Cremation Lily - MP3 PACK

 

RUTracker - 2.12GB

FOR UR CONSIDERATION

This 2.245 GB archive gathers forty-seven Cremation Lily releases made between 2011 and 2018, preserving an unusually dense period in the development of Zen Zsigo’s project. It begins with short, obscure recordings issued when Cremation Lily was still closely associated with noise and power electronics, then follows the music as it expands into ambient drift, degraded dance rhythms, shoegaze, field recording, tape manipulation and fragile songwriting. The quantity is striking, but the real value lies in hearing change occur without waiting for orderly album cycles.
Cremation Lily began in England around 2009 as a vehicle for sample-based ambient music. Zsigo has described its origin in personal terms, connecting it to an encounter with death and to a fear of living without meaning. That emotional foundation helps explain why the project’s name has endured even while its musical methods have changed. Cremation and lilies bring destruction and tenderness into the same image. One reduces the body to residue. The other belongs to mourning, ceremony and beauty. The music repeatedly moves between those poles.
The earliest material in this pack appears in 2011, with releases including 2, Funeral Home, Sexless Merit and an untitled recording. These belong to a cassette-driven underground in which projects could develop publicly through small editions rather than waiting to produce a definitive debut album. A new tape might contain a single extended piece, a handful of sketches or one temporary version of the project. The format encouraged speed and risk. Ideas could be documented while they were still unstable.
That instability is central to Cremation Lily. The early work is often described through power electronics and harsh noise, but the project never fits comfortably inside the confrontational traditions of those forms. Distortion is present, yet it is frequently accompanied by vulnerability, blurred memory and a sense of private emotional damage. The noise does not always face outward as aggression. It can sound like pressure turned inward until the recording itself begins to deform.
The extraordinary run of 2012 and 2013 releases demonstrates how quickly the project’s vocabulary expanded. The archive contains Age of Consent, April Twenty-One, Infant, Leather Satchel, Nothing, Everything Hidden, Opiate Birth, Servant’s Habit, All Unbroken Remains and Votive Mirror from 2012 alone. The following year is even more crowded, with titles including A Body of One’s Own, Brotherhood of Gold, Fertility Servant, It’s OK to Say No, Lorient Shield, Photography Ring, The Pardons of Saints, The Photographer, Uncomplicated Explanations and Welcoming Shining Love.
The titles form their own emotional archive. Bodies, consent, birth, service, photography, sainthood and hidden things recur beside language of reassurance and affection. They suggest a project concerned not merely with darkness but with how experience is recorded, carried and misunderstood. Photographs preserve a surface while excluding everything outside the frame. Mirrors return an image while reversing it. Journals arrange life into entries. The body becomes both the subject being documented and the unreliable equipment through which documentation occurs.
This concern with memory distinguishes Cremation Lily from industrial music built mainly around impersonality. Machines and damaged electronics remain important, but they rarely erase the person operating them. Even the most abstract releases feel attached to a body moving through particular rooms, weather and relationships. Sound becomes a form of private evidence.
The rapid release schedule also prevents the music from settling into a brand. During these years, one recording might foreground abrasion while another drifts toward watery ambience, distant melody or corroded rhythm. What connects them is not a fixed production formula but an emotional temperature. Beauty is usually present in damaged form. Harshness rarely arrives without some trace of longing behind it.
Zsigo’s use of inexpensive and unstable technology contributes to this character. Cassette loops, overloaded signals, samples, field recordings and worn textures allow flaws to become compositional tools. Tape does not reproduce sound neutrally. It softens detail, adds hiss, bends pitch and gradually wears down. When loops repeat, they may seem to lose certainty with each return.
That deterioration suits music preoccupied with memory. A remembered event does not remain chemically sealed. It is replayed, altered and mixed with later experiences. Cremation Lily often sounds as though the recording has already been remembered several times before reaching the listener.
The archive becomes increasingly connected to landscape during 2014 and 2015. Titles such as Christening Summer, Fires Frame the Silhouette, Fluids of October, Lines of Golden Light, The End of the Pier, The Storms of Summer, The Treasury Painted Roof, Lovers Against the Rocks, Opalescent Blue, Pleasure Pier and Sea Spray Perfumes replace the sealed room with coastlines, changing seasons and reflected light.
This is not a clean escape from the project’s earlier severity. The landscape remains unstable and emotionally charged. Piers extend from land into water but stop before reaching another shore. Sea spray briefly makes the air visible, then disappears. Summer carries pleasure alongside the knowledge that it will end. Fire illuminates a silhouette while destroying whatever surrounds it.
The English coast became especially important to Cremation Lily’s identity. It appears not as vacation scenery but as a boundary where solid ground meets something too large to hold. Water functions as motion, cleansing, drowning and erasure. The project’s later language repeatedly returns to currents, rain, underwater states, rocks and shorelines because they provide physical forms for uncertainty.
The visual identity developed alongside the sound. Cremation Lily releases often use photographs, washed-out color, handwriting and modest packaging that resemble personal keepsakes more than formal industrial design. The images may appear tender or ordinary until their placement within the project gives them a heavier charge. A coastline, a building or a figure in sunlight becomes evidence of something already lost.
This approach differs from the militarized symbols, explicit transgression and monochrome severity common to some noise and power-electronics packaging. Cremation Lily’s imagery can appear soft, even sentimental, without neutralizing the music. The gentleness creates another kind of exposure. It removes the armor usually supplied by extreme imagery.
Collaboration enters the archive without breaking its continuity. A River Returning to Sea, made with False Moniker in 2015, and Northern Fields, made with Kay Hill in 2016, place Cremation Lily’s language beside other artists while retaining the project’s concern with place and movement. Collaboration here does not operate like a collection of guest appearances. It offers another method of allowing external material to enter the private world.
The 2016 releases Journal, The Currents Mislead and Washed Through Glass make the project’s documentary concerns especially clear. A journal promises an ordered account, but memory rarely provides one. Currents carry the body while making direction difficult to judge. Glass allows sight while preserving separation. These images describe a recurring Cremation Lily condition: the desire to understand experience while remaining trapped inside the equipment used to perceive it.
By 2017, longer releases such as Leisure Scars and The Processes and Instruments of Normal People; Trying and Failing, Falling and Water Running show the project embracing titles and structures capable of holding contradictory states. “Leisure scars” joins rest with injury. “Normal people” are defined not by success but by processes, failed attempts and repeated movement. The grand statement is built from ordinary damage.
The music was also moving beyond its earliest classification. Elements of ambient music, shoegaze, industrial rhythm and emotionally direct vocals had become increasingly visible. Zsigo did not abandon noise so much as redistribute it. Distortion could surround a melody rather than replace it. Rhythm could appear briefly, dissolve and leave only residue. A voice could emerge from the static without becoming fully exposed.
This evolution eventually brought Cremation Lily into conversation with a wider group of artists working between experimental electronics and guitar music. The project’s later association with The Flenser made sense because that label has frequently supported work that crosses metal, post-punk, ambient and intensely personal songwriting. Yet the stylistic expansion documented here began years before that connection. The archive shows the slow accumulation of methods that would later become more visible on full-length albums.
The final entries, In England Now, Underwater and Perspective, Landscape from 2018, make an appropriate ending for this particular collection. England is no longer simply the place where the project exists. It has become submerged, remembered from beneath the surface. Perspective and landscape are paired because no landscape exists independently of the position from which it is viewed.
That idea applies to the entire archive. These releases do not provide an objective record of eight years. They document changing perspectives, incomplete states and moments preserved before their meaning had settled. The same themes return under different weather. The same materials acquire different emotional uses.
Forty-seven releases might seem excessive, particularly in an era when digital discographies can expand faster than anyone can absorb them. Cremation Lily’s productivity, however, belongs to the logic of the cassette underground. Each object captures one temporary arrangement rather than claiming to be the final account. Repetition becomes a method of returning to unresolved material.
The pack is therefore best understood not as a stack of interchangeable noise tapes but as a long-form diary whose entries use different recording systems. Some are brief and severe. Others open into landscape. Some preserve collaboration, while others feel almost painfully solitary. Together they reveal that the project’s development was neither a clean progression from harsh noise toward prettier music nor a series of random stylistic changes.
The underlying subject remains remarkably consistent: how a person carries loss without allowing it to become the only available identity.
Noise can protect the feeling by making it difficult to reach.
Melody can expose it.
Tape can preserve it while demonstrating that preservation always alters the thing being saved.
Water can wash it away, return it or hide it beneath the surface.
Cremation Lily’s achievement during these years is the construction of an intimate music without a stable definition of intimacy. The recordings can be abrasive, obscured and physically unpleasant, yet their central impulse is often the wish to communicate something too fragile for direct speech.
The archive ends in 2018, but it already contains the architecture of the work that followed. The later synthesis of guitars, electronics, shoegaze haze, rhythm and clearer songwriting did not suddenly replace an earlier project. It grew from years of cassettes, private documents, coastal images and signals allowed to decay in public.
At 2.245 GB, this pack is large enough to become a landscape of its own. Moving through it reveals a body of work built from mourning but unwilling to remain still. Light changes across water. Photographs fade. Currents mislead. Scars become part of leisure, and ordinary people keep trying after failure.
Nothing is preserved perfectly.
Enough survives to continue.

VA - 2007 - Cold Meat Industry Live In Australia - Two Evenings Of Delightful Delicacies

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI170

Stormfågel - 2007 - Ett Berg Av Fasa

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI171

Rome - 2007 - Confessions D'un Voleur D'ames

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI172

Desiderii Marginis - 2007 - Seven Sorrows

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI173

All My Faith Lost - 2007 - The Hours

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI174

Sturmast - 2007 - Ibis Redibis Nunquam in Bello Peribis

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI175

:Golgatha: - 2007 - Tales of Transgression and Sacrifice

 

Cold Meat Industry – cmi176

Foundation Hope - 2008 - Tunes For The Wounded

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI177

Dawn and Dusk Entwined - 2007 - Septentrion

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI178

Brighter Death Now - 2008 - Necrose Evangelicum 2xCD (Remastered)

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI179

Deutsch Nepal - 2008 - Dystopian Partycollection

Cold Meat Industry – CMI180

 

Rome - 2008 - Masse Mensch Material

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI181

Beyond Sensory Experience - 2008 - No Lights in Our Eyes

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI182

Vestigial - 2008 - Translucent Communion

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI183

:Golgatha: And Dawn & Dusk Entwined - 2008 - Sang Graal

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI 184

Passione Nera - 2008 - Research

Cold Meat Industry – CMI185

 

Medusa's Spell - 2008 - Last X Hours

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI186

Raison D'etre - 2008 - The Luminous Experience (Live in Enschede)

 

Cold Meat Industry – cmi188

Atrium Carceri - 2008 - Souyuan

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI189

V:28 / VA - 2008 - Total Reconstruction

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI190

Cold Meat Industry – CMI191

 

Knifeladder - 20096 - Music Concrete

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI192

New Risen Throne - 2009 - Crossing the Withered Regions

Cold Meat Industry – cmi193

Eldar - 2009 - Sapere Aude

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI195

Brighter Death Now - 2009 - Where Dreams Come True Live in Chicago

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI196

Die Weisse Rose - 2009 - A Martyrium of White Roses

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI 197

:Golgatha: - 2009 - The Waste Land

 

Cold Meat Industry – cmi198

Aeterna - 2009 - New Dawn

Cold Meat Industry – cmi199

 

TriORE - 2009 - The First Three Hours

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.201

Raison D'etre - 2009 - The Stains of the Embodied Sacrifice

 

Cold Meat Industry – cmi202

Atrium Carceri - 2009 - Phrenitis

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI203

Apatheia - 2009 - Lifethesis

 

Cold Meat Industry – cmi204

IRM - 2010 - Order 4

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI205

Eldar - 2010 - Amesha Spentas

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI206

Blood Axis - 1998 - Blot Sacrifice In Sweden

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.X

Blót: Sacrifice in Sweden is a live document, but it does not behave like a simple record of a concert. Recorded on November 15, 1997 at Skylten in Linköping during Cold Meat Industry’s tenth-anniversary celebration, the performance was later remixed and processed by Blood Axis in the United States. The resulting album, released by Cold Meat Industry in 1998, preserves the scale and immediacy of the event while reshaping it into something more deliberate than an untouched soundboard tape.
The group performing that night consisted of Michael Moynihan, Annabel Lee and Robert Ferbrache. Their arrangement gave Blood Axis a much wider physical range than a studio project assembled mainly through electronics and samples. Moynihan’s deep ceremonial voice and bodhrán supplied the central presence, Lee’s violin and melodeon introduced folk melody and tension, and Ferbrache used guitar and keyboards to connect acoustic instrumentation with orchestral and industrial weight.
That combination made Blood Axis difficult to place within one genre. The project emerged from industrial culture and retained its use of samples, repetition and authoritarian atmosphere, but its growing interest in European folk traditions, classical music and ritual structure pushed it toward what would become known as neofolk or apocalyptic folk. On Blót, these elements do not sit politely beside one another. They overlap until a traditional melody can feel militarized, a classical passage can resemble propaganda, and an electronic drone can acquire the gravity of religious music.
The title establishes the ceremonial frame. A blót was a pre-Christian Germanic and Scandinavian sacrificial observance connected with communal feasting, offerings and relations between human society and the divine. Blood Axis uses the word less as historical reconstruction than as a way of describing the performance itself. The concert is presented as an offering, staged in Sweden before an audience gathered to celebrate the survival of a label whose catalog had repeatedly explored death, religion, violence and European cultural memory.
Cold Meat Industry was an unusually appropriate host. Founded by Roger Karmanik in 1987, the Swedish label had developed an international audience for dark ambient, death industrial, ritual electronics and severe neoclassical music. Its tenth-anniversary event brought the catalog into physical space. Projects that usually reached listeners through carefully designed CDs and mail-order packages appeared together before an audience already fluent in their symbols.
Blood Axis was not a typical Cold Meat Industry act, but the group shared the label’s belief that sound, artwork, packaging and ideology could form one complete environment. Blót was issued as a CD in a cardboard slider and as a limited double LP. The release received the special catalog number CMI.X, marking its relationship to the anniversary rather than placing it within the ordinary numbered sequence.
The cover uses Carl Larsson’s monumental painting Midvinterblot. The image depicts the legendary Swedish king Domalde being led toward sacrifice in an attempt to end famine and restore prosperity. Larsson’s painting had a contentious history of its own. Its mixture of historical imagination, national mythology, pageantry and violence makes it an ideal visual counterpart to Blood Axis.
The sacrifice in the painting is public and political. A ruler’s body becomes payment for the continuation of the community. Beauty, ceremony and killing occupy the same field. Blood Axis repeatedly works within that uneasy combination, using formal music and carefully chosen imagery to examine how violence becomes sacred when surrounded by tradition.
The performance draws from an unusually broad archive. Classical sources, traditional Irish material, modern folk compositions, poetry, political speeches and Blood Axis’s earlier recordings are placed together without a firm distinction between original work, adaptation and quotation. This method had already defined The Gospel of Inhumanity, the group’s first full-length album. Rather than write within the ordinary boundaries of rock or industrial music, Blood Axis built compositions from cultural fragments that already carried historical force.
The group’s use of such material is not neutral. Voices and texts connected with Friedrich Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, Rudyard Kipling, Benito Mussolini and Oswald Mosley place the music close to the political and aesthetic territory of the European radical right. Moynihan’s publishing activities, interviews and sustained interest in fascism, paganism and political extremity have made Blood Axis inseparable from controversy. That context cannot be dismissed as mere shock decoration added by listeners.
At the same time, Blót does not present a clear political program. Its method is symbolic rather than argumentative. Historical voices enter as components of a ritualized sound world where poetry, authoritarian speech, folklore and music are stripped from their original settings and made to reinforce one another. The ambiguity is part of the appeal for some listeners and the central problem for others. Fascist imagery can be treated as provocation, historical obsession or aesthetic material, but repeated use also grants it renewed power.
The record’s atmosphere depends on this uncertainty. It often feels less like a band performing songs than a temporary institution conducting a ceremony whose doctrine remains unstated. The audience hears commands, quotations and declarations, but receives no stable explanation of how they should be interpreted. Music supplies the unity that politics and history do not.
The live setting increases that force. Studio recordings can create an imaginary ceremony through overdubs and editing. Here, real bodies occupy the room. Drums strike air, violin lines cut through the space, and Moynihan’s voice addresses an assembled crowd. Even after studio processing, the underlying event remains audible.
The album is nevertheless too controlled to function as raw live documentation. The original multitrack recording was returned to the United States and substantially reworked. That makes Blót a hybrid: part concert album, part studio reconstruction and part official memory of the event. The performance supplied the foundation, but the finished record determines how the night will be remembered.
This manipulation suits Blood Axis because history itself is being treated as material. The group does not reproduce ancient ritual, nineteenth-century nationalism, twentieth-century politics or traditional folk music in authentic form. It edits them together. The album’s production repeats that process on the concert. A historical event is recorded, transported, altered and returned as mythology.
Annabel Lee’s presence is especially important to the transformation of the earlier Blood Axis sound. Her violin and melodeon introduce a human instability that sampled orchestras cannot reproduce. Bowed strings can sound mournful, pastoral or violently agitated within a few seconds. The melodeon carries associations with communal folk performance, but within Blood Axis it can feel displaced from any comfortable social function.
Ferbrache’s instrumentation supplies the bridge between those acoustic elements and the project’s industrial foundation. Guitars do not simply turn the music into rock, while keyboards do not provide ordinary accompaniment. They create mass around the folk instruments and voice, allowing intimate melodies to expand into something monumental.
Moynihan performs less as a conventional singer than as a master of ceremonies. His low voice rarely offers casual personality. It declares, invokes and pronounces. The theatrical severity can be overpowering, but it is fundamental to the record’s structure. Blood Axis depends upon the suggestion that every sound belongs to a larger philosophical order, even when that order remains deliberately obscure.
The album appeared at a transitional moment. During the early and middle 1990s, the boundaries between industrial music, dark ambient, neofolk, martial music and black metal culture were becoming increasingly porous. Labels, mail-order catalogs and festivals allowed artists from different scenes to share listeners and symbols. Blót captures that convergence before it hardened into a predictable style.
Its strongest quality is the way it turns a concert into an argument about memory. Ancient sacrifice, European high culture, political catastrophe, folk tradition and underground music are made to occupy the same ceremonial present. The result can be powerful, pompous, unsettling and beautiful, sometimes simultaneously.
The title promises sacrifice in Sweden, but what is being sacrificed is unclear. It may be the boundary between concert and ritual, history and fantasy, beauty and brutality. It may also be the possibility of approaching any of the borrowed material innocently.
Nothing on Blót is merely decorative. Every quotation arrives carrying old authority, and the music builds a new structure from the accumulated weight.

Ebony Pendant - 2019 - Sempiternal Passage Through Realms of Suffering and Hatred

 

Grime Stone Records – none

Ebony Pendant’s first release is only three tracks and twenty-eight minutes long, but it already contains the full outline of the project’s world. Recorded in Seattle during June and July of 2019 by S.C., who handled every instrument, Sempiternal Passage Through Realms of Suffering and Hatred arrives as a self-contained act of raw black metal rather than a tentative sketch. The recording is rough, solitary and severe, but its strongest quality is not abrasion alone. Beneath the distortion is an instinct for melody and repetition that gives the music a much longer emotional reach than its demo status might suggest.
The title is enormous, almost deliberately excessive, yet it accurately describes the scale the music is trying to create. “Sempiternal” suggests something everlasting, but not peacefully eternal. The passage continues because suffering repeats itself. Hatred is not presented as one dramatic eruption. It is a permanent route humanity keeps choosing, generation after generation.
The release’s own statement makes that idea explicit. Time is described as a snake eating its tail, while people continue killing one another and reproducing the same destructive tendencies found throughout history. Ebony Pendant presents mankind less as the victim of an approaching apocalypse than as the machinery producing it.
That distinction is important. A great deal of black metal treats destruction as an outside force, summoned from wilderness, hell, winter or cosmic darkness. Here, the source of ruin is human recurrence. Violence returns because people preserve the conditions that create it. History does not progress cleanly toward enlightenment. It circles back through domination, war and cruelty.
The music follows that circular logic. Riffs are repeated long enough to stop feeling like ordinary sections inside songs and begin functioning as environments. Movement occurs, but the listener is repeatedly pulled back into the same emotional weather. The long forms do not rush toward a chorus, climax or clear resolution. They allow patterns to accumulate until the distinction between momentum and entrapment becomes uncertain.
Raw production is essential to the effect. The guitars occupy a broad, grainy surface, while the drums drive from inside rather than standing cleanly in front. The vocals arrive as another damaged layer, less a narrator explaining the record than a presence trapped within it. Nothing is polished into separation. The instruments bleed together and create the impression of one storm containing several movements.
Yet the recording is not shapeless. Ebony Pendant’s later comments about trying to balance rawness with intelligibility help explain what is already happening here. The sound is intentionally obscured, but not to the point that the compositions disappear. Melody remains traceable through the distortion. The riffs are built to linger after the recording ends.
That tension between ugliness and memorability gives the demo its identity. It belongs to raw black metal, but it does not treat poor fidelity as sufficient evidence of authenticity. The recording has ideas beneath its surface. Its harshness changes how those ideas are perceived, making melodic lines feel distant, half-buried and recovered through effort.
This is one reason the release connects so naturally to the cassette-oriented black metal underground of the late 2010s. By that time, digital recording had made clarity cheap and widely available. Choosing roughness was no longer merely a consequence of limited equipment. It had become an aesthetic decision, a refusal of the smooth transparency expected from modern production.
That choice could easily become empty imitation. Countless projects reproduced the hiss, thin drums and overloaded guitars of earlier black metal without recovering the danger or imagination that originally made those sounds compelling. Ebony Pendant avoids that trap by using rawness as emotional perspective rather than historical costume.
The recording feels obscured because its subject is obscured. Humanity repeats its failures while pretending each disaster is unprecedented. The past remains present but indistinct, like architecture visible through fog. The production places the listener inside that condition.
The project’s use of nihilism also deserves attention. Ebony Pendant identifies itself as “nihilistic black metal,” but the music is not empty in the ordinary sense. It is highly concerned with human behavior, consequence and meaning. The nihilism lies in the absence of faith that mankind will learn from any of it.
That creates a contradiction at the center of the project. To make art about humanity’s inability to change is already to preserve a desire to understand the pattern. The record condemns recurrence while repeating riffs. It rejects faith in progress while constructing a complete imaginative world. Its despair is active, not indifferent.
The Seattle setting places Ebony Pendant within a region with a long history of atmospheric and nature-oriented black metal, but this demo does not simply reproduce the expansive Cascadian model. The music is less pastoral and less concerned with immersion in wilderness as spiritual escape. Nature may surround the imagery, but the emotional center remains human corruption.
The atmosphere is cold without becoming scenic. Forests, night and distance function as conditions of isolation rather than destinations offering transcendence. The project’s world does not promise purification by leaving civilization behind. The same destructive consciousness travels wherever people do.
The release also appeared during a productive moment for underground American black metal. Small labels, Bandcamp pages and limited cassette editions allowed solitary projects to move quickly from private recording to international circulation. Artists could establish complete identities with one demo, a logo and a carefully chosen image before ever becoming a conventional live band.
Ebony Pendant used that economy effectively. The project’s obscurity was not caused by a lack of definition. The music, name, visual language and philosophical statement all arrived already aligned.
The first digital release appeared in July 2019. Physical editions followed through small underground labels, including a limited Grime Stone Records CD-R edition. The scale was modest, but the recording quickly became the foundation for a larger catalog. Forbidden Sonority contacted Ebony Pendant immediately after the demo appeared and continued working with the project on later tape releases.
That rapid response makes sense. The demo sounds like the beginning of something, but not because it is underdeveloped. It creates a world with enough room for expansion.
The following release, Incantation of Eschatological Mysticism, broadened the approach through slower passages, layered guitars and a longer album structure while retaining the blast-beat-driven, hypnotic character established here. Later splits, EPs and albums would increase the project’s visibility, but the essential method remained recognizable: raw production, extended repetition, bleak melody and distrust of mankind.
Seen from the later catalog, Sempiternal Passage is not simply a primitive version of a more accomplished sound. Its compactness gives it a particular force. There is no attempt to demonstrate range, introduce numerous collaborators or build a polished public identity. One person records three long pieces and releases them with a statement denying any dedication.
“This album is dedicated to no one.”
That line completes the work’s refusal of consolation. Dedications usually place art within a relationship, offering it to a person, community or memory. Ebony Pendant withholds the gesture. The record is not presented as service, tribute or communication with a beloved listener. It appears almost as an object discovered after the person responsible has already left.
Even so, the music communicates intensely. Its solitude is not silence. It turns isolation into a large acoustic space and fills that space with recurring evidence of hatred, grief and exhaustion.
The cover and title encourage expectations of total hostility, but the recording’s endurance depends upon its underlying beauty. The melodies do not rescue the listener from the distortion. They make the distortion more painful by suggesting something recognizable and almost tender inside it.
That is where the demo exceeds genre routine. Hatred alone becomes flat quickly. Suffering alone can become theatrical. Ebony Pendant combines them with a sense of tragic repetition, the feeling that the cycle is terrible precisely because alternatives can still be imagined.
The music keeps moving forward while returning to the same place.
The snake continues eating its tail.
The passage has no destination because humanity has mistaken repetition for history.

Ebony Pendant - 2020 - Incantation of Eschatological Mysticism

 

ASRAR – ASR089

Ebony Pendant’s 2019 demo introduced a solitary raw black metal project built from repetition, damaged melody and disgust with humanity. Incantation of Eschatological Mysticism, written and recorded during the following winter, enlarges that foundation into a forty-two-minute album without polishing away the conditions that made the demo convincing. It remains rough, isolated and hostile, but the additional space allows S.C. to develop a more varied language of speed, slowness, trance and atmosphere.
Released digitally in February 2020 and physically through ASRAR as catalog number ASR089, the album contains seven pieces, including a closing interpretation of material by Judas Iscariot. S.C. performs all instruments, preserving the sense that Ebony Pendant is not a conventional group interacting inside a studio but one person constructing an entire environment alone. Every layer belongs to the same consciousness, even when guitars, drums and vocals appear to be pulling in different directions.
The title places mysticism beside eschatology, the study or expectation of final things: death, judgment, extinction and the end of the world. Yet the record does not sound fascinated by one spectacular apocalypse. Its destruction unfolds as a gradual failure of consciousness. Humanity is not waiting for an outside force to end civilization. People generate the catastrophe through violence, deception, resentment and the refusal to recognize those forces within themselves.
That idea continues the circular pessimism of Sempiternal Passage Through Realms of Suffering and Hatred. The demo described time as a serpent devouring its tail while humanity endlessly repeated its cruelty. The album enters the interior of that cycle. Hatred is no longer only a historical pattern visible across generations. It becomes a substance breeding within the mind, obscuring perception and transforming ordinary people into agents of ruin.
The language is mystical, but the underlying concern is psychological. Fog, demons, frozen landscapes, open gates and ritual invocations give invisible human impulses physical form. Loathing becomes weather. Despair becomes a current pulling consciousness from the body. Violence becomes an entity that appears to arrive from elsewhere, even though its actual source is internal.
This is one of the album’s most effective contradictions. Ebony Pendant uses supernatural imagery while repeatedly suggesting that mankind does not need supernatural assistance to create hell. A demon may be invoked, an abyss may open and the world may freeze beneath permanent darkness, but the essential corruption was already present in the person performing the ceremony.
Mysticism becomes a method of confronting realities that ordinary language has failed to contain.
The album’s production preserves the obscurity of the demo while increasing its dimensional range. The guitars remain grainy and layered, creating broad surfaces whose melodic lines appear to move behind one another. A single phrase can be immediate enough to follow but distant enough to seem partly remembered. The sound is saturated without becoming completely unreadable.
This distinction matters. Raw black metal frequently treats low fidelity as proof of sincerity, as though hiss, distortion and thin percussion automatically restore an underground danger lost through modern recording. Ebony Pendant uses roughness more purposefully. The production determines perspective. The music feels half concealed because the subjects it approaches are hidden, repressed or visible only through symbolic forms.
The guitars do most of the atmospheric work. Their layering produces a cold radiance rather than a simple wall of distortion. Melodies cross and dissolve, occasionally suggesting something mournful or even beautiful before the recording pulls them back into the mass. The listener is not given a clean lead line floating above accompaniment. Melody must be located inside the damage.
The drums supply another tension. Much of the album remains driven by blast beats, but the rhythm does not simply create nonstop speed. S.C. incorporates slower passages that alter the apparent size of the music. When the attack recedes, the guitars do not provide relief. They spread outward, making the surrounding emptiness more visible.
The slower sections were an important expansion from the demo. They allow Ebony Pendant to build dread through suspension rather than impact. A fast passage can produce the feeling of being carried through hostile terrain. A slow one suggests being forced to remain there.
This use of contrast prevents the album from becoming one continuous blur. The recording maintains a narrow emotional range, but its internal motion is carefully controlled. Acceleration, repetition and sudden openness create the sense of consciousness moving through separate stages of collapse.
S.C.’s vocals remain embedded within the instrumental mass. They are harsh and distant, but not treated as meaningless texture. The lyrics are extensive and unusually direct about the project’s philosophy. They repeatedly address isolation, self-destruction, human violence and the attraction of nonexistence. Even when the voice is difficult to decipher in the recording, the language underneath it has a strong narrative and conceptual function.
The project’s self-description as nihilistic black metal is accurate but incomplete. Ebony Pendant does not sound indifferent to meaning. The music is tormented by the search for it. The nihilism comes from the conclusion that consciousness may be incapable of producing anything except new forms of suffering.
That difference separates despair from emptiness. An entirely indifferent project would have no reason to condemn humanity, describe its failures or imagine the world after its disappearance. Ebony Pendant’s hostility reveals an investment in the question. Hatred is generated by disappointed attention.
The record looks toward annihilation because continued existence appears to guarantee continued repetition.
Death is therefore presented in several conflicting ways. It is physical extinction, spiritual release, punishment and possible enlightenment. The ending of consciousness can appear terrifying in one moment and merciful in another. To cease living may mean surrendering to despair, but it may also be the only escape from the machinery of recurrence.
This ambiguity gives the album emotional depth beyond simple misanthropy. Misanthropic black metal can become another form of heroic posing, with the performer imagining himself above the species he condemns. Ebony Pendant offers less security. The voice does not always stand outside humanity as a superior observer. It appears implicated, vulnerable to the same internal darkness and drawn toward the same void.
The album’s isolation is consequently different from fantasies of aristocratic separation. Solitude does not make the individual pure. It provides enough silence to observe the corruption more clearly.
The forest and winter imagery also resist easy romanticization. American atmospheric black metal often treats wilderness as a place of escape from industrial society, a source of spiritual renewal or a world existing beyond human damage. Ebony Pendant’s natural environments offer no dependable refuge. Trees stand inside loathing fog. Snow becomes burial. Mountains provide a view of extinction rather than transcendence.
Winter is not cleansing. It is the final state reached when movement stops.
The Seattle origin inevitably places the project near a regional tradition of expansive, nature-oriented black metal, but Incantation of Eschatological Mysticism feels more claustrophobic than panoramic. Its landscapes may be vast, yet they are experienced through a consciousness that cannot escape itself. The external world becomes another projection surface for internal collapse.
This is where the title’s “incantation” becomes important. An incantation uses repetition to transform words into action. It is not simply a description of a desired event but an attempt to produce one. Ebony Pendant’s repeated riffs behave similarly. They do not progress like ordinary narrative sections. They circle an image or state until the listener begins to inhabit it.
Repetition becomes both musical hypnosis and philosophical proof. The same figure returns because the world itself is trapped in recurrence. Small changes occur within the cycle, but they do not necessarily create progress.
The album’s relationship with raw black metal history is acknowledged directly through its concluding Judas Iscariot interpretation. Andrew Harris’s project became an important model for solitary American black metal through recordings that combined repetition, melodic austerity and ideological withdrawal. Including that material does not merely add a cover at the end. It identifies a lineage in which isolation is both working method and subject.
Ebony Pendant does not duplicate the earlier project’s sound exactly. S.C.’s guitars are often denser and more ethereal, while the lyrics place greater emphasis on psychological and mystical transformation. The connection lies in the use of black metal as a private structure built outside ordinary social life.
In 2020, such solitude had a different technological setting than it did during the cassette underground of the 1990s. One person could record an album, release it digitally and reach international listeners immediately, while limited tapes and vinyl still supplied the physical scarcity valued within underground culture.
The album appeared shortly before the global pandemic made isolation a shared condition, although it was written and recorded before that context existed. Its release date gives it an accidental historical resonance. Music already obsessed with enclosure, unseen contamination and human self-destruction entered the world just as millions of people began experiencing fear, separation and suspended time.
That coincidence should not be mistaken for the album’s intended subject. Its pessimism is broader and less temporary. Ebony Pendant is not describing one disaster. The record argues that disaster is the normal result of human consciousness operating without self-knowledge.
ASRAR’s vinyl edition placed the album inside a physical underground network that continued to value black metal as an object as well as sound. Limited pressings, inserts and austere artwork preserve the ritual of acquisition that digital availability might otherwise dissolve. The LP format also divides the record into sides, imposing a brief physical interruption upon music designed to feel continuous and immersive.
The artwork extends the project’s visual identity through darkness, antiquity and solitary occult atmosphere. Ebony Pendant does not present a contemporary human personality for the audience to follow. The emphasis remains on the emblem, the landscape and the imagined world surrounding the music.
This partial concealment is consistent with the one-person format. S.C. is present everywhere in the recording but does not compete with it as a celebrity. The project’s identity rests in recurring symbols and methods rather than personal visibility.
Seen beside the 2019 demo, the album represents expansion without correction. Many debut albums following raw demos lose their force by replacing obscurity with professional separation, as though the earliest sound were an error to be fixed. Incantation of Eschatological Mysticism retains the abrasion and hypnotic repetition while making the compositions more patient and internally varied.
It is fuller, but not cleaner in spirit.
It is more controlled, but not safer.
It explains more through lyrics while making the musical environment feel less stable.
The seven-part structure creates a complete descent rather than a collection of unrelated attacks. Recurring images of fog, winter, blood, hidden depths and corrupted consciousness accumulate across the album until they appear to describe one landscape viewed through different states of mind.
The album’s real subject is not occult power. It is the desire to imagine evil as an outside force because recognizing it within oneself would be unbearable. Demons and mystical gates provide distance from human responsibility. Ebony Pendant repeatedly destroys that distance.
The loathing fog rises from within.
The apocalypse is constructed through ordinary acts.
The circle opens only to reveal another circle beneath it.
What makes the album compelling is that its music does not merely illustrate those ideas. Its structure enacts them. Riffs return, consciousness narrows and beauty emerges inside repetition without offering escape. The listener is held between attraction and repulsion, drawn toward melodies whose surrounding world denies any possibility of consolation.
Incantation of Eschatological Mysticism establishes Ebony Pendant as more than a promising raw black metal demo project. It presents a complete philosophy of recurrence, internal corruption and extinction through music that understands how ugliness and beauty can strengthen one another.
The record asks to be heard alone in the dark, but solitude does not protect the listener from humanity.
It removes the distractions.

Kūka'ilimoku / Ebony Pendant - 2020 - Split

 

Not On Label – none

This 2020 split joins two one-person American black metal projects that had appeared almost simultaneously the previous year. Kūka’ilimoku came from Honolulu, while Ebony Pendant operated from Seattle. Both were young projects working quickly, recording alone and using the freedom of digital release and small physical editions to establish complete identities without waiting for bands, studios or conventional album cycles. Their methods overlapped, but their music emerged from very different landscapes and historical concerns.
The split was written and recorded during March 2020 and released digitally on April 6. Kūwāha’ilo performed and recorded the Kūka’ilimoku side, while S.C. handled every instrument and all recording for Ebony Pendant. The complete release runs a little under twenty-eight minutes, with four pieces from Kūka’ilimoku and three from Ebony Pendant. It was later issued on vinyl by Goatowarex in 2021 and received a second pressing in 2023.
The physical release gives the collaboration a traditional split-album structure: one artist occupies each side, and the act of turning the record creates a clear boundary between them. That separation matters because the projects are not trying to merge into a shared sound. Each side remains independent, but the pairing reveals qualities that might be less obvious when either is heard alone.
Kūka’ilimoku is named after Kūkaʻilimoku, the Hawaiian form of the god Kū associated with political power, warfare and the rise of Kamehameha I. The name therefore carries specific Hawaiian historical and spiritual weight rather than functioning as generic martial imagery. Kūwāha’ilo’s project draws upon Native Hawaiian language, history, land and anti-colonial anger, placing those subjects inside raw black metal and hardcore punk.
That combination is significant because black metal has often treated European paganism, nationalism and landscape as its assumed cultural property. Kūka’ilimoku uses the same underground machinery while shifting its center thousands of miles away. Distorted guitars, primitive percussion and hostile vocals are made to speak from Hawai‘i, where conquest, annexation, tourism, military occupation and the commercial consumption of land create a completely different historical field.
The project’s official description is blunt: disgust and hatred directed at those who leech from the lands of Hawai‘i. That statement places the music against the familiar tourist image of the islands as endlessly available paradise. Hawai‘i is not presented as scenery, fantasy or spiritual decoration. It is inhabited land carrying memory, conflict and continuing pressure.
This gives Kūka’ilimoku’s rawness a practical meaning. The recording does not sound primitive because the project is reenacting a romantic European past. It sounds immediate because the anger is treated as current. Short structures, punk momentum and abrasive production prevent the material from becoming ceremonial pageantry. The music moves quickly enough to feel closer to an attack than a monument.
Kūwāha’ilo has described the project as a personal outlet that comes more naturally than his previous musical work. It was designed for solitary home recording rather than live performance or the negotiations of a conventional band. His recording method during this period was unusually direct. Percussion was performed on a small electronic drum pad, with the kick recorded separately by striking another assigned pad with a stick. The arrangement was inconvenient but allowed the entire project to remain physically played and independently controlled.
That homemade method suits the ideological position. The music does not ask an external institution to authenticate Hawaiian anger or translate it into a polished form for outsiders. It is constructed privately and released on its own terms.
Kūwāha’ilo has also spoken honestly about the possible tension between his cultural material and the musical language carrying it. Black metal and punk may be understood as foreign or “haole” interests within parts of his home environment. The project therefore exists between identities rather than presenting a simple fusion in which every element fits comfortably.
That friction gives the music its character. Hawaiian subjects are not placed over black metal as decorative lyrics. The imported genre is forced to operate inside a local worldview that may itself remain suspicious of the music. Kūka’ilimoku becomes an argument conducted through a form that is both useful and culturally unsettled.
The split arose through friendship rather than strategic label planning. Kūwāha’ilo and S.C. knew one another, admired each other’s work and noticed that their first demos had appeared around the same time. After discussing a split, both completed their recordings within roughly a month. The speed reflects the way each project worked during its early period: ideas were written, recorded and released while the initial pressure remained intact.
Kūwāha’ilo later explained that he shifted his writing slightly toward Ebony Pendant for this release. He used chord progressions he would not normally have chosen, producing what he considered some of his most conventionally black metal material. Even with that adjustment, his side remained concise and direct, while Ebony Pendant’s writing retained a more dramatic and expansive character.
That difference creates the split’s internal movement. Kūka’ilimoku operates through compression. Its material feels carved down to attack, with punk economy preventing riffs from becoming long atmospheric journeys. Ebony Pendant opens the other side into a colder and more spacious environment. The contrast is not between raw and polished music. Both recordings are rough. The distinction lies in how each project uses roughness.
For Kūka’ilimoku, abrasion communicates immediacy, territorial anger and refusal.
For Ebony Pendant, it creates distance, obscured beauty and psychological enclosure.
Ebony Pendant had released its first demo, Sempiternal Passage Through Realms of Suffering and Hatred, in July 2019, followed by the full-length Incantation of Eschatological Mysticism in February 2020. The split therefore appeared only weeks after S.C.’s first album and continued a rapid period of development.
The project’s early identity was already firmly established: solitary black metal, heavily layered guitars, bleak melody, repetition and lyrics concerned with death, occultism, nature, dream states and the destructive tendencies of human consciousness. The sound was raw but not deliberately unreadable. Melodic lines remained present beneath the distortion, allowing atmosphere to grow from the struggle between clarity and concealment.
On the split, Ebony Pendant’s side feels more compact than the preceding album without abandoning its dramatic shape. S.C. still writes in arcs rather than bursts. Riffs accumulate and return, giving the music the sensation of moving through a structure whose full outline remains hidden. The rough recording does not reduce the scale. It makes the scale feel distant, as though towers, storms and forests are being seen through snow or smoke.
This creates an important contrast with Kūka’ilimoku’s relationship to landscape. Ebony Pendant’s natural world is symbolic and interior. Forests, stars, storms and black fortresses become forms through which isolation, hatred and mystical dread can be understood. The landscape mirrors consciousness.
Kūka’ilimoku’s land is political before it is symbolic. Hawai‘i is not an abstract wilderness into which the individual retreats. It is a specific place shaped by ancestry, occupation, extraction and contested belonging.
One side turns history into direct fury.
The other turns inward suffering into vast imagined architecture.
The pairing works because neither project treats black metal as a fixed European inheritance. Both are American, but neither is interested in celebrating a broad national identity. Instead, they operate from locations whose distance from one another becomes part of the split’s scale.
Honolulu and Seattle are separated by the Pacific, climate and cultural history, yet underground distribution allows two solitary musicians to share a release almost immediately. This is one of the defining conditions of twenty-first-century black metal. A project can remain physically isolated while entering international networks of labels, collectors and collaborators within days.
The split format is especially suited to that environment. Historically, splits helped bands divide manufacturing costs, exchange audiences and document friendships between scenes. Digital release removed much of the financial necessity, but the format retained its social meaning. A split says that two artists recognize something in one another and are willing to place their identities in direct comparison.
Here, that recognition does not depend upon identical politics or mythology. Kūka’ilimoku’s anti-colonial Hawaiian focus and Ebony Pendant’s nihilistic mysticism are not presented as one philosophy. Their connection lies in method, intensity and independence.
Both projects reject the ordinary visibility expected from modern performers. Neither is built around a public band personality, professional photographs or constant explanation. The individual creator remains partially concealed behind the project’s language, images and sound. Yet the solitude does not produce vagueness. Each side is unmistakably attached to the person and place that made it.
The release also appeared during a moment when raw black metal was experiencing renewed underground attention. Bandcamp, limited tapes and boutique vinyl labels had made it possible for small projects to build international followings quickly. The style’s deliberately degraded surfaces offered a counterweight to the increasingly clean, edited and standardized production of contemporary metal.
That revival carried obvious risks. Rough sound could become branding, and obscurity could be manufactured as easily as polish. Kūka’ilimoku and Ebony Pendant avoid becoming empty exercises because each project has a subject larger than fidelity. The production serves the worldview rather than replacing it.
Kūka’ilimoku’s side would lose force if its anger were smoothed into professional distance. Ebony Pendant’s side would lose its strange depth if every guitar layer were separated and illuminated. Their recordings need friction because friction is part of what they are describing.
The inclusion of a Beastcraft interpretation on the Kūka’ilimoku side also places the release within a recognizably underground black metal lineage. Beastcraft’s primitive Norwegian satanic black metal represents one branch of the form’s deliberately regressive tradition. Within this split, that influence is absorbed into a project whose cultural and political center remains Hawaiian. The gesture acknowledges ancestry within the genre without surrendering the project’s separate identity.
The split’s later vinyl history shows that the collaboration continued to attract attention beyond its first digital appearance. Goatowarex issued the initial pressing in 2021, and Kūka’ilimoku offered a second black-vinyl pressing in 2023 with a double-sided insert. The movement from an independently released digital recording to repeated vinyl editions mirrors the underground process through which a quick collaboration becomes an enduring physical object.
The release remains most compelling as a record of two projects near their beginning. Neither musician had accumulated a large catalog or a settled public history. Their first demos had appeared less than a year earlier. The recordings were completed quickly, before either project had reason to imitate its own reputation.
That early energy survives in the lack of unnecessary framing. There is no elaborate concept claiming to unite Honolulu and Seattle. No invented story is needed. Two musicians recognize mutual force, adjust slightly toward one another and divide a record.
The first side strikes from inhabited land.
The second opens into an imagined storm.
Between them, the split demonstrates how raw black metal can carry radically different relationships to place. One voice insists that land cannot be separated from people and history. The other transforms landscape into the architecture of a solitary mind.
The record does not resolve that difference.
It preserves it, presses it onto opposite sides and makes the listener turn the object over.