letters, almost resembling the title plate beneath a museum painting.
The artwork is not simply wicked because it contains war, fire and dead bodies. It is wicked because it makes collapse look impossibly grand while refusing to let grandeur escape responsibility. The same civilization capable of producing arches, temples, sculpture and ships has produced the machinery that destroys them.
Pro Xristou shares that doubleness. Its choirs and heroic melodies celebrate resistance, yet the cover warns that every victorious order can become another doomed empire. Rotting Christ raises ancient kings and apostates from history, but Cole’s painting waits beneath the music with a colder verdict.
The banners rise, the chorus answers and the old gods return for one more procession. Behind them, the bridge is already breaking.

Nachtmystium - 2024 - Blight Privilege

 

Lupus Lounge – WOLF 119  400.00MB FLAC

Blight Privilege begins with the uncomfortable fact of survival. “Survivor’s Remorse” does not celebrate Blake Judd’s return or present recovery as a clean heroic arc. A slow, bruised guitar progression circles beneath his rasp while keyboards spread a sickly light across the arrangement. The song keeps building without granting the triumphant release its title appears to invite. Survival has occurred, but it has brought memory, accountability and the knowledge that other people absorbed the consequences of the years being survived.
That distinction matters because Nachtmystium cannot return as though nothing happened. Judd’s heroin addiction, theft conviction, fraudulent merchandise sales and repeated betrayals of listeners became inseparable from the band’s collapse. Blight Privilege does not erase that history simply because its creator became sober or completed another strong record. Nor should the album be treated as a public certificate of redemption. Music can document change, remorse and self-examination, but it cannot reimburse people, repair trust or decide that forgiveness is now owed.
The record is strongest when it accepts that limitation. Judd does not sound absolved. He sounds stranded inside the extended aftermath of his own actions, examining the person who caused them without discovering a convenient border between illness and responsibility.
“Survivor’s Remorse” uses repetition to make that examination physical. The guitars return to the same wounded figure while synthesizers and lead lines gradually widen the surrounding space. Nachtmystium’s psychedelic elements once suggested escape, chemically altered perception or doors opening beyond black metal’s boundaries. Here they resemble the persistence of thought after the chemical fog has cleared. The room grows larger, but nothing inside it disappears.
“Predator Phoenix” is much more immediate. A hard, almost post-punk bass movement drives beneath icy guitars while the chorus rises with the kind of hook Judd has always hidden inside abrasion. The title joins predation to rebirth, preventing the phoenix image from becoming comforting. Something may rise from destruction without becoming harmless.
That is the central anxiety of Blight Privilege. Recovery can produce another version of the self, but the old appetites, manipulations and reflexes may still exist inside it. Rebirth does not guarantee innocence. A predator can emerge from the ashes claiming transformation, and everybody who remembers the fire has reason to remain suspicious.
The song’s rhythm carries an urban nighttime momentum closer to Killing Joke or dark wave than traditional black metal. Nachtmystium has never treated genre loyalty as a moral achievement. The guitars retain black metal’s cold grain, but the bass and drums move with the blunt physical confidence of post-punk. The result is catchy without sounding cheerful, a poisoned anthem built to keep walking after midnight.
“A Slow Decay” returns to longer form. Its opening guitars hang in a gray space before the rhythm gathers, creating the sensation of deterioration being observed in real time. Decay here is not spectacular collapse. It is the gradual loss of health, stability, relationships and identity until the damaged condition begins feeling ordinary.
Judd’s voice remains harsh, but the performance has less theatrical evil than Nachtmystium’s early work. He sounds weathered rather than possessed. The rasp carries fatigue, and its placement inside the mix makes it feel embedded in the music instead of commanding from above.
The guitars are similarly mature without becoming polite. Melodies stretch across broad chords, then harden into tremolo movement. Lead work appears with surprising brightness, recalling the psychedelic expansion of the Black Meddle albums while refusing their drugged exhilaration. The colors remain, but somebody has opened the curtains after an ugly night.
“Conquistador” shifts the record outward. Its title invokes conquest, domination and the mythology used to turn theft into destiny. The central riff has a dry, swaggering movement that almost resembles desert rock or outlaw country dragged through black-metal distortion.
That small country influence is not a costume change. It gives the track a cracked American horizon, trading Scandinavian forest imagery for highways, ruined settlements and the historical habit of calling violence progress. Nachtmystium’s music has always felt specifically American when it is most convincing, not because it uses flags or regional folklore, but because it absorbs excess, reinvention, commerce, narcotics and self-destruction into one unstable identity.
The conquistador is also an uncomfortable mirror for the album’s narrator. He takes, renames and moves forward while expecting the new territory to conceal what happened behind him. Blight Privilege repeatedly rejects that fantasy. The past remains inhabited.
“Blind Spot” is one of the album’s most melodic songs. Clean guitar and a strong bass line create a dark-rock foundation before the heavier layers arrive. The title identifies the area the self cannot perceive without somebody else pointing toward it, the hidden space where destructive behavior continues while the person causing it insists upon clarity.
The song’s beauty is uneasy because it can be heard as evidence of self-awareness while also demonstrating how persuasive Judd remains as a songwriter. That tension surrounds the entire record. A compelling song can make confession feel convincing. It can generate sympathy before accountability has been measured. Nachtmystium understands this power but cannot stand outside it.
Blight Privilege is therefore an album listeners may approach with completely different thresholds. Some will hear a serious artistic reckoning. Others will hear another narrative shaped by somebody with a documented history of manipulating trust. The music does not settle that disagreement, and pretending it does would reduce both the record and its history.
“The Arduous March” is the album’s heaviest piece emotionally, despite spending much of its running time at a deliberate mid-tempo pace. The drums strike with funeral patience while guitars repeat a blunt descending pattern. When blast beats finally enter, they function as release from pressure rather than the automatic language of extremity.
The subtitle attached to some listings, “22 Full Moons,” turns recovery into counted time. A month is not an abstract promise. It is a completed cycle, then another, each requiring the same decision to continue. The arduous march is unromantic. There is no mountaintop, only distance accumulated through repeated ordinary movement.
This is where the album’s sobriety is most audible as structure. Earlier Nachtmystium records often chased sensation through sudden psychedelic color, electronic disruption and intoxicated momentum. Blight Privilege still contains those elements, but they are placed with greater patience. The songs do not sound sober because they have become restrained or morally improved. They sound sober because consequences remain visible after the surge passes.
The title track closes the standard edition by turning social collapse into personal condition. “Blight” suggests disease spreading across crops, buildings or communities. “Privilege” suggests insulation from consequences. Joined together, the phrase identifies the strange protection sometimes granted to destructive people who remain charismatic, talented or useful enough that others keep reopening doors.
It is an ugly, effective title because it can be directed outward or inward. Contemporary culture allows powerful people to flourish inside the damage they create, but Judd has also benefited from listeners willing to separate his music from his conduct, labels willing to release it and collaborators willing to return. The album exists partly because talent continues producing opportunities after trust has been burned.
Musically, “Blight Privilege” gathers the record’s strongest qualities into one long closing statement. A bleak central riff moves beneath keyboards, post-punk rhythm and psychedelic guitar color. The arrangement grows gradually, avoiding a huge final explosion. It ends with persistence rather than victory.
The deluxe edition adds “Banished,” an appropriate epilogue because exile has followed Nachtmystium for years. Yet banishment is not always imposed unjustly. Communities may remove someone because repeated behavior has made trust impossible. The romantic figure of the outsider becomes more complicated when the outsider helped construct the wall.
The cover presents a darkened human form amid smeared black, gray and diseased yellow-green textures. It resembles a photograph damaged by chemical exposure, mold or fire, with the body still partially visible beneath the corruption. The image does not offer the clean theatrical symbolism of corpse paint, forests or occult geometry. It looks contaminated.
That contamination fits the title perfectly. Blight spreads across a surface while preserving enough of the original form to show what is being lost. The figure has not vanished, but visibility has become unstable. Identity survives as damaged evidence.
The enlarged deluxe book edition makes that image more confrontational. Sixty pages of lyrics, photographs and extended artwork turn the comeback into a physical document, inviting close examination rather than allowing the album to pass as another streaming release. The lavish format also intensifies the central contradiction: a record about ruin, homelessness and damaged trust arrives as a carefully manufactured collector’s object.
Nachtmystium has always been good at contradictions. Black metal meets psychedelia, ugliness produces hooks, isolation becomes public spectacle and self-destruction becomes career material. Blight Privilege may be the most ethically uncomfortable version of that formula because the contradictions no longer belong only to sound.
The album is genuinely strong. Its riffs are memorable, its pacing is controlled and its post-punk and psychedelic details feel integrated rather than nostalgic. Judd has not lost the ability to make black metal breathe beyond its traditional walls.
But musical strength is not moral evidence. Blight Privilege deserves to be heard as a record about survival, remorse and damaged self-knowledge without being mistaken for proof that every debt has been paid.
The survivor remains standing in the blighted field. The music rises around him, beautiful in places, poisonous in others. Whether anyone approaches is no longer his decision.

Vatican Shadow - 2024 - Demolished Holy Sites (Redacted)

 

Hospital Productions – HOS-950  1.05GB FLAC

Demolished Holy Sites begins by refusing to tell the listener where the destruction occurred. There are 150 tracks, each identified only as “Holy Site,” assigned a number and stamped “Redacted.” No city, country, building, religion, military unit or casualty count is permitted to remain. Vatican Shadow has spent years turning the vocabulary of intelligence reports, military operations and televised war into electronic music, but this release removes even the fragments of narrative that usually allow the listener to pretend the material has been understood.
“Holy Site 001” lasts less than a minute. A damaged electronic pulse appears, carries a small amount of pressure and stops. The next site begins almost immediately. Another rhythm, tone or broken industrial mechanism forms, survives briefly and is replaced. The album repeats this procedure 150 times across three hours, producing a scale that is simultaneously enormous and microscopic.
A holy site usually gathers time. Buildings are erected over earlier buildings. Stories accumulate around stones, graves, trees, wells and rooms. Generations enter with different languages and political circumstances but continue recognizing the location as charged. Pilgrimage turns geography into repeated movement. Ritual prevents the site from becoming an ordinary piece of land.
Demolition reverses that accumulation in seconds. A wall that survived centuries can be flattened by one strike. The dust may contain architecture, books, human remains and devotional objects, but aerial footage compresses everything into one gray cloud. Vatican Shadow works inside that compression.
The tracks are too brief to become immersive environments in the usual ambient sense. Each one arrives as a clipped transmission or fragment extracted from a larger event. The listener receives a rhythm without context, an atmosphere without coordinates and a disturbance without explanation.
That structure resembles the way destruction is consumed through databases and news feeds. One location follows another. Images repeat. Numbers rise. Names disappear behind categories. Mosque, church, shrine, monastery, cemetery and temple become entries inside a report whose administrative clarity cannot represent their emotional or historical weight.
Dominick Fernow’s use of the word “redacted” is therefore essential. Redaction usually claims to protect sensitive information. A black bar conceals a person, source, method or location while allowing the surrounding document to circulate. Here the concealment has swallowed nearly everything except the category of destruction.
The titles confirm that a holy site existed and was demolished, but they withhold the details required to imagine it. This creates a brutal equality. Site 001 and Site 150 are presented through the same blank language, regardless of size, age or number of lives attached to them.
The anonymity may initially appear respectful. Removing specific names prevents the album from turning active devastation into lurid packaging or collectible geopolitical trivia. Vatican Shadow does not ask the listener to choose a favorite tragedy based on the most evocative title.
Yet redaction is also violence. Names connect events to people and responsibility. A destroyed building without location can be treated as inevitable weather. A holy site without a named community becomes a symbol available for anybody’s interpretation.
Demolished Holy Sites remains suspended between those two functions. It denies spectacle while reproducing the bureaucratic distance through which spectacle is managed.
The music follows the same tension. Vatican Shadow’s familiar vocabulary remains present: clipped percussion, distorted kicks, cold drones, short melodic signals and industrial textures that resemble communications equipment operating inside damaged infrastructure. But the miniature format strips these materials of the gradual development that normally gives a Vatican Shadow track its particular identity.
A rhythm may establish itself for twenty seconds, begin suggesting a larger structure and vanish before completion. A low drone appears like smoke filling a room, but there is no time for the room to become recognizable. A metallic pulse advances, then stops as though the recording itself has been censored.
This constant interruption makes the album difficult to hear casually. Individual tracks are too short to settle into the background, while the complete work is too long to absorb as a sequence of separate compositions. Attention keeps being reset.
The listener begins by noticing differences. One site is harsher, another nearly ambient, another driven by a crude techno pattern. After dozens of tracks, those distinctions become harder to preserve. Memory starts combining them into one extended field of demolished rhythm.
That failure of memory is part of the work. Large-scale destruction exceeds the mind’s capacity to retain individual events. The tenth ruined building may still produce horror, but by the hundredth, horror has begun becoming format. Repetition does not make the events less terrible. It reveals how easily reception becomes numb.
Vatican Shadow has always understood repetition as both musical technique and political condition. Military operations repeat procedures. Media outlets repeat footage. Governments repeat phrases until policy begins sounding natural. Electronic rhythm offers a perfect language for this because repetition can feel hypnotic, reassuring and oppressive without changing its basic mechanism.
On Demolished Holy Sites, repetition operates at the level of the track list as much as within the tracks. The album itself becomes a pulse: site, number, redaction, duration, stop. Site, number, redaction, duration, stop.
The numbers produce the illusion of order. Numbering suggests that somebody has counted, cataloged and preserved the evidence. But the sequence provides no explanation for why one site receives 034 and another 035. The administrative structure contains no visible moral structure.
This gap between measurement and meaning has followed Vatican Shadow from the beginning. Fernow’s project frequently uses titles drawn from photographs, captions, headlines and military language, transforming apparently factual phrases into unstable emotional objects. A report can identify weapons, targets and dates while remaining incapable of describing fear, mourning or historical consequence.
Demolished Holy Sites reduces that method to its skeleton. Even the headline has disappeared. Only the classification remains.
The release’s enormous length should not be mistaken for indulgence. Three hours is exhausting, but exhaustion is the point at which the record’s form becomes legible. A twenty-minute version would present an elegant concept. One hundred and fifty sites become a burden.
That burden changes the listening experience. Around the midpoint, the tracks stop feeling like isolated pieces and begin resembling rooms in a structure whose plan cannot be understood. The listener keeps passing through them because the numbering promises an eventual end.
Completion does not provide resolution. Reaching Site 150 confirms only that the list has stopped. It does not suggest that demolition has ended outside the record or that every destroyed location has been counted.
The album’s title also uses the plural without specifying a historical period. These sites could belong to current war zones, earlier campaigns, sectarian attacks, colonial destruction, revolutionary iconoclasm or the endless reconstruction of cities upon sacred ground. The lack of coordinates allows the album to accumulate several histories at once.
That openness is powerful but dangerous. Vatican Shadow’s work often uses contemporary geopolitical imagery while refusing explicit commentary. The ambiguity can force the listener to confront how images of war are consumed, but it can also allow real suffering to become a severe aesthetic of uniforms, surveillance and classified documents.
Demolished Holy Sites comes closer than most Vatican Shadow releases to acknowledging that danger through form. The record does not provide glamorous titles or dramatic cover imagery that turns one destroyed building into an emblem of forbidden knowledge. Its repetition becomes anti-spectacular.
Nothing is given enough time to become iconic. Each miniature is replaced before it can be framed as the definitive sound of catastrophe.
The release could also be heard as 150 failed memorials. A memorial attempts to keep a person or place present through name, object and repeated attention. These tracks offer repeated attention but remove the names. Their durations are too short for mourning, yet together they occupy more time than most listeners will comfortably surrender.
That contradiction gives the album its emotional force. It asks for hours while providing only fragments. The listener cannot know the sites but must continue encountering evidence of their absence.
The physical organization of sound matters. Many pieces contain low frequencies that feel less like club bass than pressure traveling through concrete. Percussion appears as impact without visible source. Drones resemble electrical systems continuing after the building they served has been abandoned.
Occasional melodic fragments are particularly disturbing because they imply memory without revealing what is remembered. A few notes appear, almost tender, then disappear beneath the next numbered site. Their incompleteness mirrors cultural memory after a place has been destroyed and its surviving community scattered.
Vatican Shadow does not create a three-hour lament. That would offer emotional clarity the subject cannot support. The music remains cold, procedural and often physically blunt.
The project’s industrial character is therefore not merely stylistic. Demolition is an industrial process. It involves machinery, planning, targeting, explosives, debris removal and decisions about what will be built afterward. Sacred destruction may be justified through religion or war, but it is executed through logistics.
The album sounds like those logistics after every official explanation has been removed. Short sequences activate. Systems pulse. Something is processed and the machine advances to the next entry.
The redaction prevents the listener from knowing whether each sound represents a building, photograph, report or invented category. Perhaps there were never exactly 150 sites. The number may be literal, symbolic or simply the capacity of the structure Fernow created.
That uncertainty is more effective than false documentation. The record does not claim to be journalism. It uses the appearance of an archive to expose how archives can preserve evidence while concealing experience.
By Site 150, the listener has learned almost nothing factual. No names can be repeated, no map reconstructed and no responsible force identified. What remains is the shape of administrative erasure: numbered fragments, clipped durations and the steady replacement of one loss by another.
Demolished Holy Sites is not Vatican Shadow at his most immediately musical. There are no large techno tracks to anchor the sequence, no dramatic titles to supply political theater and no concise album arc. It is closer to a catalog generated by a damaged institution.
Its power lies in forcing that catalog to become physically excessive. One destroyed sacred space might be imagined. One hundred and fifty become a system.
The final track stops, leaving the listener with the silence that every entry has been approaching. The locations remain redacted. The dust settles without revealing what stood there.