Lussuria - 2019 - Three Knocks

 

Hospital Productions – HOS-626  123.73MB FLAC

Three Knocks begins in the aftermath of a warning. The listener does not hear a hand striking a door or anyone crossing a room to answer it. Instead, “Fentanyl Chaser” opens inside the drugged uncertainty that follows, when the ordinary architecture of home, hospital, memory and dream has already started folding into itself. Operatic voices turn slowly through tape haze. Metal chimes glint above a low, unstable atmosphere. What might once have been ceremonial or beautiful has been cut into fragments and placed somewhere that beauty can no longer explain.
Lussuria is the dark ambient project of Jim Mroz, but “dark ambient” barely describes the physical specificity of Three Knocks. The record does not simply provide a gloomy background or construct an imaginary dungeon from synthesizer presets. Its sounds have bodies and histories. Tape has been cut, copied and replayed. Metal has been struck. Air has passed through bone. Machinery associated with medicine and survival has been converted into percussion.
The four tracks arose from a family emergency. Mroz’s grandmother suffered what began as an allergic reaction and rapidly became something doctors struggled to control. Swelling continued despite treatment, and she was placed in a medically induced coma with a breathing tube. When she regained consciousness, the remaining effects of Propofol and other drugs left her confused, suspicious and at times aggressive toward hospital staff. Her speech became cryptic, and among the experiences she described was the memory of three slow knocks.
The knocks had supposedly come before the illness. She heard them at her office door, answered, and found nobody there. Later, while suspended between unconsciousness, sedation and waking, the event acquired the shape of an omen. The three knocks could be heard as a mockery of the Holy Trinity, one blow for each crucifixion, or simply as an ordinary sound transformed by fear and medication into a private supernatural system.
Three Knocks never decides whether the event was paranormal, neurological, symbolic or misremembered. That refusal gives the album its force. Mroz does not reconstruct the story through spoken narration or cinematic sound effects. He creates an environment in which several explanations remain simultaneously possible.
“Fentanyl Chaser” is the softest entrance and perhaps the most disturbing. Its title joins a powerful synthetic opioid with the language of something taken afterward to alter or extend an effect. The phrase sounds medical, recreational and fatal at once. The music is built from manipulated opera and choral loops mixed with metal chimes, but the voices do not retain the dignity usually associated with either form.
Opera depends upon a body projecting emotion into a public space. Choral singing depends upon separate voices joining into one organized whole. Tape manipulation removes both conditions. The singers are absent, their breath detached from their bodies, their phrases cut away from dramatic context. They continue singing because the loop commands them to.
The result resembles religious music heard while consciousness is failing. Voices swell, blur and retreat before language becomes clear. Chimes suggest ceremony, but no ceremony is identified. The track hangs between hospital sedation and spiritual visitation, where familiar sounds can acquire enormous significance because the mind can no longer trust ordinary sequence.
The title track is harder and more architectural. Ammunition casings, oil drums and the sound of knives being sharpened enter its crescendo. Each material carries a different form of threat. Casings are what remain after shots have been fired. Oil drums belong to industry, storage and improvised percussion. A knife being sharpened is not yet violence, but preparation made audible.
That preparatory sound is crucial. Three Knocks is less interested in impact than anticipation. A knock announces that something may be outside. Sharpening announces that an edge is being prepared. The album holds the listener inside the interval before the door opens or the blade is used.
The track’s percussion does not settle into a stable ritual beat. Strikes appear through thick atmosphere, sometimes distant and sometimes close enough to feel placed beside the ear. The metallic sources create a ceremony without community. There is no group movement, dance or shared belief, only repeated actions inside an empty acoustic chamber.
Mroz has long worked with the visual and sonic language of Catholicism, medieval architecture, decayed aristocracy and religious dread. On Three Knocks, that imagery becomes personal rather than historical decoration. The warning is not discovered in a ruined church or old text. It arrives at an office door and follows a family member into an emergency room.
Modern medicine and ancient superstition therefore occupy the same room. Propofol, breathing tubes and hospital monitoring do not eliminate the possibility of angels, omens or demonic mockery. Nor does spiritual interpretation cancel the physical reality of swelling, sedation and respiratory danger. The album refuses the comforting idea that one system of explanation must defeat the other.
“The Fear in Letting Go” introduces one of the record’s most charged sound sources: a femur flute. Instruments made from human thigh bones have ceremonial associations in Tibetan Buddhist traditions, where the kangling can be used in practices confronting impermanence, death and attachment. Mroz places that hollow bodily sound beside metal percussion drawn from an iron lung.
The pairing is severe. One object is made from a dead body. The other was designed to force breath into a living one. Bone becomes wind instrument while medical machinery becomes drum. Death supplies breath; survival equipment supplies impact.
The track’s title broadens this material beyond its source story. Letting go can mean releasing fear, control, another person, consciousness or life itself. The phrase is commonly offered as gentle advice, but Lussuria hears the terror inside it. To let go is also to stop gripping whatever has made identity and continuity feel possible.
The music advances slowly, allowing every sound to retain physical weight. The femur flute does not become an exotic flourish laid over an ambient bed. Its thin, dry tone seems to pass through an actual cavity. The iron-lung percussion carries a dull institutional resonance, as though a machine built to preserve breath has remembered every body once enclosed within it.
Lussuria’s strongest work often depends upon this conversion of objects into emotional mechanisms. Mroz does not need a melody to tell the listener how to feel. He chooses sources already carrying contradictory associations, then places them close enough to infect one another.
The iron lung can represent care and confinement. The femur flute can represent ritual wisdom and the transformation of a corpse into an instrument. Opera can represent beauty and artificial excess. Medication can relieve suffering or remove a person’s ability to distinguish hospital staff from attackers. Three knocks can be meaningless or the most important sound a person ever hears.
“Confused and Ill by Shadows” closes the album with its largest and most unstable field. The title sounds like a diagnosis written by somebody who has abandoned medical language. Confusion is mental, illness is bodily, and shadows are neither, yet all three become inseparable.
The track extends beyond eight minutes, allowing low drones, processed voices and metallic details to lose their individual identities. Earlier sources return as afterimages rather than recognizable events. The listener may hear a choral fragment, a scraping edge or a dull impact, but each appears partially absorbed by surrounding haze.
Shadows are produced when something blocks light, but they reveal only outline. The grandmother’s experience survives in a similar form. A sudden illness occurred. Medication was administered. Speech became cryptic. Three knocks were remembered. The complete cause and meaning remain unavailable, leaving only shapes cast by events that cannot be fully reconstructed.
The track does not end with recovery in any triumphant sense. The real-life story includes survival and return from the hospital, but Three Knocks is concerned with what survives psychologically after the medical crisis has passed. A body may recover while the omen remains active. Once an unexplained sound has been connected to catastrophe, it cannot easily return to being ordinary.
That lingering association is one reason the album feels more intimate than Lussuria’s larger historical works such as American Babylon or Industriale Illuminato. Those records evoke civilizations, religious structures and institutional spaces. Three Knocks contracts that scale into one family story and one unanswered door.
The production remains spacious, but the space is domestic and internal. Even at its loudest, the album does not resemble a vast landscape. It resembles a limited number of rooms becoming impossible to navigate: the office where the knocks were heard, the emergency room, the sedated interior of the body, and the remembered location reconstructed afterward.
Hospital Productions is an especially appropriate home for the record. The label name, originally derived from Dominick Fernow’s interest in institutional and medical imagery, becomes almost literal here. Yet Three Knocks avoids cheap hospital horror. There are no heart-monitor beeps arranged into rhythm or samples of doctors delivering ominous diagnoses.
Instead, medical technology is approached through material transformation. The iron lung is struck. Drug names become titles. Coma becomes duration and suspended structure. The hospital is represented not as a movie location but as a condition in which the body belongs temporarily to machines and strangers.
The four-track structure gives the album the compact shape of a report. Each piece examines a different part of the event: sedation, warning, release and confused aftermath. But the tracks bleed into one another enough that no section feels independently resolved.
This is ritual ambient without the reassurance of ritual. Traditional ceremony provides repeated actions whose meanings are shared by participants. Three Knocks offers repetition without consensus. The sounds may be warnings, invocations or symptoms, but nobody can confirm which.
Mroz’s use of tape is essential to that uncertainty. Tape does not merely reproduce the source. It ages, stretches, hisses and slightly alters every return. A loop resembles memory because it repeats while losing accuracy. Each pass claims to preserve the event and simultaneously changes it.
The record’s four titles are unusually direct. “Fentanyl Chaser” names the chemical-medical atmosphere. “Three Knocks” names the omen. “The Fear in Letting Go” names the emotional crisis. “Confused and Ill by Shadows” names the residue. Together they form a short narrative without revealing what actually happened behind the door.
Three Knocks never needs to become loud in the conventional industrial sense. Its violence lies in the vulnerability of unconsciousness and the realization that the mind can turn against the people attempting to keep the body alive. The album enters that state without exploiting the family story as lurid medical spectacle.
It remains careful, restrained and unresolved. The sharpened knife does not strike. The ammunition casings appear after an unseen discharge. The iron lung no longer holds a patient. The singers repeat phrases whose original drama has vanished.
Everything on the record is evidence separated from its event. That separation creates the haunting. Three sounds at a door become a warning only because catastrophe follows. A hospital hallucination becomes spiritual because ordinary language cannot contain it. A surviving family story becomes music because sound can preserve uncertainty more honestly than explanation.
The album ends, but the knocks remain unanswered. Not because nobody opened the door, but because opening it revealed nothing. The empty threshold is what continues making the sound.

Lussuria - 2024 - Broken Porcelain of the Dining Interior

 

Hospital Productions – HOS-947  132.76MB FLAC

Broken Porcelain of the Dining Interior sounds like an aristocratic house remembering its own destruction. A gust enters through an unseen opening. Tableware shifts, portraits loosen from the walls, and painted figures overhead begin laughing as the room’s carefully arranged history loses its grip. Lussuria does not record the crash directly. The album begins after the first fracture, when the building is still standing but every surface has become unreliable.
The eight tracks are all titled “Unliving in This Marble History,” numbered from Part I through Part VIII. That repetition removes the usual expectation that each piece will present a separate subject. Instead, the album behaves as one twenty-eight-minute environment divided into chambers. The listener keeps moving through the same historical interior while its light, temperature, and structural stability change.
“Unliving” is more disturbing than simple death. Something dead has completed its life. Something unliving may never have possessed life in the first place, yet continues imitating it through preservation. Marble statues, portraits, furniture, architecture, and inherited wealth all perform this strange continuation. They retain faces, gestures, family names, and ceremonial arrangements long after the people who created them have vanished.
Lussuria has always been drawn to buildings that seem capable of storing spiritual residue. Churches, palaces, monasteries, confessionals, hospitals, villas, and ruined industrial spaces recur throughout Jim Mroz’s work. Broken Porcelain of the Dining Interior narrows that architecture to the dining room, a place where wealth is rehearsed through posture, service, decoration, and controlled appetite.
The dining interior is not merely where food is eaten. In a grand house, it is a theater of rank. Everyone has a position. Plates, knives, glasses, servants, guests, paintings, and chandeliers help maintain an appearance of natural order. The room makes privilege look ceremonial rather than economic.
Broken porcelain is therefore more than decorative damage. Porcelain is fragile, expensive, and associated with refinement. A broken plate exposes how easily refinement becomes debris. Once shattered, it cannot continue performing its social function. It loses the family crest, perfect circle, polished surface, and assigned position at the table.
The album’s sound has the same relationship to elegance. Lussuria uses drones, blurred melodic traces, softened impact, degraded tape, distant voices, and ritual percussion, but nearly every attractive texture appears damaged at its edges. Beauty survives, yet it no longer guarantees order.
Part I enters cautiously, with low movement and distant tonal material beginning to gather. The sound resembles a room heard from elsewhere in the house. Something is occurring beyond a closed door, but the listener receives only pressure through the walls. The piece establishes distance before revealing detail.
Part II draws nearer to the interior. High frequencies glint like light striking glass or silverware, while a darker foundation moves beneath them. There is no stable rhythm, but small repeated actions suggest objects trembling in place. The room has not collapsed. It has begun warning its contents.
The sequencing gives these early tracks the feeling of slow displacement. One source appears to move behind another. A tone initially heard as atmosphere becomes foreground, while what seemed central recedes into haze. Lussuria builds space by changing the listener’s relation to sounds rather than by simply adding volume.
Part III is more physically active. Scraping, impact, and rough electronic texture interrupt the suspended atmosphere. The porcelain of the title becomes easier to imagine here, not through an obvious sample of plates smashing but through sounds that suggest surfaces cracking under pressure.
Mroz’s restraint keeps the record from turning into haunted-house theater. There are no footsteps walking predictably down a corridor, doors creaking on cue, or voices whispering from behind the curtains. The album is frightening because its sources remain difficult to identify. An unexplained sound holds more power than a recognizable effect.
Part IV is the longest section and the center of the suite. It expands the album from damaged room into historical field. Drones stretch wider, and faint melodic material seems to arrive from another period without becoming a direct quotation of old music.
The Vanderbilt reference in the release text opens the record toward American wealth, specifically the immense estates and social power produced by nineteenth-century railroad and shipping fortunes. A mansion lawn appears natural, but its size, emptiness, and maintenance are economic statements. Landscape has been shaped to display ownership.
Lussuria imagines the dining room’s contents falling onto this endless lawn. Plates, portraits, and cutlery leave the house but do not escape its history. They land on another controlled surface belonging to the same system. The wind creates disorder, yet even the debris remains inside the estate.
That is the album’s quiet cruelty. The house can fracture without ending the world that built it. Broken objects become picturesque ruins. Disaster itself can be absorbed into the property’s atmosphere and later sold back as history.
Part V is the album’s strongest concentration of this tension. Its tones carry a mournful elegance, but rough textures continually interfere. The music seems close to forming a lament, then withdraws before grief becomes comfortable. Nothing is permitted the dignity of a clean memorial.
A marble history is designed to appear permanent. Marble survives weather, supports monuments, and gives institutions the visual weight of antiquity. Yet marble is also cold, quarried, cut, transported, and polished through labor. Its apparent timelessness conceals the human systems required to produce and maintain it.
The album’s degraded surfaces work against that illusion. Tape hiss, distortion, and unstable frequencies make history sound physically vulnerable. The marble may remain, but the story attached to it erodes.
Part VI deepens the interior darkness. Lower frequencies dominate, creating a sensation of sound moving beneath the floor. Lussuria often uses bass not as musical support but as architecture. It makes the room feel heavier and suggests spaces below the visible one: cellar, foundation, service corridor, burial chamber, or mechanical system.
Grand houses depend upon invisible labor and hidden infrastructure. Dining rooms appear effortless because kitchens, servants’ passages, heating systems, storage rooms, and workers remain outside the guests’ view. The album’s low-end movement feels like that concealed structure beginning to announce itself.
Part VII allows more air between events. After the pressure of the middle sections, individual sounds hang in exposed space. The effect is not relief. It resembles the silence after objects have finished falling, when the room must be inspected and the extent of the damage becomes clear.
This is where the album’s short duration works in its favor. Broken Porcelain does not spend an hour elaborating its concept into a complete fictional universe. It offers fragments, allows them to accumulate, then leaves before the house becomes familiar.
Part VIII lasts only two minutes and feels less like a conclusion than the final piece of ceiling giving way. The suite does not rebuild the dining room or explain the laughter of the painted figures. It ends while history remains unsettled.
The album was reportedly disassembled in late October 2024 at Mroz’s working space in Mount Sinai, New York, and portions were intended to resurface in a later project titled Immaterial. That language of disassembly suits the music better than ordinary recording terminology. The work feels taken apart rather than composed from nothing.
Lussuria repeatedly treats sound as recovered material. A drone may resemble a section removed from a larger environment. A damaged melodic figure suggests a surviving piece of music whose complete form has disappeared. The listener receives shards rather than a reconstruction.
That makes porcelain an ideal image. A shard contains evidence of the original object, including color, curvature, thickness, and pattern, but cannot fully restore it. Every surviving piece invites imagination while refusing certainty.
The custom clamshell cassette case extends the album’s domestic and funerary atmosphere. A clamshell protects the tape like a small display box, reliquary, or specimen container. The physical edition places the recording inside another hard interior that must be opened.
Its release on Halloween gives the album a seasonal frame, but Broken Porcelain is not built from ordinary supernatural horror. Its ghosts are social arrangements preserved beyond their living purpose. Wealth continues staging itself. Portraits continue watching. Marble continues presenting permanence. The dining room remains prepared for people who will never return.
Compared with Three Knocks, this album is less biographical and less tied to one narrated event. Three Knocks begins with a family medical emergency and allows uncertainty to spread outward from it. Broken Porcelain begins with architecture and allows architecture to reveal its emotional sickness.
The two records still share an interest in objects carrying more meaning than their practical function can explain. Three knocks at a door become an omen. A femur becomes a flute. An iron lung becomes percussion. Here a plate becomes inheritance, a dining room becomes social machinery, and a gust of wind becomes historical revolt.
The revolt remains ambiguous. Wind has no political intention. It does not know whether it is breaking a poor household’s only plate or scattering aristocratic porcelain across a manicured lawn. Lussuria supplies the setting, allowing accident to resemble judgment without declaring that justice has occurred.
That ambiguity prevents the record from becoming a simple fantasy of rich people’s houses collapsing. The ruins remain beautiful. The listener may enjoy the elegance of the decay, thereby participating in the same aesthetic transformation that turns old wealth into museum culture.
Broken Porcelain of the Dining Interior understands that destruction does not automatically free an object from power. A shattered plate can still carry a crest. A ruined estate can still dominate the landscape. A dead family can remain socially present through institutions, property, and carefully narrated history.
Lussuria’s music inhabits that afterlife. It does not shout at the mansion from outside. It enters quietly, waits beneath the painted ceiling, and listens until the figures begin laughing.
The wind arrives. The candles bend. The table loses its arrangement. One plate slips, strikes the floor, and divides the entire room into before and after.

Lussuria - 2024 - Under Crumbled Stairs

 

Hospital Productions – none  295.62MB FLAC

Under Crumbled Stairs begins with a voice trying to rise from beneath architecture. “Viva Voce!” means by living voice, performed aloud rather than silently or through an intermediary, but Lussuria gives that living voice no clean air. It appears inside a low electronic fog, surrounded by damaged resonance and the suggestion of stone pressing downward. The exclamation point promises declaration. The music answers with something half-buried, as though speech has survived only by passing through rubble.
The album’s central landscape is Pompeii, but Jim Mroz avoids the familiar postcard ruins, plaster casts, and cinematic eruption. Vesuvius remains mostly outside the frame. What matters is the condition after catastrophe, when homes, gestures, tools, bodies, food, wall paintings, and ordinary arrangements have been fixed in place long enough to become historical evidence.
Pompeii is valuable because destruction interrupted daily life without allowing it to be properly cleared away. The city did not slowly empty, remodel itself, or discard its obsolete interiors. Disaster sealed rooms while their social meanings were still active. A dining space remained a dining space. Graffiti remained on walls. Bread remained inside ovens. Bodies retained the final shapes taken while attempting to escape.
Lussuria approaches that preservation as something more troubling than historical good fortune. To preserve a city is also to keep its catastrophe permanently available for examination. Tourists walk the streets where people fled, photograph casts made from cavities left by decomposed bodies, and admire household decoration protected by mass death. Disaster becomes access.
“Human Ruins” makes that relationship direct. A ruin is normally architectural, but the title transfers the word onto people. The body becomes a damaged structure whose remaining shape can be studied after its function has ended. Low pulses and rough textures gather slowly, with no sudden eruption dividing life from death. The catastrophe seems already absorbed into the material.
The track does not produce sympathy through a lamenting melody. Its weight comes from distance. Sounds resemble traces retrieved from beneath sediment, faint enough that the listener must lean toward them. That act of attention risks reproducing the archaeological gaze, treating the dead as fascinating surfaces, and the album never offers an easy position outside that discomfort.
“Moths (Morning Rust)” turns toward smaller forms of decay. Moths consume fabric quietly, leaving damage visible only after the material is lifted into light. Rust works similarly upon metal, spreading through slow chemical change. Both processes occur without spectacle. They are the opposite of volcanic eruption, yet their patient destruction may ultimately be just as complete.
The morning of the title should reveal and renew. Instead, it reveals corrosion. Metallic sounds flicker through a faded tonal field, sometimes resembling small wings striking a shade, sometimes the dry movement of oxidized hinges. Lussuria makes decay sound active without making it aggressive. The room is being eaten at a scale below ordinary attention.
This attention to gradual damage separates Under Crumbled Stairs from albums built around one overwhelming disaster. Vesuvius may have destroyed Pompeii rapidly, but the site’s current identity has been produced across centuries of burial, excavation, preservation, restoration, tourism, and exposure. Catastrophe was only the first transformation.
“Cetomba” is the album’s most mysterious title, sounding like a corrupted name, archaeological term, or fragment of language whose original context has been lost. The track behaves accordingly. Sounds are present without identifying themselves. A distant pulse suggests movement while thin, unstable tones gather around it.
Lussuria often uses obscurity as architecture. Rather than describing a location, the music withholds enough information for location to become uncertain. The listener senses walls, corridors, courtyards, underground chambers, or open fields, but none can be confirmed. Space is built from pressure and reverberation rather than mapped through recognizable field recordings.
“The Artificial Freezing of Pompeii” names the album’s deepest idea. Pompeii appears frozen in time, but that freezing is partly artificial. The eruption destroyed and buried the city; archaeology later selected, exposed, reconstructed, stabilized, labeled, and displayed it. What visitors encounter is not untouched antiquity. It is a managed relationship between ruin and interpretation.
The track’s sounds seem suspended rather than stopped. Drones hold their position while small details move inside them, resembling particles trapped within ice. The word “artificial” prevents the stillness from becoming mystical. Preservation has technicians, institutions, chemicals, funding, barriers, and decisions about which surfaces deserve continued life.
Freezing can protect an object while making ordinary use impossible. A preserved room cannot remain a home. A body turned into an archaeological cast no longer belongs only to the person it once was. Preservation converts lived space into evidence, and evidence must remain still enough to be read.
Lussuria’s tape-treated textures reproduce that contradiction. Recording saves sound from disappearance, but it also removes sound from the moment that gave it purpose. Repetition can keep an event accessible while making it increasingly abstract. The loop preserves and imprisons at once.
“Flagellation Star” interrupts the album’s slower drift with off-center rhythm. A dub-like pulse moves through the track, but the beat never offers uncomplicated release. Echoes stretch away from each impact, leaving empty space where another strike seems expected.
Flagellation turns punishment into repetition. The body is struck according to ritual, discipline, desire, or religious devotion. A star can guide, illuminate, burn, or represent a sacred figure. Combining the words produces an image of pain elevated into celestial order.
The rhythm gives the piece a bodily pull absent from much of the album, yet each beat feels slightly displaced. Rather than inviting dance, it makes the body anticipate impact. Dub techniques traditionally transform the studio into a space of echo, subtraction, and bass pressure. Here that space resembles a chamber in which every strike continues after contact.
The track also connects Roman catastrophe to Christian imagery without pretending the two belong to one continuous tradition. Pompeii’s destruction occurred before Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome, but the ruins have been repeatedly viewed through later religious ideas about judgment, punishment, corruption, and apocalypse. Vesuvius becomes easy to imagine as divine violence even when geological explanation is fully available.
“Head of the Modernist” brings the album into another historical period. Modernism often presented itself as rupture, cutting away inherited ornament and reorganizing life around new structures, technologies, and visual forms. Yet the modernist head here appears detached, perhaps another fragment displayed without its body.
The track is comparatively clear in outline, with tones that feel more architectural and deliberate. Even so, the structure remains worn. Modernism’s dream of beginning again has already become another historical style, preserved in museums and ruins of its own.
Placing the modernist among Pompeian imagery collapses the comfortable distinction between ancient and recent. Every present imagines itself as complete enough to judge the past. Then its buildings crack, its technologies become obsolete, and its radical forms acquire explanatory plaques.
The title track returns fully to domestic collapse. Stairs organize movement between levels, but crumbled stairs interrupt that movement. They show where passage once existed while preventing the body from using it. Standing beneath them introduces another danger: what remains above may continue falling.
The piece moves with slow vertical pressure. Higher tones seem suspended over a darker mass while rough movement gathers below. The listener is placed neither safely upstairs nor firmly at ground level. The track occupies the unstable space where architecture has failed but not finished failing.
Stairs are among the most ordinary structures in a house. Their destruction makes the entire building difficult to understand. Rooms may survive on separate floors, but the relationship among them has been severed. History often survives in the same way: isolated chambers remain vivid while the passages connecting them disappear.
Lussuria does not rebuild those passages. The music accepts discontinuity. A devotional phrase, metallic scrape, low drone, or damaged melody appears as a room that cannot be entered from the previous one. The album progresses, but its route is broken.
“Devozione Alla Madre Del Dolori” closes the record through devotion to the Mother of Sorrows, the Catholic image of Mary suffering through the passion and death of Christ. The title’s Italian places the album within a specifically religious and Mediterranean emotional vocabulary after its archaeological drift.
Mary’s sorrow is not private grief alone. It has been repeated through paintings, statues, prayers, processions, hymns, and domestic devotional objects. Suffering becomes an image preserved across centuries, recognizable through posture, clothing, tears, pierced heart, or downward gaze.
Lussuria’s music approaches devotion through damaged atmosphere rather than church imitation. There is no grand organ or clean choral resolution. The closing tones feel worn by handling, like a religious image touched repeatedly by generations of anxious hands.
The Mother of Sorrows provides a human figure through which overwhelming loss can be approached. Pompeii, by contrast, contains too many dead and too many separate final moments to be held emotionally as one event. Devotion concentrates suffering into one face. Archaeology disperses it across rooms, casts, objects, and streets.
The track holds those methods together without resolving them. Religious grief gives catastrophe a sacred shape. Historical preservation gives it evidence. Music allows both to remain unstable.
The release text asks what ancient wine tasted like and imagines the red grapes of Pompeii surviving until their dying day. Wine is another technology of transformation and preservation. Grapes are crushed, fermented, stored, aged, poured, and consumed. Their original form is destroyed so that another form can continue.
Vineyards around Vesuvius still grow from volcanic soil. The same geological force capable of killing a city enriches the earth that supports later cultivation. This is not sentimental rebirth. It is a reminder that nature does not divide creation and destruction according to human morality.
Under Crumbled Stairs continually returns to that indifference. Stone preserves a body because ash filled the space around it. Soil produces grapes because volcanic material altered its composition. A building collapses, leaving fragments useful to future historians. Nothing intends to become symbolic, but human attention turns survival and damage into meaning.
The cassette format suits that instability. Tape records through physical contact, moves linearly, and slowly acquires wear. It can preserve sound for decades while changing slightly through every machine, copy, temperature shift, and damaged section. Like an excavated wall painting, it survives through vulnerability rather than permanence.
Compared with Broken Porcelain of the Dining Interior, released later in 2024, Under Crumbled Stairs is less focused on wealth and domestic ceremony. Broken Porcelain imagines an aristocratic interior throwing its contents across a Vanderbilt lawn. Under Crumbled Stairs looks further backward, toward a city where domestic life became archaeological display.
Both records are concerned with architecture continuing after its inhabitants. Both hear rooms as containers of social behavior. But this album is dustier, more devotional, and more concerned with the strange intimacy produced by excavation.
Its nine tracks are concise enough that the atmosphere never becomes decorative wallpaper. Each opens a separate cavity in the larger ruin, then closes before the listener can become comfortable inside it. The result resembles a guided passage through spaces whose explanatory signs have been removed.
Lussuria does not recreate Pompeii. He approaches the emotional mechanism through which ruins become charged: the awareness that ordinary life stopped there, while objects remained.
A stair breaks and still indicates upward movement. A body disappears and leaves a hollow shape. A voice is buried and continues pressing against the stone. Morning arrives, revealing rust. Moths work inside abandoned fabric. The vineyard grows under the volcano’s gaze.
Under Crumbled Stairs listens to everything that survives without promising that survival is mercy.

Castrator - 2025 - Coronation of the Grotesque

 

Dark Descent Records – DDR344  277.58MB FLAC

Coronation of the Grotesque begins at full impact, with no atmospheric doorway and no patience for the listener to settle into the room. “Fragments of Defiance” drops straight into hammering drums, serrated riffing and Clarissa Badini’s cavernous roar, establishing an album built around forward violence rather than murky suspense. Castrator plays death metal with the confidence of a band that knows exactly how much ornament the material requires. Riffs arrive, perform damage and move aside before they can become furniture.
The album’s cover gives this violence a throne. Jon Zig’s artwork presents a swollen ceremonial nightmare of bone, flesh, teeth, trophies and malformed authority, rendered with the dense anatomical detail associated with classic brutal death metal. The image initially seems to promise another procession of monsters and mutilated bodies, but its important figure is the crown. Grotesquery has not merely escaped into the world. It has been elevated, decorated and installed as legitimate power.
That image connects directly to Castrator’s lyrical method. The band uses death metal’s language of dismemberment, bodily control and punishment, but redirects it toward historical and contemporary systems that already treat human beings as disposable material. The grotesque is not some imaginary beast crouching outside civilization. It is the ruler, priest, owner, institution or social order wearing civilization’s official clothing.
Castrator formed in 2013 and released their first full-length, Defiled in Oblivion, in 2022 after years of scattered activity and lineup changes. Coronation of the Grotesque sounds considerably more unified. The performances are heavier, but the real improvement is structural. Breakdowns, speed changes and solos appear as parts of the songs rather than demonstrations inserted into them. The record is brutal without behaving like brutality must remain at maximum density every second.
Carolina Perez’s drumming drives that control. Her blast beats have sharp definition, but she is equally effective when the songs drop into slower, neck-breaking movement. The transitions feel decisive. Castrator does not gradually wander between speeds. The floor disappears, another rhythm catches the body and the attack continues from a different angle.
Robin Mazen’s bass is unusually present for an album this compact and guitar-heavy. It thickens the riffs without merely tracing them, giving the faster sections a muscular center and the slower passages an ugly physical drag. Noah Buchanan’s mix allows that low end to remain audible beneath the kick drums and layered guitars, making the record feel heavy from the bottom rather than simply loud across the surface.
Sara Loerlein’s arrival changes the band’s guitar language. The central riffs remain rooted in old-school American death metal, particularly the blunt force and percussive movement associated with New York and Florida, but her leads introduce a stranger melodic edge. Solos bend, shriek and briefly widen the songs before being pulled back into the main assault. They are not polished windows cut into the brutality. They sound like additional forms of structural failure.
“I Am Eunuch” makes the album’s relationship between bodily horror and institutional power explicit. The song concerns the ancient practice of castrating men and boys for slavery, service and social control. Castrator does not treat eunuchization as exotic historical cruelty safely separated from modern life. The mutilated body becomes evidence of power claiming ownership over reproduction, sexuality, labor and identity.
The riffs lurch between frantic movement and heavier chugging, making the song feel physically interrupted. Badini’s lower register gives the words the force of accusation, while higher rasped layers create a second, more frantic voice around it. The arrangement turns mutilation into rhythm without turning the victim into spectacle.
That distinction matters across the album. Death metal has always used injured bodies as entertainment, often arranging women as anonymous victims beneath the genre’s appetite for gore. Castrator does not abandon graphic language, but changes who receives attention and where responsibility is placed. Violence is not presented as a private fantasy floating free of cause. It emerges from religious authority, misogyny, slavery, predation and systems designed to protect perpetrators.
“Covenant of Deceit” addresses Naasón Joaquín García, the leader of La Luz del Mundo who was convicted of sexually abusing minors. The title attacks the language through which religious authority disguises exploitation. A covenant should establish sacred trust. Here it becomes the mechanism allowing deceit to operate behind obedience, hierarchy and promised salvation.
The song is one of the album’s most oppressive, using a slower central weight rather than depending entirely upon speed. The guitars grind beneath Badini’s voice, and the repeated movement creates the impression of a structure too large to confront through one act of resistance. Castrator’s anger is not abstractly anti-religious. It is directed toward authority using devotion as access to vulnerable bodies.
“Mortem Opeterie” moves with tighter thrash momentum. Its compact arrangement and charging riffs make it one of the record’s most immediate tracks, but the guitar work keeps the motion from becoming straightforward. Leads flash across the rhythm like metal fragments thrown from machinery. The title itself remains cryptic, adding a ritualized or pseudo-Latin quality without explaining the exact event.
“Remnants of Chaos” provides one of the album’s few moments where melody carries visible grief. The song remains heavy, but its lead guitar introduces a mournful shape that lingers after the riff changes. Castrator understands that sorrow does not require clean vocals, acoustic interruption or a theatrical pause in aggression. A brief melodic line can reveal what the surrounding violence has left behind.
“Deviant Miscreant” is built for movement. Its faster thrash-derived sections collide with a Celtic Frost-like breakdown whose simplicity gives it enormous weight. The title uses two labels historically imposed upon anyone refusing acceptable behavior. Castrator takes those accusations and makes them sound less like shame than active rejection.
The album repeatedly reclaims language used to mark bodies as defective, impure or socially dangerous. Eunuch, deviant, miscreant, grotesque and beguiled all involve judgment. Somebody possesses the authority to name another person’s condition. Castrator’s answer is not polite correction. The record takes those words, sharpens them and returns them through amplification.
“Psalm of the Beguiled” again attacks sacred language from within. A psalm ordinarily offers praise, lament or instruction. The beguiled have been charmed, deceived or led away from clear judgment. The title describes worship after manipulation has entered it.
The track has a severe ceremonial quality without leaving death metal’s physical vocabulary. Repeated riffs function like corrupted liturgy, while the drumming keeps the ceremony from becoming stately. Badini’s voice sounds less like a sermon than the buried response of those expected to remain silent during one.
“Blood Bind’s Curse” approaches inheritance as entrapment. Blood can signify family, loyalty, ancestry and belonging, but those bonds may transmit obligation, abuse and silence alongside identity. Castrator’s music is well suited to this contradiction. The riffs feel tightly connected, yet each connection increases pressure rather than security.
“Discordant Rumination” closes the album’s original material with its longest and most internally varied composition. The title suggests thought that cannot reach harmony, circling injury without producing resolution. Dissonant guitar shapes rub against the heavier rhythmic foundation, and the arrangement keeps reopening instead of delivering one obvious final climax.
It would have been a powerful ending. The song feels like the album looking back across its historical and contemporary subjects without pretending that exposure alone has repaired anything. Defiance remains fragmented. Chaos leaves remnants. The grotesque may be identified, but it still wears the crown.
Instead, Castrator finishes with “Metal Command,” an Exodus cover. The choice initially appears almost cheerful compared with the original material. After songs about mutilation, misogyny, exploitation and religious abuse, the album ends by celebrating heavy metal itself.
The cover also reveals the band’s thrash foundation. Castrator thickens the original into death metal without removing its charging Bay Area skeleton. Gary Holt contributes a lead, creating a direct link to the source rather than treating the song as an archaeological object. Badini’s delivery replaces gang-shouted enthusiasm with monstrous command, making the track sound less like an invitation to the scene than an order issued after conquering it.
Still, “Metal Command” slightly weakens the dramatic ending created by “Discordant Rumination.” It functions well as a bonus victory lap, but the album’s central argument reaches its natural conclusion one track earlier. The cover belongs after the credits, when the band returns to the pleasure of playing metal after spending nine songs directing that pleasure toward uglier realities.
Coronation of the Grotesque succeeds because its politics and musical form do not compete for control. Castrator does not stop the record to explain its moral position, nor does it use serious subjects as decorative evidence of depth. The lyrics identify specific structures of suffering while the music gives those structures physical dimensions: confinement, repetition, impact, severed movement and pressure from above.
The band also avoids presenting its all-woman lineup as a novelty requiring lowered expectations or protective praise. Castrator’s perspective matters because death metal has long been saturated with masculine authority and female victimization, but the album’s force depends upon songwriting, performance and control. Perez, Mazen, Badini and Loerlein do not request space within the genre. They occupy it.
The title therefore cuts in more than one direction. The grotesque rulers inside the songs have been crowned by history, religion and social obedience. But Castrator also understands that death metal itself celebrates grotesque transformation. Voices become inhuman, bodies become machines and ugliness becomes strength.
Coronation of the Grotesque seizes that transformation from the people who normally define who is monstrous. The crown remains disgusting, heavy and stained. Castrator simply turns it around and drives its points into the heads that believed they owned it.

Enthroned - 2025 - Ashspawn

 

Season Of Mist – SOM 880  369.07MB FLAC

Ashspawn opens with the sound of something being summoned slowly enough to understand the dimensions of the room it is entering. “Crawling Temples” does not begin with the immediate high-speed attack that once defined much of Enthroned’s work. Voices, percussion and coiled guitar establish a ceremonial pressure before the full band begins moving. When the blast beats finally arrive, they do not announce the album’s true form so much as tear through a form that was already taking shape beneath them. This is black metal built from chambers, thresholds and deliberate transformations rather than one uninterrupted charge.
Enthroned has spent more than three decades associated with a particularly direct strain of Belgian black metal. The early records pursued speed, militant riffing, satanic proclamation and the physical aggression of late-1980s extreme metal carried into the Scandinavian explosion. Ashspawn retains that foundation, but it no longer sounds interested in proving the band can attack. The attack is assumed. What matters is how violence can be arranged into ritual, how a riff can become architecture and how repetition can change from simple insistence into spiritual pressure.
The album arrives six years after Cold Black Suns, and that distance is audible. Ashspawn does not feel assembled from whatever songs accumulated between tours. Its nine pieces share one tonal climate and one sense of movement. Most exceed four minutes, several approach seven, and the closing pair pass far beyond the compact dimensions of Enthroned’s earliest work. The longer structures allow riffs to return in altered forms and make the faster passages feel like ruptures inside larger ceremonies.
Nornagest remains the album’s controlling presence. His vocals are harsh but unusually varied, moving between rasped declaration, lower invocations, layered chants and spoken fragments. He no longer treats the voice solely as a blade placed over the instruments. It becomes one of the album’s environmental materials. Multiple voices may gather around a repeated phrase until the words sound less like lyrics than a formula being activated.
“Crawling Temples” introduces this method through images of bodies, structures and corruption becoming inseparable. The temple is no longer a fixed building. It crawls, breathes and carries contamination through the landscape. The guitars respond with riffs that seem to move laterally rather than simply descend. They coil across Menthor’s drumming, tighten, then release into faster motion.
Menthor’s performance is essential to the album’s scale. His blasts remain precise, but Ashspawn draws greater power from his control of slower rhythms. Tom patterns, rolling double bass and carefully spaced impacts give the songs a ceremonial body. The drums can sound martial without turning into mechanical background. Even at their most exact, they retain the sensation of hands repeatedly striking physical surfaces.
“Basilisk Triumphant” is immediately more commanding. Its title creature kills through vision, turning whoever meets its gaze into stone. The music repeatedly alternates between movement and sudden weight, as though the basilisk’s stare has interrupted the body mid-action. Chanted “Gloria” passages borrow the language of Christian praise and force it into a hymn of self-deification.
That reversal is central to Enthroned’s mature occultism. Earlier satanic black metal often depended upon desecrating recognizable Christian symbols through inversion. Ashspawn is less interested in holding a cross upside down and waiting for the gesture to carry the entire argument. Its lyrics build private systems from biblical language, demonology, Eastern religious terms and invented ritual utterance. The result is not doctrinally clean, but it is texturally convincing.
T. Kaos handles both guitar and bass, giving the album an unusually unified string architecture. The guitar tone is heavy enough for death metal without losing black metal’s cutting upper register. Chords often retain individual notes inside the distortion, allowing dissonance and melody to remain visible. The bass thickens the riffs rather than merely duplicating their lowest notes, especially when the songs slow into broad, stomping movement.
“Stillborn Litany” pushes the ritual language furthest. Its opening invocation sounds deliberately difficult to decode, a sequence of names and syllables intended to function through repetition rather than ordinary explanation. The title joins failed birth with formal prayer. Something has been produced without life, yet receives a complete ceremony.
The song’s nearly seven-minute length allows this dead thing to acquire an enormous presence. Blast beats and tremolo riffs appear, but the central effect is processional. Vocal layers gather, riffs circle and the arrangement repeatedly returns to its incantatory center. The stillborn subject is not mourned privately. It is installed within a cosmology of curses, grief and infernal inheritance.
The title track is shorter and more immediately physical. “Ashspawn” reduces the album’s doctrine to destruction producing another form of life. Ash is residue, proof that something has burned beyond recovery. Spawn suggests multiplication, offspring and continued biological force. Joining them creates an image of birth occurring after annihilation rather than before it.
The song moves through a thick, stumbling riff that repeatedly catches itself, as though the new body has not yet learned to walk. Faster passages tear away from that central weight, but the riff returns and keeps the track anchored. Its repetition may initially feel excessive, yet the stubbornness suits the subject. Whatever has emerged from the ash does not possess elegance. It drags itself forward.
Ashspawn’s production gives this movement considerable depth. The guitars occupy a broad middle range while drums remain clear enough to preserve the shape of every tempo change. Nornagest’s vocals sit above the instruments without floating separately from them. Samples and background textures appear at the edges, expanding the music without covering its riffs in unnecessary orchestration.
“Raviasamin” begins with a more serpentine motion. Its title appears connected to the language of venom, poison or an invoked entity whose exact identity remains partly sealed. This uncertainty is useful. Enthroned does not supply a glossary beside the album. Names gain force through their placement and sound, allowing language to become another form of texture.
The track demonstrates how melodic the album can be without becoming melodic black metal in the familiar heroic sense. Guitar lines rise from the rhythm and briefly open the surrounding darkness, but they do not promise escape. Melody reveals another chamber and then closes the entrance behind the listener.
“Sightless” is the album’s shortest and most direct piece. Its compactness provides relief from the longer ritual structures without relaxing the atmosphere. The title removes vision after “Basilisk Triumphant” made vision lethal. To become sightless may therefore be punishment, protection or deliberate refusal.
The riffs strike quickly, and Menthor’s drumming gives the track a strong forward snap. Enthroned sounds closest here to its earlier form, but the songwriting remains more layered. A secondary guitar shape continues beneath the main attack, preventing the song from becoming a simple nostalgia exercise.
“Chysalid” appears to mutate “chrysalis,” the protective structure within which transformation occurs. The missing letter makes the word look damaged before the music begins. Where “Ashspawn” presents rebirth through residue, “Chysalid” approaches transformation through enclosure.
The track’s riffs repeatedly fold inward. Sections appear to contract around the voice before opening into wider passages. There is nothing delicate about this metamorphosis. Whatever is developing inside the shell seems to be reshaping itself through pain.
The album’s occult imagery works best when it remains connected to these physical processes. Birth, burning, crawling, blindness, venom, stone and transformation provide bodily anchors for abstract spiritual claims. Enthroned’s Satanism is not presented as an intellectual seminar. It is imagined through flesh being subjected to pressure until another identity appears.
“Ashen Advocacy” is the album’s strangest piece and its first major break from the established flow. A film sample introduces a darker industrial pulse, while the band initially holds itself inside a slow, haunted structure. The nearly eight-minute track behaves less like a song than a tribunal convened in a ruined chamber.
The title suggests speaking on behalf of ash, giving representation to whatever has been destroyed and reduced to residue. Its central riff repeats with uncomfortable patience while samples and electronic textures create an institutional coldness. When the full black-metal attack finally enters, it feels like a sentence being carried out rather than a chorus arriving.
This use of industrial sound is restrained enough to remain effective. Enthroned does not paste mechanical beats across the entire album or pretend to have transformed into an electronic project. The machinery appears at the exact point where the record needs a different form of threat. It makes human drumming and distorted guitar feel newly violent when they return.
“Assertion” closes the album with an act of will. After repeated invocations, transformations and encounters with hostile entities, the title reduces everything to declaration. An assertion does not request proof from outside. It establishes itself through force.
The track takes nearly seven minutes to complete that declaration. It revisits the album’s broad tempos, layered vocals and dissonant guitar movement while preserving enough speed for the ending to feel active rather than ceremonial exhaustion. The final passages do not dissolve into atmosphere. Enthroned leaves the structure standing.
That ending reveals Ashspawn’s greatest difference from albums built mainly around satanic spectacle. The record is concerned with construction. Temples crawl, litanies organize grief, ash produces offspring and a chrysalis contains mutation. Even destruction becomes material for building another form.
Enthroned’s history could easily have turned the band into a reliable heritage act, repeating the speed, imagery and riffing that established its name during the 1990s. Ashspawn does not reject that history, but neither does it treat endurance as an achievement sufficient by itself. The album is slower, more architectural and more willing to let atmosphere emerge from songwriting rather than keyboards spread behind it.
There are moments when the repeated mid-paced riffs extend longer than necessary, and the ritual language can become dense enough to obscure emotional distinction among the songs. The album demands more attention than its immediate violence initially suggests. Its strongest sections are rarely the first thirty seconds of a track. They occur when a returning riff has accumulated enough meaning to feel altered.
That patience makes Ashspawn an effective late-career album. Enthroned no longer needs to sound young, uncontrolled or desperate to establish extremity. The band sounds exact. Every blast, chant, sample and broad guitar chord has been placed inside a structure designed to survive its own fire.
The title creature is therefore the album itself. Ashspawn rises from the burned remains of Enthroned’s earlier identities without pretending those remains have disappeared. The old Belgian black-metal violence is still there, blackened and recognizable, but it has grown new limbs. It crawls through the temples, opens its eyes and begins turning the surrounding world to stone.

Aya - 2025 - Hexed!

 

Hyperdub – none  226.89MB FLAC

hexed! begins with aya striking herself using the machinery that was supposed to provide escape. “I am the pipe I hit myself with” opens in a burst of crushed rhythm, strangled electronics and a voice moving between muttered recollection, theatrical accusation and full-bodied scream. The title turns an instrument for consuming a drug into an instrument of punishment. There is no outside attacker required. Addiction has folded the user, weapon and victim into the same figure.
The track also introduces the album’s supernatural language. aya describes being kissed by a witch, placed under suspicion and driven into something resembling a hunt. The imagery reaches back toward her adolescence in a Pentecostal church, where intense music and bodily sensation were interpreted as evidence of the Holy Spirit until queerness transformed her from believer into perceived contamination. hexed! does not separate religious ecstasy from chemical ecstasy cleanly. Both involve altered states, repetition, submission and the desire to have unbearable feeling explained by a force larger than the self.
The title suggests that addiction is a spell cast from outside, yet the album repeatedly complicates that excuse. To be hexed is to be acted upon, but aya remains aware of her own participation in the damage. The music lives inside that contradiction. Beats lurch forward with enormous conviction, then collapse as though ashamed of where they were going. Voices multiply, mock and interrupt one another. Every moment of control creates another mechanism capable of turning against its maker.
“off to the ESSO” relocates the supernatural drama to a petrol station. The track is funny, quick and deeply local, built from geographical references, slang and the strange nighttime clarity of walking through a city while exhausted or altered. A service station becomes destination, landmark, refuge and miniature social universe.
The rhythm keeps changing shape beneath aya’s delivery. Drum sounds strike with the force of hardcore and grime but refuse a dependable grid. Synthetic bass bends until it resembles sheet metal being dragged through a stairwell. The track moves like someone who knows the route while no longer trusting perception.
That instability is central to aya’s production. She does not merely combine genres by placing a distorted guitar sound over a techno beat. Her synthetic instruments seem to possess weight, elasticity and bad intentions. Percussion buckles after impact. Bass stretches beyond its expected dimensions. Voices behave like surfaces that can be scratched, liquefied or folded.
“the names of Faggot Chav boys” confronts classification directly. Its title gathers two insults, one directed toward sexuality and the other toward class, style and regional identity. aya does not reclaim them by sanding away their hostility. She keeps the words ugly and makes them collide.
The vocal delivery carries the snapping timing of grime, playground taunting and spoken-word performance. Names and identities become things shouted across streets, remembered after humiliation or worn deliberately before someone else can use them as weapons. The song’s short duration makes it feel like an encounter rather than a developed narrative.
hexed! is saturated with place. Huddersfield, Manchester and London appear not as tasteful documentary scenery but as routes, petrol stations, rooms, pavements, parties and transit points. Movement between cities does not produce a clean new identity. Earlier versions of aya remain attached to each location, and the album seems constantly to run into them.
“heat death” enlarges the scale from neighborhood memory to cosmic extinction. The scientific phrase describes a theoretical state in which usable energy has been exhausted and no meaningful work can continue. aya turns that total depletion into personal atmosphere.
The track pounds forward, but its energy feels doomed to spend itself. Metal-like eruptions and electronic screams gather around a rhythm whose intensity cannot prevent eventual collapse. Addiction produces a similar false infinity. The next night, next dose or next peak appears capable of restarting the system while actually reducing what remains available.
“peach” is one of the album’s most exposed songs. Its textures soften, but softness does not create safety. A melodic figure glows beneath aya’s voice while small digital disturbances keep opening inside it. The title promises sweetness, flesh and ripeness, yet the music treats tenderness as something easily bruised.
This is where hexed! becomes more than a brilliantly designed crisis simulator. aya can write emotional movement that does not depend upon impact. Her quieter sounds retain unusual physicality. A soft tone is not merely pretty; it seems to occupy vulnerable tissue. A vocal effect does not conceal the person singing; it reveals how unstable the boundary around that person has become.
The title track pushes this fragility into a wider cinematic space. “hexed!” begins almost as a reprieve, allowing long tones and voice to gather without immediate attack. The spell is no longer represented through frenzy alone. It becomes suspension, the feeling of remaining inside a condition after the dramatic event has passed.
This quieter center reveals the album’s narrative shape. The first half behaves like active crisis: movement, accusation, intoxicated geography and punishment. After the title track, the music begins examining residue. The body is no longer only being struck. It is listening to what continues vibrating afterward.
“droplets” is delicate without becoming decorative. Small sounds fall into a large dark field, and aya’s voice carries a careful intimacy absent from the album’s opening attacks. Droplets suggest rain, sweat, tears, condensation or a substance being measured in small amounts. The source remains unclear, allowing the image to move between healing and relapse.
The track’s beauty is strengthened by the surrounding abrasion. hexed! does not use a ballad as proof that aya possesses a gentler side. Gentleness is another extreme condition, requiring the music to expose itself without the armor of maximal distortion.
“navel gazer” turns introspection into self-mockery. Navel-gazing is usually an accusation that someone has become trapped inside their own thoughts and experiences. On an album this personal, the term could be defensive, acknowledging the risk before anybody else points it out.
But looking inward is not presented as indulgent luxury. aya’s internal world is crowded by religious shame, chemical compulsion, gendered scrutiny, social memory and panic. The navel is also a bodily scar marking an earlier physical connection. To stare at it is to confront dependency, separation and the evidence that the self did not begin independently.
“The Petard is my Hoister” mangles Shakespeare’s phrase about being “hoist with his own petard,” meaning destroyed by one’s own explosive device. aya turns the passive consequence into possession. The petard is not merely what causes the hoisting; it becomes the hoister, an active companion in self-destruction.
The track’s sound follows that linguistic knot. Rhythms appear to launch themselves upward and detonate beneath their own structures. Voice, bass and percussion compete for control, producing a grotesque mechanical comedy. It is one of the album’s clearest examples of aya’s ability to make suffering funny without reducing its seriousness.
Humor matters throughout hexed! because addiction stories can easily become solemn monuments to damage. aya refuses that prestige. Slang, literary jokes, ugly laughter and ridiculous sonic gestures keep the album attached to social life. Even the worst period contains petrol-station errands, badly timed observations and language made funny because despair has exhausted ordinary dignity.
“Time at the Bar” closes the record by slowing the machinery. The title can mean time spent drinking, a deadline at closing, imprisonment, legal judgment or standing before an obstacle. Every meaning suggests that movement has reached a boundary.
The track returns toward the landscape of aya’s youth, where moors, roads, religion and memory gather without forming a sentimental homecoming. Home is not one stable place waiting to welcome her back. It is a shifting collection of locations, voices and earlier selves, some nurturing and others dangerous.
The closing music does not announce recovery as victory. Sobriety appears less like a clean spell-break than the difficult process of recognizing how the spell was constructed. The rhythms no longer need to imitate liberation through endless acceleration. Space begins appearing around the voice.
That space distinguishes hexed! from im hole. The earlier album often sounded submerged inside the altered state it documented, its rhythms and language bending through chemical dissociation. hexed! looks back with greater clarity, but clarity does not make the experience orderly. The memories remain vivid enough to distort the present.
aya’s vocal performance is the album’s most important instrument. She raps, whispers, mutters, screams, recites and sings without arranging these methods into separate characters. They are pressures passing through one body. Heavy processing stretches the voice while preserving its grain, making even the most synthetic transformations feel intimate.
The album’s club relationship is equally complicated. These tracks contain rhythm, bass and recognizable traces of techno, grime, footwork and UK soundsystem music, but they rarely offer the body a reliable agreement. A pattern may lock into place just long enough for movement to begin, then snap sideways.
That refusal is not anti-dance. It recognizes the dance floor as a site of pleasure, transformation, danger, repetition and compulsion. aya has described chasing intensity through rave culture until the chase became dark. hexed! preserves the physical knowledge of that environment without pretending every form of surrender was freedom.
Its metal and hardcore influence works similarly. Distortion, screamed vocals and sudden rhythmic violence are not decorative signs of aggression. They carry memories of adolescent catharsis, religious intensity and music experienced as overwhelming bodily proof.
Eli Gromova-Gulbe’s artwork and Dee Iskrzynska’s photography place aya within a similarly unstable visual world. The cover does not offer a clean portrait announcing self-possession. The body appears processed by color, surface and distortion, held somewhere between fashion image, digital wound and supernatural evidence.
The exclamation mark in hexed! is important. It prevents the title from becoming purely mournful. The word is cried out, joked about or announced with theatrical force. aya has survived long enough to turn the condition into form, but the album does not pretend form has neutralized it.
What makes hexed! exceptional is the precision beneath its apparent chaos. Every collision has weight. Voices enter at exact angles. Rhythmic failures are timed with enough control to feel physically inevitable. The record sounds unhinged because aya has become extraordinarily skilled at designing hinges that break on command.
The album ends without proving that the curse has been lifted. Its stronger claim is that the curse can be examined, named, sampled, distorted and rebuilt into something whose direction no longer belongs entirely to it.
The pipe remains visible. The bruises remain. The church, petrol station, club, moor and damaged rooms remain. But aya has taken the machinery that once organized the harm and made it answer to her.

Harakiri for the Sky - 2018 - Arson

 

AOP Records – AOP053  574.90MB FLAC

Arson opens as though the fire began years ago and nobody noticed until the roof finally gave way. “Fire, Walk With Me” does not creep toward ignition. Guitars arrive in bright, surging layers while Kerim “Krimh” Lechner’s drums push the song forward with the momentum of someone running through rain toward a place already burning. J.J.’s voice enters as a torn scream from inside that motion, raw enough to suggest immediate crisis but controlled enough to remain part of the composition. Harakiri for the Sky’s black metal has always been emotional, but Arson enlarges emotion until it becomes architecture.
The Austrian duo had already established its central method across three earlier albums. M.S. writes and performs the instrumental material, building long songs from tremolo guitar, post-rock crescendos, hardcore urgency and depressive black-metal atmosphere. J.J. supplies the lyrics and vocals, approaching grief, addiction, suicide, memory and personal collapse without the distancing imagery of medieval forests or satanic ceremony. Arson does not reinvent that method. It pushes it toward maximum scale.
The album contains eight tracks and runs for more than seventy minutes. Most songs last between eight and eleven minutes, giving every riff enough time to return, gather emotional weight and eventually become something larger than its first appearance. This can be exhausting. Arson does not believe every idea should be stated once and left alone. It believes repetition is how pain proves it has not gone anywhere.
“Fire, Walk With Me” borrows its title from Twin Peaks, but the song does not use the reference as decorative darkness. Fire in the series is corruption, desire, trauma and transformation, a force that moves through people rather than merely destroying buildings. Harakiri for the Sky treats it similarly. The guitar melodies blaze upward while J.J. sounds less like someone observing the flames than someone asking them to finish what they started.
M.S.’s guitar writing is immediately recognizable. One line establishes the emotional horizon, another thickens it with chords, and a higher melody rises over the rhythm like light breaking through smoke. The music is openly beautiful, sometimes almost triumphant, but the beauty never confirms survival. It creates the cruel sensation of hope appearing at the exact moment hope has become least credible.
“The Graves We’ve Dug” begins from the understanding that ruin is often self-constructed. The title does not blame an external enemy. These graves have been prepared through repeated choices, habits, silence and damage accumulated across time. The song’s faster sections carry urgency, while the slower passages feel like recognition arriving too late.
Harakiri for the Sky’s relationship with post-rock is especially clear here. The band uses gradual expansion, repeating guitar figures and large crescendos, but removes the clean emotional uplift that often accompanies those techniques. A crescendo does not necessarily mean transcendence. It may simply mean the feeling has become too large to remain contained.
“You Are the Scars” stretches beyond ten minutes and turns injury into identity. A scar proves that a wound closed, but it also keeps the wound visible. The title addresses another person as the lasting mark itself, collapsing memory, love and harm into one body.
The song circles its central melodic figures with almost obsessive patience. J.J.’s vocal performance becomes increasingly desperate while the guitars remain strangely radiant. That contrast is the album’s defining sound. The instruments seem capable of reaching open sky, while the voice remains trapped in whatever happened below.
Krimh’s drumming prevents these long structures from dissolving into decorative atmosphere. His blast beats are sharp and forceful, but the performance is most effective during transitions. Cymbal movement, tom patterns and changing kick rhythms give the repeated guitar sections different physical meanings each time they return. The same melody can feel like pursuit, collapse or exhausted continuation depending upon what the drums place beneath it.
“Heroin Waltz” uses one of the album’s most immediately striking titles. A waltz suggests formal elegance, rotation and controlled movement in three. Heroin suggests chemical escape, dependency and bodily deterioration. The combination turns addiction into a dance whose steps are learned through repetition until stopping becomes more difficult than continuing.
The track does not literally remain inside a waltz rhythm. Instead, its sections rise and fall with a circular feeling, repeatedly carrying the listener back toward the same emotional center. Guitar lines reach toward sweetness while the vocals tear through them. The beauty becomes inseparable from the mechanism causing harm.
Harakiri for the Sky is often grouped with depressive suicidal black metal, but Arson differs from the genre’s most skeletal forms. The production is broad and muscular. The drums sound physically present. The guitars are layered with enough clarity to preserve melodic detail, and the songs build toward large climaxes rather than withdrawing into lo-fi isolation.
The depression here is not represented by musical weakness. It is represented by energy that cannot locate a useful destination. The songs run, climb and erupt, but every path eventually returns to grief.
“Tomb Omnia” is one of the record’s darkest pieces. Its title suggests a tomb containing everything, or everything itself becoming a tomb. The song moves with a heavier, more funereal weight, allowing the guitars to darken without abandoning melody.
The track is connected to suicide and the damage left among those who survive it. Harakiri for the Sky does not romanticize death as pure release. The music remains among the living, where absence becomes a permanent object around which family memory reorganizes itself. The tomb is not limited to the grave. It expands into every room still occupied by people who remember.
“Stillborn” continues the album’s vocabulary of failed emergence. A stillborn life reaches the threshold of existence without crossing it. The word can also describe plans, relationships and identities that ended before they had the chance to become complete.
The song begins with a restrained guitar figure before widening into one of Arson’s most powerful surges. J.J.’s voice sounds especially exposed, carrying less rage than helplessness. The music repeatedly gathers enough force to suggest rebirth, then falls back into the knowledge contained by the title.
This pattern risks predictability. By the album’s second half, the listener understands how many songs will move: melodic opening, acceleration, vocal anguish, repeated central figure, large crescendo and exhausted release. Arson does not always justify every minute of its length. Certain sections repeat after their emotional point has already landed.
Yet that excess also belongs to the record’s psychology. Grief does not become concise because concision would improve the composition. Intrusive thought repeats after its meaning is understood. Addiction returns after consequences are obvious. A person can rehearse the same memory for years without discovering a new ending.
“Voidgazer” turns that compulsive attention toward emptiness itself. To gaze into the void is a familiar philosophical image, but the song makes the act feel less heroic. The void does not reveal hidden wisdom. It becomes another object of fixation.
The track’s guitar melodies are among the album’s most open and skyward, creating the sensation of enormous distance. J.J.’s voice cuts across them from a far narrower emotional space. He may be gazing outward, but the sound suggests that the void has already moved inside.
The album’s cover reinforces this relationship between beauty and destruction. A woman stands before an immense burning landscape, her body dark against orange light. The image could be read as witness, survivor, arsonist or intended sacrifice. There is no visible action confirming which role belongs to her.
That ambiguity suits the record. Fire may destroy the source of pain, but it also destroys shelter. It can purify, expose, erase or spread beyond control. The figure on the cover does not flee. She stands close enough to become part of the event.
“Manifesto” closes the album in less than five minutes, practically a miniature by Arson’s standards. It is a cover of a song by the Austrian crust-punk band Graveyard Rodeo, and its directness cuts through the preceding hour of extended emotional structures.
The track carries a rougher punk momentum, with fewer atmospheric detours and a clearer sense of confrontation. Ending with a cover prevents the album from resolving entirely inside its own grief. After seven long songs of internal combustion, Harakiri for the Sky reaches outward toward another band’s language and lets collective anger replace solitary collapse.
The cover also exposes the hardcore skeleton beneath the group’s music. Beneath the post-rock crescendos and black-metal tremolo, Harakiri for the Sky relies upon the emotional directness of punk. The songs do not hide their wounds behind elaborate mythology. They name scars, graves, heroin, stillbirth and emptiness with almost embarrassing clarity.
That directness will repel listeners who prefer black metal to maintain distance through symbol and atmosphere. Arson offers very little protection from feeling. Its lyrics can become melodramatic, and its guitar melodies repeatedly reach for overwhelming emotional release. The album would rather risk excess than disguise what it is trying to express.
M.S. occasionally pushes that melodic language close to repetition across songs. Certain chord movements and high guitar lines resemble earlier Harakiri for the Sky material, and the album’s enormous duration makes those similarities more visible. Arson is not a record of constant reinvention.
It is instead a record of refinement through endurance. The duo has found a narrow emotional mechanism and keeps testing how much weight it can carry. On the strongest tracks, the answer is considerable. Guitar, drums and voice move together until private anguish takes on the scale of weather.
Arson’s title names deliberate destruction rather than accidental fire. Somebody begins an arson fire for revenge, concealment, pleasure, protest or escape. The act transforms emotion into an event that cannot be withdrawn once released.
The album behaves the same way. Each song begins with a wound and keeps adding oxygen. Melodies brighten, drums accelerate and J.J.’s voice pushes beyond ordinary speech until the feeling has consumed the available space.
There is no calm survey of the ashes at the end. “Manifesto” leaves the record with fists still moving. Arson does not cure the despair it describes or convert suffering into wisdom. It gives despair an enormous burning structure, walks directly into it and keeps playing until the walls fall.

Harakiri for the Sky - 2021 - Maere 2xCD

AOP Records – AOP081  683.42MB FLAC

Mære begins with the burden already in place. “I, Pallbearer” opens through ascending guitar lines and a rhythm that seems determined to keep walking despite the weight pressing downward. A pallbearer carries the dead, but the song enlarges that task until it becomes an identity. J.J. does not sound like someone attending one funeral. He sounds condemned to transport every absence he has accumulated, including friends, relationships, abandoned homes and earlier versions of himself.
The title of Harakiri for the Sky’s fifth album refers to the mare of Germanic and Scandinavian folklore, a malicious nocturnal presence believed to sit upon a sleeping person’s chest and produce paralysis, suffocation and terror. The word survives inside “nightmare,” but Mære returns the fear to its physical origin. Something enters during sleep, applies weight and prevents the body from moving even while consciousness remains painfully alert.
That condition describes the album’s emotional mechanism. These songs are full of attempted movement: leaving towns, crossing oceans, climbing mountains, drinking through nights, outrunning memories and imagining reunion with the dead. Yet every journey remains pinned beneath grief. The guitars surge forward while J.J.’s voice stays trapped inside the same recurring thoughts.
Mære expands the method established on Arson rather than replacing it. Matthias Sollak again constructs long post-black-metal songs from tremolo melody, post-rock accumulation, melodic death-metal force and hardcore urgency. Most tracks pass eight minutes, and “I’m All About the Dusk” exceeds eleven. The two-CD format is practical, but it also suits a record too large to feel like one uninterrupted sitting. The pause between discs resembles waking briefly before the pressure returns.
“I, Pallbearer” immediately makes clear that the album is less interested in metaphorical sadness than in direct inventories of loss. J.J.’s lyrics describe cleaning a dead friend’s apartment, bipolarity, psychosis, alcohol and the unbearable imbalance between surviving and believing someone else deserved survival more. The writing occasionally risks sounding like every bleak thought has been copied from a notebook without filtration, but that excess is part of the band’s appeal. Harakiri for the Sky does not present despair after it has been disciplined into elegant symbolism.
The music provides the discipline the lyrics refuse. Sollak’s layered guitars establish clear emotional architecture around the flood of words. One line supplies forward motion, another widens the atmosphere, and a higher melody rises above both. Krimh’s drums keep the song from collapsing under its own length, changing the physical meaning of each repeated riff through blasts, double-bass movement and carefully controlled cymbal work.
“Sing for the Damage We’ve Done” is the album’s most immediately complete song. Its central melody carries the grand, wounded lift Harakiri for the Sky has refined across several records, but Neige’s clean voice changes the emotional geometry. J.J.’s scream sounds trapped inside consequence, while Neige seems to float above it like memory, forgiveness or the unreachable version of the relationship before damage occurred.
The guest appearance does not turn the track into an Alcest song. Neige appears selectively, providing contrast rather than taking over the arrangement. His voice makes the surrounding harshness feel more severe because it introduces a possible calm that the song cannot maintain.
The phrase “sing for the damage we’ve done” treats music as witness rather than cure. Singing does not reverse the damage. It gives the damage a shared form. The song acknowledges that silence also has consequences, but words cannot guarantee repair once they finally arrive.
“Us Against December Skies” turns winter into memory. December is cold, but it is also calendrical, the period when another year closes and accumulated absence becomes measurable. The song remembers companionship through streets and seasons while accepting that the remembered closeness no longer exists.
Sollak’s guitars repeatedly lift the track toward something almost triumphant. This is one of the band’s defining contradictions. The melodies often suggest victory, open landscape and emotional release, while the lyrics insist that nothing has been overcome. The result is not false hope. It is the sound of the body producing energy after the mind has abandoned the possibility of destination.
“I’m All About the Dusk” stretches that contradiction across eleven minutes. Dusk is neither day nor night, but the visible process of one condition becoming another. J.J. identifies with the threshold itself: twilight, mist, uncertainty and life spent longing for a darkness that has not fully arrived.
The song’s length allows its central ideas to recur almost ritualistically. Guitar melodies return after long instrumental movement, gathering new emotional pressure each time. Krimh is especially important here, shifting from controlled propulsion into full black-metal force without making the changes feel pasted together.
The track also reveals the danger of Mære’s scale. Harakiri for the Sky has become exceptionally skilled at building long emotional structures, but skill can harden into formula. Several songs rely upon similar rises, tremolo shapes and climactic returns. Heard individually, they are powerful. Across eighty-four minutes, their resemblance becomes impossible to ignore.
“Three Empty Words” pushes lyrical repetition toward its limit. Love, apology and farewell hover as phrases whose meaning has been emptied through failure or lateness. The song gathers quotations, maxims, images of storms, funerals and broken hearts into a vast emotional scrapbook.
Some lines land with uncomfortable directness, while others resemble motivational phrases dragged into a depressive context. The effect is messy, but the mess feels true to the record’s psychology. Mære is filled with language because silence has become intolerable, even when language can no longer distinguish personal revelation from phrases inherited from songs, films and ordinary conversation.
The music prevents the track from becoming only verbal accumulation. Its melodic center is strong enough to survive the lyrics’ density, and the arrangement repeatedly clears space before building again. Harakiri for the Sky understands that catharsis requires withholding. Constant climax would flatten the emotion into atmosphere.
“Once Upon a Winter” turns nostalgia toward geography. Mountains, snow, home and burial become inseparable. Home is not merely where someone was born but where the body imagines finally being placed. The landscape becomes maternal and funerary at once.
The song has one of Mære’s most patient openings, allowing the guitars to establish distance before the full band arrives. When the faster movement begins, it feels like weather crossing the mountains rather than a conventional tempo change.
The winter imagery is familiar territory for atmospheric black metal, but Harakiri for the Sky approaches it through contemporary emotional language rather than mythic wilderness. These mountains are not untouched realms beyond society. They are connected to lost relationships, urban alienation and the desire to be buried somewhere that still resembles belonging.
“And Oceans Between Us” makes separation physically enormous. The song describes a relationship that cannot be restored even though emotional attachment remains active. Oceans become the measurable distance between two people who continue occupying one another’s memories.
The main guitar figure is among the album’s most immediate, moving with enough clarity to resemble a post-rock anthem before the vocals tear open its surface. Krimh’s drumming gives the track relentless forward momentum, but every lyric describes fading, poisoning and the inability to become someone different.
This tension between motion and stasis is Mære’s deepest strength. The songs never sound physically defeated. They sprint, climb and expand. Paralysis exists inside all that motion, proving that activity and escape are not the same thing.
“Silver Needle // Golden Dawn” brings addiction, suicide and occult radiance into one divided title. Silver suggests the needle’s cold physical reality; gold suggests light, transcendence or the delusion that self-destruction may open into something purer. The anonymous vocalist from Gaerea adds a second harsh presence, making the song feel less like solitary confession and more like two figures recognizing the same enclosure.
The track is one of the album’s darker pieces, with riffs that feel more severe and less openly luminous than those surrounding them. The guest voice does not provide relief. It thickens the despair, turning the song into shared testimony without implying solidarity is sufficient to stop the damage.
“Time Is a Ghost” treats chronology as another haunting. The past no longer exists, the future has not arrived and the present disappears while being experienced. Time becomes a ghost because it affects everything without possessing a stable body.
The song gathers many of the album’s recurring conditions: sleeplessness, alcohol, travel, buried hope, coldness and the sense that every ordinary act resembles an ending. Sollak’s melodies remain expansive, but the repeated declarations of “end times” make expansion feel less like opening than the widening of an abyss.
The original material could have ended there, with the band’s entire emotional system dissolving into the impossibility of holding time. Instead, the album closes with Placebo’s “Song to Say Goodbye.”
The choice is almost too perfect. Placebo has long written about damaged intimacy, addiction, sexual ambiguity, resentment and the point where farewell becomes both accusation and self-indictment. Harakiri for the Sky enlarges the song into its own language without destroying the original’s direct emotional spine.
J.J.’s scream removes Brian Molko’s cool, wounded distance, while the guitars turn the song’s concise alternative-rock structure into a broad post-black-metal farewell. The cover works because Harakiri for the Sky does not treat Placebo as a guilty pleasure requiring metallic correction. The band recognizes an existing kinship and increases its scale.
Placed after nine enormous songs, “Song to Say Goodbye” also provides unexpected economy. It lasts less than six minutes and follows a comparatively direct structure. After Mære’s long internal monologues, another writer’s song says goodbye with sharper boundaries.
The album’s artwork by Art of Maquenda presents a pale, spectral figure surrounded by organic and dreamlike detail. The image avoids the burning spectacle of Arson. It is quieter and more inward, suggesting sleep, fever, transformation and the threatening closeness of something whose exact anatomy cannot be trusted.
That cover suits an album named for nighttime paralysis. The Mære is terrifying not because it attacks from a visible distance but because it occupies the body’s most vulnerable state. It presses against the chest, interrupts breathing and turns the familiar bed into a trap.
The music recreates that weight through abundance. Mære is deliberately exhausting. Ten songs, eighty-four minutes, repeated climaxes and lyrics overflowing with grief make the album difficult to absorb casually. It does not offer the neat arc of a shorter record whose darkness resolves into clarity by the final track.
At times, the length weakens individual impact. “Three Empty Words” and “Once Upon a Winter” contain ideas that might have struck harder with several minutes removed. J.J.’s vocal register remains relatively consistent, and the constant intensity can make separate crises resemble one long crisis.
Yet reducing Mære to bloat misses what the album is designed to express. Nightmares do not observe editorial discipline. Grief repeats information already understood. Anxiety returns to the same physical sensations and asks the same questions without accepting previous answers.
Arson sounded like emotional ruin being set on fire. Mære sounds like what happens when the smoke enters the bedroom and remains there through the night. The flames are less visible, but breathing has become harder.
The two-CD edition makes this scale tangible. One disc cannot hold the full emotional load, so the album physically divides itself while refusing to become two separate works. The listener turns to the second half and reenters the same weather.
Mære does not overcome the creature on the chest. It studies the pressure, gives every buried memory another melody and waits for morning without trusting morning to arrive. The body remains pinned, but the guitars keep moving beneath it.