Bannerwar - 2004 - To Honour Fatherland

 

Battlefield Records – none  348.78MB APE

To Honour Fatherland is built from the desire to make black metal sound not merely hostile but monumental. Bannerwar’s debut full-length does not seek the diseased claustrophobia of raw basement recordings, the occult murk of early Hellenic black metal, or the solitary winter atmosphere associated with Norway. Its central emotional vocabulary is elevation. Guitars rise, keyboards widen the horizon, bass lines move with ceremonial confidence, and every song seems to imagine itself beneath an enormous sky filled with banners, cavalry, ancestral spirits, and approaching armies. The production is modest and sometimes awkward, but the intended scale is unmistakable. Bannerwar want the listener to experience history, race, war, and fatherland not as topics being discussed but as forces descending from above.

“Black Storm over Hellas” functions as an overture, introducing the album through synthesizer atmosphere rather than immediate metallic violence. The storm is not simply weather. It is political, historical, and mythological pressure gathering over Greece. Keyboards establish a grand but homemade landscape, their synthetic tones unable to disguise their technological origin yet emotionally effective because they imply more than the equipment can physically reproduce. The opening feels like a war film score rebuilt with underground resources, all distant thunder, martial anticipation, and a horizon waiting to ignite.

This entrance immediately distinguishes Bannerwar from many contemporary NSBM bands whose raw production and stripped-down writing treated technical crudity as proof of ideological purity. To Honour Fatherland is raw, but it does not reject grandeur. Sunchariot’s keyboards are central throughout the album, supplying choirs, martial fanfares, and broad harmonic layers behind the guitars. Their purpose is not to soften the music. They transform its direct riffs into declarations of historical scale. A simple melodic figure can suddenly resemble an army crossing a valley once the keyboards spread behind it.

“Το αίμα της φυλής,” meaning “The Blood of the Race,” introduces the album’s ideological foundation without disguise. Blood is treated as identity, memory, law, and inheritance. This is not vague pagan symbolism detached from modern politics. Bannerwar’s worldview belongs openly to racial nationalism and the NSBM underground, where ancestry is imagined as a biological command and cultural history is reduced to an unbroken ethnic essence. The title turns belonging into something supposedly carried within the body before thought or choice begins.

Musically, however, the track contains more emotional complexity than its slogan suggests. The guitar melody is not purely triumphant. It carries yearning, as though the racial unity proclaimed in the title is experienced primarily as something absent or endangered. This tension appears repeatedly across the album. The ideology claims continuity, certainty, and inherited strength, while the music often sounds like mourning for a world that cannot be recovered. Bannerwar’s most persuasive moments come from that gap between declarative language and melancholic melody.

The album’s title track stretches nearly nine minutes, using duration to create the feeling of a central ceremony. “To Honour Fatherland” moves through fast black metal passages, slower martial sections, keyboard expansions, and recurring guitar lines whose repetition gives them the quality of pledges. The song does not present the fatherland as ordinary territory containing cities, disagreements, labor, families, commerce, and daily inconvenience. It is abstracted into a sacred body, something older and more permanent than the individuals supposedly serving it.

This transformation allows nationalism to borrow the emotional intensity of religion. The fatherland becomes a source of origin, obligation, identity, and transcendence. To honor it means placing its imagined continuity above individual life. The music supports this elevation through scale. Each return of the primary melody feels less like a verse and more like another stage in an oath.

Yet the longer running time also exposes Bannerwar’s compositional limitations. The central motifs are strong, but they are sometimes repeated beyond their ability to generate new meaning. The song’s atmosphere remains compelling while its architecture becomes less certain. Rather than developing toward a decisive conclusion, it occasionally feels suspended inside its own grandeur. This is characteristic of the album as a whole. Bannerwar possess a strong instinct for memorable melodic material, but not always the discipline required to determine when that material has completed its work.

“Aryan Skies” extends the album’s imagery upward. The sky becomes racial territory, purity projected onto the atmosphere itself. Such language attempts to make political ideology appear natural and cosmic rather than historically manufactured. Race is no longer merely a human category. It is written into sunlight, weather, ancestry, and the structure of the world. This is one of extremist mythology’s most effective operations: turning a modern political fantasy into something that appears older than politics and therefore beyond argument.

The song’s keyboards are especially prominent, giving the arrangement its most overtly symphonic character. Guitar and bass maintain forward motion while the synthetic harmonies create a wide, almost luminous field. The title suggests blue-eyed celestial purity, but the music is more interesting when heard as an attempt to transform the ordinary Greek sky into a projection screen for private mythology. Greece’s actual history is filled with migration, conquest, trade, cultural exchange, religious transformation, and competing identities. The “Aryan skies” imagined here require that complexity to be erased so one purified image can occupy the entire horizon.

“Raise the Banners of War” is more direct and physically successful. Its central riff possesses a sharper sense of forward movement, and the arrangement benefits from concentrating its energy rather than continually expanding. The banner is an ideal symbol for Bannerwar because it converts an idea into something visible, portable, and collective. Individuals disappear beneath it while still feeling represented by it. A crowd becomes one moving shape.

The song captures the bodily attraction of martial music. Rhythm synchronizes movement, melody enlarges emotion, and repetition removes hesitation. The listener can experience advance without confronting what the advance is toward or whom it may crush. This is part of the persuasive power of extremist music. It provides the emotional rewards of unity, courage, and purpose while keeping the human consequences beyond the frame.

Bannerwar’s drum programming is often the album’s weakest technical element. The percussion supplies speed and structure, but rarely the physical depth implied by the compositions. Blast beats can sound flat beneath the glowing keyboards and melodic guitars, giving the impression that the army exists from the waist upward. Yet this artificiality sometimes works in the record’s favor. The rigid patterns behave less like one drummer and more like impersonal military machinery, an engine continuing without fatigue or uncertainty.

Vorvoros’ bass contributes more personality. Several passages allow it to move visibly beneath the guitars, adding warmth and motion to arrangements that might otherwise become top-heavy. The bass often acts as the album’s most human instrument, responding to the melodic architecture rather than simply reinforcing it. Its presence helps To Honour Fatherland avoid becoming a continuous sheet of guitar and synthesizer.

“Ήλιε Ανίκητε,” or “Unconquered Sun,” turns toward solar devotion. The title recalls Helios and the ancient image of the invincible sun, but within the album’s ideological framework the sun also functions as a racial and political emblem. It represents permanence, strength, rebirth, victory, and the supposed return of an ancestral order after darkness. The song has one of the album’s stronger melodic centers, with keyboards and guitars combining into a genuinely elevated passage.

Solar symbolism is especially useful to nationalist paganism because the sun appears universal while being claimed as tribal. It shines upon everyone, yet the ideology attempts to treat it as a private ancestral sign. Bannerwar’s music makes that appropriation emotionally convincing through warmth and scale. The melody rises naturally, giving the impression that the symbol has revealed itself rather than been selected and arranged by human beings.

The track also reveals the difference between Bannerwar and the older Greek black metal tradition. Bands such as Rotting Christ, Varathron, and Necromantia often built atmosphere through heavy bass, ritual pacing, occult darkness, and distinctly Mediterranean rhythmic weight. Bannerwar’s sound is brighter, thinner, and more aligned with epic melodic black metal. Their Greece is not primarily a land of subterranean rites. It is a battlefield under solar banners.

“Kulturkampf” brings the political conflict into direct language. The German term means “culture struggle” and historically referred to conflict between the German state and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, but it has since been repurposed broadly by nationalist and extremist movements to describe an existential battle over values, identity, education, religion, and social order. Bannerwar use the term less as a specific historical reference than as a declaration that culture itself has become a battlefield.

This framework is attractive because it turns every disagreement into evidence of war. Art, immigration, religion, sexuality, education, language, and historical interpretation can all be recast as attacks upon the group. Once culture is understood entirely as conflict, compromise becomes betrayal and curiosity becomes weakness. The music follows this logic through rigid forward motion and repeated melodic certainty. It does not investigate what culture is. It announces which side must dominate.

The closing cover of Blue Eyed Devils’ “Eternal Fight” makes Bannerwar’s connection to white-power rock culture explicit. The choice is not simply a tribute to a musical influence. It places the Greek band inside a broader international ideological network extending beyond black metal. RAC contributes blunt slogans, direct choruses, and the idea of music as recruitment and reinforcement. Bannerwar reframe the song through colder guitar tone and symphonic atmosphere, but its central function remains allegiance.

The phrase “eternal fight” summarizes the worldview surrounding the album. Conflict is not a temporary condition entered reluctantly to protect a peaceful life. It becomes permanent identity. The enemy may change, but struggle must continue because the movement defines itself through resistance. This creates a closed emotional circuit. Defeat proves persecution, victory proves righteousness, criticism proves conspiracy, and isolation proves purity. There is no condition capable of disproving the worldview.

This absence of peace is striking across To Honour Fatherland. The album repeatedly invokes fatherland, ancestry, culture, sun, blood, banners, and sacrifice, yet it offers little sense of the ordinary life supposedly being defended. There are no songs about neighborly obligation, artistic creation, raising children, maintaining roads, caring for the sick, resolving disputes, or living among complicated human beings. The imagined fatherland exists primarily as something threatened. Remove the enemy and much of its emotional structure disappears.

That does not make the record musically empty. Bannerwar possess a genuine gift for heroic melodic movement. Von Magnus writes guitar lines that rise naturally and remain memorable without becoming conventionally catchy. Sunchariot’s keyboards enlarge those lines into a rough symphonic architecture, while Arkhon’s high rasp gives the music a strained and urgent human presence. His voice is not technically polished, but its thinness suits the recording. He sounds less like a commanding general than someone attempting to shout across a battlefield much larger than himself.

That disproportion is one of the album’s most revealing qualities. To Honour Fatherland imagines monumental history, cosmic ancestry, racial destiny, and vast military movement, but it is visibly made by a small underground band with limited resources. The keyboards expose their presets, the drums reveal their programming, and the mix occasionally loses control of its competing layers. Yet the musicians’ commitment gives those limitations emotional force. The album is a cardboard monument sincerely believed to be stone, and belief occasionally changes how it sounds.

The poor mix can blur the guitars and keyboards together, but this fusion sometimes produces the record’s most atmospheric passages. Individual instruments disappear into one bright metallic cloud, making the music feel larger than its components. Elsewhere, the same density produces fatigue. The title track and “Aryan Skies” could have gained power from tighter editing, allowing their strongest motifs to strike without being diluted through excessive repetition.

As a debut, however, the album establishes Bannerwar’s identity with remarkable clarity. Later releases would move toward rawer production and somewhat different balances among atmosphere, melody, and aggression, but the basic world is already complete here. Ancient Greece, racial mythology, heroic warfare, solar imagery, and modern extremist politics are fused into a bright, martial form of symphonic black metal.

The album also belongs to a particular stage of the international NSBM network, when small labels, private CDs, mail order, ideological forums, and copied digital archives allowed bands from different countries to exchange both musical language and political symbols. Battlefield Records’ edition arrived as an underground object with no conventional catalog number, carrying its message through scarcity and subcultural circulation rather than public visibility. Limited access could itself be interpreted as purity, making obscurity part of the ideological experience.

To Honour Fatherland remains a revealing record because its musical strengths and moral failures are tightly intertwined. The heroic melodies, upward movement, and keyboard grandeur create genuine emotional force. That force is then directed toward racial hierarchy, historical simplification, and a nationalism dependent upon permanent enemies. Pretending the music has no appeal would avoid understanding how the ideology works. Pretending the appeal redeems the ideology would be equally dishonest.

Bannerwar’s imagined fatherland glows beneath invincible suns and Aryan skies, but its brightness is created by removing most of humanity from the picture. History becomes banner, blood, and battle; culture becomes struggle; belonging becomes inheritance; and peace becomes merely the pause before another war. The album reaches upward continuously, yet its worldview remains confined within a narrow circle.

That contradiction gives To Honour Fatherland its lasting interest as an underground artifact. The music genuinely wants transcendence. Its melodies strain toward distance, scale, and historical continuity. But the ideology mistakes exclusion for elevation. The songs build a vast sky, then insist that only one kind of person is entitled to stand beneath it.

Arthemesia - 2000 - Devs-Iratvs

 

Native North Records – NNR-002-1  316.41MB FLAC

 

Devs-Iratvs sounds like a band trying to make black metal large enough to contain several incompatible forms of transcendence at once. Arthemesia’s debut is fast and ferocious, but speed is only one current running through it. The album also contains long melodic guitar arcs, reflective acoustic openings, death-metal weight, expansive keyboards, sudden clean voices, technical drumming, and lyrics concerned with divinity, grief, stellar consciousness, nature, magic, and the dissolution of ordinary human limits. It belongs to the melodic and symphonic Finnish black metal explosion surrounding the turn of the millennium, yet it rarely settles into the predictable relationship of harsh verse, keyboard atmosphere, and triumphant chorus. The songs keep opening new doors inside themselves, sometimes with remarkable fluency and sometimes with the unruly excess of musicians unwilling to discard any idea merely because another one is already in motion.

The album’s title immediately establishes this desire to exceed ordinary language. Devs-Iratvs resembles altered or corrupted Latin, suggesting an enraged god, divine wrath, or a deliberately private sacred formula without offering a completely stable translation. The unusual spelling gives the phrase the appearance of an inscription copied imperfectly from an older source. Arthemesia’s relationship to the occult works similarly. The band does not present a clearly organized ceremonial system or doctrinal Satanism. Magic, nature, cosmic power, death, dream, and self-transformation appear as connected intuitions, a personal mythology assembled from whatever symbols allow consciousness to feel larger than modern everyday life.

“Blade Circle” opens with Kai Hahto’s drums gradually entering the field before the full arrangement erupts. The effect immediately announces how important percussion will be to the album. Hahto does not merely sustain blast beats beneath the guitars. He shapes transitions, places emphatic double-bass movement under melodic changes, and gives the songs a technical physicality unusual for black metal that depends so heavily upon atmosphere. His performance continually prevents the longer arrangements from floating away. Even when keyboards and guitars widen toward cosmic scale, the drums keep the music attached to muscles, impact, breath, and time.

The blade circle of the title can suggest ritual protection, entrapment, sacrifice, or a closed system whose boundaries are made from violence. The music behaves accordingly. Guitar themes rotate and return, giving the listener the sensation of moving rapidly while remaining inside an established circumference. Jari Mäenpää and Routa use melody not as relief from extremity but as the principal form of attack. Their lines rise and coil through the percussion, carrying enough harmonic detail to remain memorable without losing abrasion.

This guitar-centered approach distinguishes Arthemesia from symphonic black metal in which keyboards provide the main emotional information and the guitars function chiefly as a distorted frame. Here the synthesizers enlarge the scenery, but the riffs usually determine movement. Keyboards appear as weather, starlight, shadow, or distant ceremonial architecture behind compositions whose identities remain grounded in strings. This balance allows Devs-Iratvs to sound grand without becoming completely weightless.

“Universal Black” begins from a quieter and more exposed position. Clean guitar and restrained percussion create a reflective opening, while whispered or cleaner vocal textures allow the music to gather itself before the harsher voices and heavier riffs arrive. The title transforms blackness from a musical style or moral symbol into a universal substance. It can be read as cosmic emptiness, spiritual origin, hidden matter, night, or the field from which individual forms briefly emerge. Arthemesia’s blackness is therefore not solely hostile. It is also generative, a space containing potential before identity hardens.

The song’s structural movement expresses this breadth more convincingly than any literal explanation could. Delicate figures coexist with death-metal growls, blackened rasping, and increasingly forceful drums. None of these elements completely cancels the others. The composition presents consciousness as layered, capable of contemplation and violence within the same passage. This may be one reason the album occasionally feels more progressive than symphonic. Its changes do not merely decorate a repeated song form. They suggest shifting internal states.

“The Breeze of Grief” gives sorrow physical motion. Grief is imagined not as a fixed burden inside one person but as weather passing through the body and landscape. Its guitar melodies carry one of the album’s strongest melancholy currents, yet the rhythm never permits complete surrender. Hahto’s drumming continues pressing forward, creating the sensation of mourning experienced while life refuses to stop. The breeze may be gentle in name, but the song treats grief as something capable of entering every opening and changing the temperature of the world.

Finnish melodic metal often places sorrow and momentum together with unusual effectiveness. The melody grieves while the rhythm travels. This duality can be heard across black metal, death metal, folk metal, and the more expansive work Mäenpää would later pursue, but Devs-Iratvs captures it before the formula became polished into a recognizable signature. The emotions feel discovered inside the riffs rather than applied afterward.

“Draconis Infernus” shifts toward a more openly mythological register. The dragon is an ancient symbol capable of representing chaos, wisdom, appetite, hidden treasure, elemental power, or the guardian separating ordinary consciousness from forbidden knowledge. Arthemesia’s infernal dragon does not emerge through slow doom or theatrical narration. It appears through rapid, technically controlled motion. Guitar figures flash and turn, while the drums create the impression of a creature too large and fast to be observed from one position.

The production remains clear enough for the instrumental detail to register, but it does not completely remove underground roughness. Guitars retain a grainy edge, vocals sit inside rather than entirely above the arrangement, and keyboards occasionally merge with the upper frequencies. This partial congestion suits the material. A perfectly separated mix might have transformed the record into technical exhibition. Hellhole Studio instead preserves a certain dangerous compression, as though the compositions contain more energy than the recording can comfortably hold.

“Ancestor of Magick” reveals the band’s interest in locating magic before organized doctrine. The title suggests an original practitioner, force, or consciousness from which later ritual systems descend. Arthemesia spell magic with the terminal “k” associated with modern occult practice, distinguishing transformative will from stage illusion, yet the song itself avoids becoming an esoteric lecture. Its music pursues ancestry emotionally through recurring melodic shapes that sound ancient without imitating a specific folk tradition.

This distinction matters. Devs-Iratvs does not rely heavily upon overt Finnish folk instruments or reconstructed traditional melody. Nature and ancestral consciousness enter through atmosphere, repetition, and the sensation of immense duration. The past being invoked is more archetypal than historical. It exists outside calendars, national borders, and documentary evidence, functioning as a source of psychic authority rather than a period accurately recreated.

The band’s name reinforces this occult-natural fusion. Arthemesia derives from Artemisia absinthium, wormwood, the bitter plant associated with absinthe, medicine, ritual, altered perception, and old magical practice. The name joins organic life with visionary consciousness. A plant growing from soil becomes a doorway into changed seeing. Much of the album follows the same movement: natural forms become metaphysical signals, while bodily sensation becomes the starting point for cosmic speculation.

“Celebration of the Heaven Lost” turns loss into ceremony. Heaven has disappeared, been rejected, or become inaccessible, yet its absence is celebrated rather than simply mourned. The title may suggest liberation from imposed religious paradise, but the music retains enough melancholy to complicate any straightforward triumph. Arthemesia seem fascinated by transcendence even while resisting inherited models of salvation. They do not abandon heaven because they no longer desire elevation. They abandon one heaven in order to search for another form of vastness.

This contradiction gives the album emotional depth. Satanic or anti-Christian language can easily become a simple reversal in which one authority is exchanged for another. Devs-Iratvs is more interesting when it presents spiritual rebellion as a state of uncertainty. The old structure has been lost, but the longing that structure once organized remains. Guitar melody carries that longing more honestly than ideology can resolve it.

“The Archaic Dreamer” is among the album’s most important compositions and gives its name to Arthemesia’s 1999 demo. The dreamer is archaic not necessarily because the person lived in antiquity, but because dreaming opens access to layers of consciousness older than modern rational identity. The song’s arrangement alternates force with more spacious melodic passages, allowing the listener to experience dream as active transformation rather than passive sleep.

Arthemesia’s use of clean and harsh vocals is especially effective here. Different voices can resemble distinct levels of the same consciousness: the waking narrator, the buried ancestor, the hostile guardian, and the figure moving through the dream. The album does not assign these roles explicitly, but its vocal variety encourages such internal theatre. Valtias Mustatuuli’s rasp remains the central human texture, yet the surrounding growls, whispers, and cleaner moments prevent the singer from becoming one fixed character.

“Beyond the Horizon” gives the album its most direct image of transcendence. A horizon is visible but unreachable, continually retreating as the traveller approaches. It therefore provides an ideal symbol for spiritual or artistic desire. The goal organizes movement precisely because it cannot be possessed. The song’s melodic guitar work repeatedly appears to rise toward a resolution before extending into another passage, making the structure itself behave like the title.

This is also where Mäenpää’s later trajectory becomes easiest to hear in retrospect. The long melodic lines, technical movement, layered keyboards, rapid percussion, and cosmic-natural imagery anticipate elements that would become central to Wintersun. Yet Devs-Iratvs should not be reduced to an embryonic version of another band’s future. Arthemesia’s music is stranger, rougher, and less efficiently heroic. Its arrangements retain black metal’s abrasion and occult ambiguity, while the later project would refine many similar materials into a more polished and cinematic language.

“Gathering of the Gods” operates as a culmination. The album’s separate forces assemble: divine anger, universal darkness, grief, dragons, magical ancestry, lost heaven, dream, and the unreachable horizon. Yet the gathering is not portrayed through one enormous symphonic fanfare. The song remains mobile, with guitars and percussion creating the sense of multiple presences arriving from different directions. Divinity appears plural rather than centralized. There is no single throne organizing the encounter.

This polytheistic or pantheistic atmosphere suits the record’s broader spiritual imagination. Power is distributed through stars, plants, ancestors, dreams, darkness, and natural forces. The sacred is encountered as multiplicity. Such a worldview allows the album to sound devotional without becoming submissive. The gods gather, but the musician does not necessarily kneel. Music becomes the place where human consciousness can briefly stand among them.

The closing “Return to the Mother” changes the direction of transcendence. After repeatedly moving upward and outward, the album turns back toward origin. The Mother may be Earth, nature, darkness, death, biological source, or the larger consciousness from which individual identity separated. Return can therefore mean burial as easily as birth. The album’s cosmic expansion ends by dissolving into the source that made expansion possible.

This movement gives Devs-Iratvs a meaningful arc. It begins inside the blade circle, travels through universal blackness, grief, infernal mythology, ancient magic, lost heaven, dream, horizon, and divine assembly, then returns to the maternal ground. Transcendence is not permanent escape from matter. It is a journey that changes how matter is understood.

The musicians involved make the album a fascinating intersection within Finnish metal history. Jari Mäenpää’s later work with Ensiferum and Wintersun would foreground technical melody, heroic scale, nature, and cosmic imagination. Kai Hahto would become one of Finland’s most recognizable metal drummers through Rotten Sound, Wintersun, Swallow the Sun, and later Nightwish. G’thaur brought a connection to Barathrum’s heavier and more primitive black-metal tradition, while Routa would be associated with Finntroll’s developing collision of black metal and folk identity. Devs-Iratvs catches these paths before their future significance had fully separated them.

That convergence partly explains the album’s abundance. Each player seems to carry a different possible future for Finnish metal into the room. Black metal rawness, death-metal technique, melodic guitar ambition, symphonic atmosphere, folk-adjacent natural mysticism, and progressive structure coexist because no single one has yet claimed complete authority. The record’s occasional overcrowding is the sound of those futures pressing against one another.

Native North Records provided a fittingly small vessel for such an ambitious work. The self-financed recording entered circulation through a modest Finnish label at a moment when the country’s metal underground was expanding rapidly. Children of Bodom, Nightwish, Ensiferum, Finntroll, Moonsorrow, and numerous smaller groups were demonstrating different ways melody, folklore, extremity, and keyboards could coexist. Arthemesia belonged to that climate while remaining more explicitly black metal and occult in its presentation.

The album’s release year is sometimes listed as 2001, although the Private Release copy and original pressing information identify it with 2000. This kind of uncertainty is common around small underground releases recorded, financed, pressed, and distributed across the boundary of a calendar year. It does not alter the music, but it suits an album already suspended between demo history and official debut, the old millennium and the new, underground black metal and a more technically expansive future.

Devs-Iratvs is not perfectly balanced. Several songs contain more transitions than they require, some keyboard passages flirt with the ornamental conventions of their era, and the vocal variety can occasionally make the arrangements feel crowded. The album’s length and constant intensity may blur distinctions between songs on an initial listen. Its ambition sometimes outruns its ability to give every idea a necessary place.

Yet those excesses are inseparable from its personality. Arthemesia do not sound as though they are calculating the minimum required to establish a marketable style. They sound intoxicated by possibility. Every riff could open into another state, every natural image could become magical, and every musical boundary appears provisional. The record’s roughness keeps this ambition from becoming sterile virtuosity.

Its greatest strength is the relationship between guitars and drums. Mäenpää and Routa create melodies that travel rather than simply decorate, while Hahto gives those journeys muscular continuity. The keyboards deepen the atmosphere, but the album can survive without leaning upon them continuously. Beneath the occult language and cosmic titles is a highly active instrumental conversation.

Devs-Iratvs remains compelling because it captures Finnish melodic black metal at the moment it was beginning to exceed its original frame. The genre’s frost, rasp, speed, and darkness remain intact, but they are being pushed toward progressive composition, technical drumming, natural mysticism, and cosmic scale. Arthemesia did not resolve all of those pressures into a perfectly unified identity. They preserved the collision.

The album ends where its name began, inside a sacred language whose exact meaning remains uncertain. The listener may hear divine anger, magical awakening, cosmic grief, or young musicians discovering that extreme metal can become a vehicle for every horizon they have not yet crossed. The title remains partly unreadable, but the music translates its central impulse clearly: break the circle, travel outward, and return changed to the darkness that produced you.

Arathorn - 1997 - Niemals Kroenender Als Was Einst War

 

Folter Records – FR 008  333.41MB FLAC

Niemals krönender als was einst war belongs to that fascinating mid-1990s interval when black metal’s borders were still porous enough for a German band to combine harsh vocals, dirty guitars, prominent bass, ceremonial keyboards, clean declamation, flute, historical fantasy, and enormous mid-tempo structures without needing to decide whether the result was black metal, pagan metal, medieval metal, or something still waiting for a name. Arathorn’s debut contains only four compositions, but each behaves like an extended journey through old halls, battlefields, winter landscapes, spectral processions, and damaged memories of sovereignty. The album does not attack through continuous speed. It advances in long measured formations, allowing riffs to repeat until they acquire the gravity of banners, oaths, and stone architecture. Its atmosphere is dark, but rarely diseased or nihilistic. The darkness belongs to distance, lost grandeur, ancestral imagination, and the belief that the past contains forms of meaning no longer available to modern life.

The title can be rendered approximately as “Never more crowning than what once was,” an awkward but evocative declaration that the highest point lies behind us. The phrase does not merely praise history. It establishes loss as the album’s governing condition. Whatever kingdom, order, courage, beauty, or spiritual intensity once existed cannot be surpassed in the present. Modernity therefore becomes an aftermath, a period lived beneath the shadow of a greater age. This backward gaze would become common within pagan and folk-oriented metal, but Arathorn express it with unusual melancholy. Their music may sound ceremonial and heroic, yet the ceremony is taking place among remains. The throne can be imagined, the banners raised, and the songs sung, but the world that gave those symbols living authority has already disappeared.

“In Spectren pulsierender Todesrinnung” begins with a slow martial movement that immediately distinguishes Arathorn from the blast-driven black metal surrounding them in 1997. The German title is difficult and perhaps intentionally archaic or privately constructed, suggesting spectres pulsing through some current, channel, or course of death. That linguistic uncertainty suits the music. Arathorn’s titles do not behave like transparent summaries. They resemble inscriptions damaged by time, still carrying emotional force after their exact meanings have become unstable.

The guitars enter with a coarse, earthy distortion rather than an icy treble shriek. Beneath them, bass remains unusually audible, giving the music a bodily center often absent from atmospheric black metal. Keyboards do not attempt to imitate a realistic orchestra. They provide broad dark chords and ceremonial color, enlarging the riffs without replacing them. The result is simultaneously primitive and stately. One can hear the limited studio means, yet the musicians treat those means as building materials for something immense.

Vocally, Arathorn divide authority among harsh rasping, cleaner monotone singing, and spoken or declamatory passages. The clean voice has little of conventional metal’s operatic strength. It sounds more like a lone figure reciting before a fire, a soldier speaking across a ruined hall, or a chronicler who has survived the event being described. Its plainness gives it credibility. These are not polished actors presenting medieval pageantry for an audience. They sound like participants attempting to remember the proper words of an old rite.

The opening track develops through accumulation rather than dramatic contrast. Riffs return in slightly altered settings, accompanied by changing vocal textures and keyboard pressure. Arathorn understand that repetition can create historical scale. A melody heard once belongs to the present moment; heard repeatedly, it begins to resemble custom, law, or inherited memory. The song’s nearly nine minutes allow the central figures to outgrow their modest technical construction. By the end, they feel less composed than unearthed.

“O ultima privire asupra luptei din ţinuturile Transilvaniei,” followed by the English subtitle “An Armageddish View over the Landscapes of Transilvania,” shifts the album toward a more explicitly geographical fantasy. The Romanian title means approximately “A final glance upon the battle in the lands of Transylvania,” introducing the perspective of someone looking back over conflict rather than standing blindly inside it. The battle has occurred, perhaps is still occurring at a distance, but the observer occupies a place of elevation. Landscape, history, and violence become one image.

Transylvania entered Western Gothic imagination through vampire literature and cinema, but Arathorn’s treatment is less sensual and theatrical than the vampiric metal developing elsewhere in Europe. There are no seductive aristocrats or candlelit boudoirs. The region becomes a vast martial landscape containing mountains, castles, armies, mist, and the residue of historical catastrophe. The subtitle’s unusual “Armageddish” suggests an apocalyptic quality without committing to one specific religious end-time narrative. The battle feels ultimate because its emotional scale has exceeded ordinary history.

The composition moves with greater variation than the opener. Mid-tempo martial sections give way to faster black-metal passages, while keyboards and clean voices repeatedly restore a sense of ceremonial distance. The song’s long form resembles a panoramic camera moving across separate areas of the same battlefield. One section reveals advancing forces, another the emptied landscape after violence, another a distant citadel or procession. The transitions can be abrupt, but the unevenness contributes to the feeling of memory rather than perfect narration. Events are not recalled in smooth order. They return as isolated scenes whose emotional connections are clearer than their chronology.

Arathorn’s relationship to black metal becomes especially interesting here. The guitars and harsh voice preserve the genre’s abrasion, but the music is not organized around negation. It wants to create rather than merely destroy. Even when describing battle and death, the arrangement continually builds images, places, and implied histories. This constructive imagination connects Arathorn to the emerging pagan-metal current, though their version remains darker and less openly folkloric than the style would become in the following decade.

“Die Inthronisation (Der Koenig erwartet euch...),” meaning “The Enthronement (The King Awaits You...),” is the shortest track, though at more than six minutes it still possesses substantial room. The title transforms the listener from observer into expected participant. The king is not being described from a historical distance. He awaits “you,” creating the sensation that the album has led through spectres and Transylvanian battle toward an audience, initiation, or judgment inside the throne room.

The music becomes more clearly processional. Keyboards establish a dark ceremonial platform while guitars repeat with deliberate weight. The clean vocals are especially effective because their restrained delivery avoids turning the scene into theatrical fantasy metal. The king’s authority seems old, distant, and perhaps exhausted rather than gloriously triumphant. Enthronement normally marks the beginning of power, but the album’s title has already informed us that the greatest age lies in the past. This may be a coronation occurring too late, a ritual performed after the kingdom’s actual strength has vanished.

That tension gives the track emotional depth. Arathorn admire hierarchy, grandeur, and historical continuity, yet their music continually reveals how fragile those structures are. A throne exists because people agree to recognize it. A king’s body ages. A dynasty can end, its symbols surviving as objects whose former authority must be imagined. The song tries to restore that authority through repetition and ceremony, but the melancholy beneath the music suggests the restoration cannot become permanent.

The parenthetical phrase “The King Awaits You...” also introduces a faintly supernatural uncertainty. Is this a living sovereign receiving followers, a dead king waiting beyond ordinary time, or an archetypal ruler encountered through ritual imagination? Arathorn do not resolve the question. Their medieval world is less a historically documented period than a psychic region where political authority, myth, memory, and death overlap.

“Die Hymne des Winters Zorn,” the sixteen-and-a-half-minute “Hymn of Winter’s Wrath,” dominates the album’s final third. Long black-metal tracks often rely upon hypnotic minimalism or progressive accumulation, but Arathorn’s closer behaves more like an extended ceremonial suite. It moves through repeated riffs, keyboard-led passages, clean and harsh vocals, changes of tempo, and stretches whose apparent simplicity gradually becomes atmospheric. Winter is not merely a setting. It becomes an active power possessing anger, voice, and the ability to reorganize the landscape.

The personification is important. Winter’s wrath removes softness, vegetation, movement, and easy survival. Roads vanish, rivers harden, and human claims upon territory become temporary. In a record preoccupied with lost sovereignty, winter represents a power greater than any king. Political crowns rise and fall, but the season returns without needing recognition. The hymn therefore praises something beyond human hierarchy even while using the ceremonial language of human worship.

The track’s opening and recurring guitar figures carry a mournful dignity rather than pure aggression. Drums maintain a steady pulse, sometimes increasing toward black-metal speed, but much of the composition remains mid-paced enough for every melodic turn to register. The bass adds warmth beneath the cold imagery, creating one of the album’s productive contradictions. Winter is represented through thick, almost earthy sound rather than thin frost. Arathorn’s coldness is experienced from beside a dying fire, not from complete exposure in an empty snowfield.

The keyboards periodically move to the foreground and transform the piece into something resembling a lost film score or medieval computer-game landscape. Their tones are unmistakably synthetic, but this limitation gives them a dreamlike quality. They do not recreate the Middle Ages. They recreate the 1990s underground imagining the Middle Ages through inexpensive technology, photocopied booklets, fantasy novels, historical fragments, and private longing. That difference matters. The album is not valuable because it accurately represents the past. It documents how the past could become emotionally real to musicians separated from it by centuries.

The title “Hymn” implies collective singing, yet much of the track feels solitary. The voices do not create a convincing crowd. They sound like a few people attempting to fill an enormous space. This disproportion produces much of the album’s beauty. The imagined kingdom is larger than the band capable of summoning it. Every keyboard chord, flute-like color, and clean vocal phrase strains against the smallness of the recording.

Arathorn’s use of long durations can occasionally become indulgent. Several riffs are repeated beyond the point where conventional songwriting would demand development, and the album’s mid-tempo preference may feel static to listeners expecting violent momentum. Yet repetition is essential to the record’s atmosphere. The songs are not designed as efficient narratives. They are places in which duration itself creates credibility. A kingdom imagined for three minutes may seem decorative; inhabited for sixteen, it begins to acquire roads, weather, rituals, and memory.

The musicians’ later disagreement about direction helps explain the unusual balance preserved here. Sköll wanted Arathorn to move further toward folk and medieval elements, while the other members apparently preferred a more metallic path. Niemals krönender als was einst war captures the point before that tension was resolved. Black metal, keyboards, narrative clean voices, martial heaviness, and embryonic folk color coexist without one element fully subordinating the others. The album’s identity comes from the unstable truce.

This also places it in an important year for German black metal. In 1997, Nagelfar released Hünengrab im Herbst, while numerous smaller groups were developing German-language approaches distinct from direct Scandinavian imitation. Arathorn’s record is less violent and compositionally intricate than Nagelfar, but it shares the desire to make native language, historical imagination, and long-form atmosphere central. Germany’s black metal underground was discovering that darkness could emerge from its own linguistic rhythms, forests, legends, wars, ruins, and uneasy relationship with history.

Arathorn’s use of Tolkien’s world in the band name adds another layer. Arathorn is the father of Aragorn, a figure defined partly through ancestry and the transmission of kingship across absence. The choice aligns perfectly with an album concerned with lost crowns, enthronement, battle landscapes, and the superiority of what once was. Yet Tolkien’s influence remains atmospheric rather than literal. The record does not retell Middle-earth stories. It borrows the emotional framework of exiled sovereignty, broken lineage, and a king whose legitimacy survives even when his kingdom does not.

This framework can become politically ambiguous, especially in German pagan and medieval metal, where longing for ancestry and premodern hierarchy may overlap with nationalist romanticism. Niemals krönender als was einst war does not present the explicit racial propaganda found in some adjacent underground scenes, and it should not be forced into that category without evidence. Its backward gaze is nevertheless worth examining. The past becomes attractive partly because its complexity has been removed. We encounter kings, battles, winter, and loyalty, but not disease, class exploitation, arbitrary violence, hunger, illiteracy, or the daily vulnerability of people living beneath those crowns.

That selectivity does not invalidate the emotional need expressed by the music. Modern life can feel temporary, commercial, rootless, and stripped of ceremony. The imagined Middle Ages offer durable symbols, slow time, direct relationships with weather and land, and a sense that individual life belongs to a larger story. Arathorn’s album converts that longing into sound. Its value lies less in historical argument than in revealing the shape of the hunger itself.

The recording’s production serves this hunger effectively. Guitars remain dirty enough to preserve underground abrasion, while keyboards are clear and bass unusually present. The mix gives the music weight without modern compression. Instruments sometimes crowd one another, but the lack of perfect separation helps the album feel inhabited rather than clinically assembled. One hears a band playing inside its own imagined hall, the reflections and rough surfaces becoming part of the architecture.

Clean vocals may be the record’s most divisive feature. They are monotonous, limited, and occasionally vulnerable beside the grand imagery. Yet replacing them with polished heroic singing would likely reduce the album’s personality. Their plainness suggests memory being carried by ordinary people rather than professional bards. The voice does not possess the king’s grandeur. It belongs to someone still telling the king’s story after the court has vanished.

Niemals krönender als was einst war remains compelling because it exists between categories and historical moments. It is black metal without sustained ferocity, pagan metal before the style’s later festival confidence, medieval music without historical instrumentation, and symphonic atmosphere without orchestral polish. Its four long tracks are uneven but deeply committed, each building a separate chamber inside the same backward-looking dream.

The album does not restore the past it praises. No recording could. What it creates instead is a temporary emotional structure in which lost grandeur can be experienced without being proven. For forty-two minutes, spectres pulse through deathly currents, Transylvanian battlefields unfold beneath an apocalyptic sky, a king waits in a darkened hall, and winter’s wrath receives its hymn. Then the structure disappears, leaving the title’s melancholy claim behind: nothing will ever be more crowning than what once was, even when what once was can now be reached only through imagination.

Melek-Tha - 1996 - Astrum Argentinum

Adipocere Records – CD AR 032  395.52MB FLAC

 Astrum Argentinum sounds like ceremonial evil assembled from machinery rather than performed by a conventional band. There are no guitar riffs carrying recognizable metal songs, no drummer creating human momentum, and almost no concern with the verse-and-chorus structures that might normally guide a seventy-five-minute album. Melek-Tha’s debut instead builds long occult environments from synthesizers, sampled voices, pounding electronic rhythms, orchestral approximations, horror-film residue, and repeated gestures whose meaning changes through duration. It belongs to dark ambient and death industrial, but its connection to the mid-1990s metal underground remains essential. This is music designed for listeners already accustomed to black-metal intros, satanic imagery, underground cassettes, and records that treat atmosphere as an act of spiritual opposition rather than background decoration.

“Evil Conjuration” establishes the method with slow synthetic chords, ominous samples, and percussion that feels more summoned than played. The rhythm does not invite bodily movement so much as impose a ceremonial pace. Each impact resembles another stage in a procedure whose rules remain hidden from the listener. The title is direct, almost generic, yet the music gains authority by refusing to explain what is being conjured. Evil functions less as a specific supernatural being than as pressure entering the recording through repetition.

This uncertainty is central to Melek-Tha. Ludo Lejeune does not construct a detailed occult narrative with characters, locations, and doctrinal explanations. He creates conditions in which the listener may imagine those things independently. Synthesizer choirs imply architecture, low drones suggest underground depth, and sampled voices create the sense of witnesses or participants whose identities have been erased. The recording resembles evidence recovered after a rite rather than a transparent documentation of one.

“Hymn of the Dead” is more solemn and compact. Its title suggests collective song, but the dead cannot produce ordinary breath or harmony. The hymn therefore has to be manufactured through electronic substitution. Synthetic voices and repeated keyboard figures become a choir for bodies no longer capable of singing. The result is mournful without becoming tender. Death is treated as a condition possessing authority and scale, not as an individual tragedy requiring consolation.

The album’s inexpensive orchestral sounds are part of its character. They rarely convince the ear that real strings, brass, or choirs are present, but realism would not necessarily improve the music. Their artificiality creates a supernatural distance. These are not human musicians imitating the dead. They are machines approximating a ceremony that may never have belonged to human culture in the first place.

“Black Wizard” introduces a more active rhythmic pattern, suggesting the occult practitioner not as an ancient robed figure standing outside technology but as someone operating through it. Samplers, sequencers, effects units, and loops become modern magical instruments. A repeated electronic pulse can function like a drum circle, mantra, or protective boundary, while sound effects replace smoke, incense, bells, and visible ritual objects. The studio becomes the chamber in which intention is concentrated.

That relationship between technology and occultism separates Astrum Argentinum from keyboard-led dungeon synth. Although both styles use synthetic sound to construct imaginary spaces, Melek-Tha’s environments are less nostalgic and less interested in medieval fantasy. The machinery remains audible. Its repetition can be harsh, clinical, and industrial, suggesting laboratories, bunkers, interrogation rooms, or abandoned factories as readily as crypts and temples.

“Midian Graveyard” creates one of the album’s clearest locations. Midian carries biblical and desert associations, while the graveyard introduces burial, abandonment, and human remains. Yet the track does not depict a recognizable cemetery with wind, bells, and footsteps arranged for cinematic effect. It produces a broad, empty field of sound whose scale seems to exceed ordinary burial grounds. The dead appear less as individuals than as an accumulated population absorbed into the landscape.

This impersonal treatment can make the album emotionally severe. Astrum Argentinum rarely pauses to offer beauty separate from threat. Even its more atmospheric passages carry the expectation that something hostile is approaching or already present. The music does not ask the listener to sympathize with its dead, demons, or ritualists. It asks them to remain inside the environment long enough for ordinary emotional orientation to weaken.

“Slava Tchortu” turns toward a specifically Slavic formulation meaning approximately “Glory to the Devil.” Its title gives the record its clearest spoken allegiance, but the composition remains more processional than celebratory. Nearly ten minutes of repeated figures, heavy rhythms, and infernal atmosphere transform praise into endurance. The listener is not given a triumphant satanic anthem. Glory is produced by continuing the rite until repetition itself begins to feel like belief.

This is one of Melek-Tha’s most effective techniques. A sound introduced plainly can seem crude or even simplistic, but after several minutes it gains psychological weight. The ear stops waiting for conventional development and begins noticing small changes in density, frequency, and spatial placement. The piece does not travel far horizontally. It descends.

“Kabbalistic Flames” introduces another esoteric vocabulary, though the album does not appear concerned with accurately representing Jewish mystical tradition. Kabbalah functions here as a symbol of forbidden knowledge, hidden correspondences, sacred letters, and transformative fire. This is typical of underground occult art, where religious systems are often detached from their historical communities and recombined into private mythology.

The flames are represented through rising synthetic textures and recurring rhythmic pressure rather than naturalistic fire samples alone. They seem less capable of providing warmth than of altering whatever enters them. Fire becomes purification through destruction, reducing identity and matter into material for another state. The track’s length gives this process time to feel gradual rather than explosive.

“Tabernacle of Hatred” takes a word associated with sacred dwelling and fills it with a hostile emotion. Hatred is not merely felt by one person; it receives architecture, enclosure, and ritual protection. The title suggests that negative emotion can become a place inhabited repeatedly until it acquires the permanence of religion. Melek-Tha’s music supports this idea through loops that seem to seal the listener inside their circumference.

The danger of such repetition is monotony. Several tracks use similar keyboard colors, sampled voices, and martial electronic impacts, and the album’s long duration can make individual pieces blur together. Yet this sameness also creates continuity. Astrum Argentinum behaves less like eight independent compositions than one prolonged operation divided into chambers. Each title names a different stage, but the same force appears to move through all of them.

“Supreme Evil” closes the album with its longest statement. By this point, evil has progressed from something conjured to something enthroned as ultimate authority. The title leaves no room for moral ambiguity or subtle characterization. Yet the music does not offer a simple climax. Its twelve minutes extend the album’s accumulated weight, repeating and enlarging familiar materials until the listener experiences conclusion as saturation rather than resolution.

This refusal of release suits the project. Conventional dramatic music often restores order after danger, even when the ending is tragic. Melek-Tha does not restore anything. The final track leaves the machinery running, as though the album ends only because the physical format reaches its limit. The summoned force has not been dismissed. The door remains open after the recording stops.

The title Astrum Argentinum can be translated approximately as “Silver Star.” Silver carries associations with the moon, reflected light, ritual tools, purity, poison, and protection against supernatural beings. A star suggests guidance, distance, cosmic order, and an object whose light reaches the observer long after its origin. The title therefore introduces a strange luminosity into an album dominated by darkness. Melek-Tha’s evil is not entirely subterranean. It also appears celestial, remote, and coldly radiant.

That silver star may function as an occult sign above the album’s separate rites, giving them one common orientation. Conjuration, death, wizardry, graveyards, infernal praise, mystical fire, hatred, and supreme evil all seem to occur beneath it. The record’s darkness is not empty. It has a fixed point toward which every repeated rhythm and synthetic procession is directed.

Adipocere Records was an unusual but logical home for the release. The French label was primarily associated with death, doom, black, Gothic, and experimental metal, yet the underground surrounding those styles had always depended upon ambient introductions, electronic side projects, ritual recordings, and horror sound design. Astrum Argentinum takes the atmosphere that another band might have used for a ninety-second intro and makes it the entire substance of the album.

This creates a demanding listening experience. The record offers few melodic hooks, little instrumental virtuosity, and no human performance dynamic comparable to a band reacting in real time. Its power comes from texture, repetition, and scale. Heard casually, the tracks can resemble crude horror keyboards stretched far beyond necessity. Heard with full attention and sufficient volume, they become massive artificial interiors whose limitations are gradually absorbed into their design.

The debut also establishes nearly everything Melek-Tha would continue exploring across an enormous later discography: occult ceremony, industrial rhythm, sampled menace, apocalyptic orchestration, ritual speech, horror imagery, and the transformation of inexpensive electronic tools into instruments of imagined domination. Later recordings would become denser, more violent, and more technically controlled, but Astrum Argentinum contains the original blueprint in unusually exposed form.

That exposure gives the record historical value. One can hear a solitary musician discovering how much psychological space a loop can create, how a synthetic choir can imply both religious grandeur and total absence of humanity, and how metal’s darkness can survive after guitars and drums have been removed. The album is not black metal, yet it shares black metal’s desire to make recording quality, isolation, extremity, and spiritual hostility into parts of one total environment.

Astrum Argentinum remains primitive, excessive, and occasionally exhausting. Its long pieces often depend upon atmosphere more than development, and its occult vocabulary can feel assembled from familiar infernal signs. Yet the commitment is complete. Melek-Tha does not wink at the listener or step outside the ritual to explain its artificial construction. The silver star is raised, the machinery begins, and for seventy-five minutes the studio becomes a tabernacle built not despite its electronic limitations, but directly from them.

Locust - 2001 - Wrong 2xCD

 

Touch – TO:51  413.12MB FLAC

Wrong is an electronic pop album designed to escape the boundaries of the stereo system playing it. Its first disc contains nine compact songs built from analogue synthesizers, programmed rhythms, layered voices, and melodies that hover between intimacy and unease. Its second disc contains nine corresponding drones intended to be activated at the same time on another player, preferably somewhere else in the house. The listener therefore does not receive one fixed mix. The rooms, walls, distances, volume settings, and slight timing errors of domestic playback become part of the composition. Music leaks from one space into another, and the album changes as the listener moves through it.
Mark Van Hoen called this a twin CD rather than a double album because the discs are not two consecutive halves. They are parallel surfaces. Disc one can be heard alone as a complete collection of songs, but disc two acts like its displaced atmosphere, a second weather system moving through the building. Start them together and the drones deepen the arrangements. Begin one several seconds late and new relationships emerge. Raise the drone disc until the songs become distant, or reduce it until it resembles machinery humming through a wall. Wrong is less a finished object than a domestic sound installation disguised as an accessible electronic record.
“Heal” opens with that balance of familiarity and instability already intact. Holli Ashton sings with a voice that can sound vulnerable, detached, seductive, and slightly unreal within the same phrase. The melody is approachable, but the synthesizers beneath it seem softened by age, heat, and mechanical fatigue. Notes drift subtly out of perfect alignment. Rhythms wobble rather than striking with digital certainty. The song asks for healing while the sound itself appears damaged, making repair feel possible but never complete.
Imperfection is not an accidental by-product here. Van Hoen deliberately used analogue synthesizers whose tuning, timing, and behavior could become unreliable. Rather than correcting every flaw through software, he lets instability remain audible. The record’s warmth comes partly from those deviations. A machine slipping out of time begins to resemble breath, hesitation, or nervous movement. Electronic music is frequently described as cold when it is too exact. Wrong becomes emotional because its machinery cannot hold itself perfectly together.
“Make a Difference” places a stronger rhythm beneath Ashton’s vocals, but the track still feels suspended inside a cloud of synthesis. The title sounds like a motivational instruction, yet the performance carries enough doubt to prevent certainty. This tension runs throughout the album. The lyrics frequently use direct emotional language, while the production makes every statement appear to arrive through distance, memory, or interference. Nothing is allowed to remain completely plain.
“Believe in the One” draws upon the shape of late-1970s and early-1980s British electronic pop without becoming an exercise in revival. Van Hoen was consciously returning to the era that first inspired him, when synthesizers were expensive, awkward, unstable, and often operated by musicians learning their possibilities in public. The track contains the melodic clarity of early synth-pop, but its surfaces are blurred by decades of ambient music, experimental electronics, and studio manipulation. It sounds simultaneously old, futuristic, and stranded outside both periods.
That temporal confusion is one of Wrong’s greatest strengths. The analogue instruments suggest an earlier technological future, while the editing and textural density belong to the late 1990s. Released in 2001 after years of label delay, the album arrived already displaced from its own recording moment. It does not sound dated because it never sounds securely contemporary. Its machines remember one era, its production inhabits another, and its song structures reach toward pop without fully entering it.
“Sweet Sky” is one of the lightest pieces, but its brightness remains chemically altered. Ashton’s voice rises into an almost weightless register while the synthesizers create a soft artificial horizon. The sky is sweet, yet it does not feel natural. It resembles atmosphere viewed through tinted glass or transmitted from a satellite whose signal is slowly degrading. The beauty is genuine, but distance gives it a faint sadness.
“What Do You Care?” turns emotional confrontation into one of the album’s richest sound environments. Vocal layers gather until individual identities blur, while the synthetic arrangement surrounds them with polished surfaces and decaying edges. The question can sound wounded, accusatory, dismissive, or quietly resigned depending upon which layer occupies attention. Playing the drone disc simultaneously makes the song even less stable, as though another emotional current has entered from outside the room.
The second disc is essential because it converts listening into physical movement. Played in another room, its drones are filtered naturally by doors, hallways, furniture, and walls. High frequencies disappear, bass accumulates, and the building remixes the music without software. Walking between the two sources changes the relationship continuously. Near the main system, the songs dominate and the drone becomes distant pressure. Near the secondary player, melody recedes and atmosphere takes control. The listener becomes a moving crossfader.
“Separate” gains particular meaning within this design. The two discs are separate but dependent, and the song’s emotional distance is mirrored by the physical distance between playback systems. Wrong repeatedly converts its lyrical concerns into spatial conditions. Separation is not only described by the vocalist. It can be experienced by standing between rooms where two related pieces of music refuse to occupy one center.
The title track is more rhythmically unsettled, with tones folding against one another in patterns that feel both deliberate and near collapse. “Wrong” does not present error as something requiring correction. Error becomes an artistic resource, a place where timing slips, synthesis decays, and technology reveals personality. The entire album grows from things not working as expected: unreliable instruments, label conflict, delayed release, imperfect synchronization, and domestic equipment being used outside its intended purpose.
Van Hoen had spent years moving between ambient electronics, techno, production, and increasingly song-oriented work. Wrong gathers those paths without resolving them into one category. The beats can suggest trip-hop or experimental pop, the drones belong to isolationist ambient, and the vocal arrangements occasionally approach dream pop. Yet the record remains too unstable to settle comfortably into any of those styles. Its songs are memorable, but their surroundings keep shifting.
“Impossible Adventure” is the closest the album comes to a direct duet, with Vinny Miller joining the vocal structure. The title describes the record itself surprisingly well. Pop music generally depends upon repeatable presentation: one master recording, one mix, one intended sequence. Wrong proposes a version that can never be reproduced exactly because each room and playback arrangement creates a different result. The adventure is impossible because the ideal synchronization, volume relationship, and spatial balance remain permanently uncertain.
“Haze” closes the song disc by allowing the album’s edges to dissolve. Haze does not erase objects completely; it reduces detail and makes distance difficult to judge. That is exactly what Van Hoen’s production does to voice and machine. We can hear melodies, rhythms, and emotional gestures, but their outlines remain softened. The drones on the parallel disc extend this haze beyond the speakers, turning the whole listening environment into one uncertain field.
Heard alone, the drone disc appears skeletal. Titles such as “Presence and Gifts,” “Faith Grows from Trees,” “Night Navigation,” and “Conversations Beyond the End of the Sky” suggest poetic environments, but the pieces function less as independent compositions than as shadows shaped to fit the durations of the songs. Their apparent incompleteness is intentional. They wait for the first disc, just as an empty room waits for sound arriving from somewhere else.
This structure also questions where an album is supposed to exist. Is it contained in the discs, produced by the equipment, located in the rooms, or completed by the listener’s movement? Wrong refuses one answer. The recorded material provides the conditions, but the domestic environment determines the final event. A cheap portable player in a kitchen will create a different album from a computer in a bedroom or a second hi-fi behind a closed door.
The concept could easily have become a technical novelty attached to weak music, but the first disc is strong enough to survive without it. Ashton’s performance gives the record its emotional center. She does not simply float prettily over the electronics. Her voice changes temperature, moving from fragile to severe, intimate to remote. The backing singers create additional reflections, making the human presence feel multiplied and occasionally disembodied.
Wrong is therefore both accessible and deeply peculiar. It offers concise songs, memorable vocal lines, and warm analogue sound, then dismantles the idea that they should be heard from one stable position. Its technology is old, its editing modern, its format playful, and its emotional atmosphere difficult to date. The record does not correct its errors. It opens them into rooms and lets the listener walk inside.

Melek-Tha - 2003 - Perfect World Eradication

 

Kubernoise – NOISE003  407.31MB FLAC

Perfect World Eradication does not sound like an occult ceremony occurring inside a hidden chamber. It sounds like the chamber has been replaced by an entire political machine. On Astrum Argentinum, Melek-Tha used primitive synthesizers, ritual voices, martial impacts, and horror-derived atmosphere to create infernal temples whose exact purpose remained obscure. Seven years later, the same basic materials have become denser, louder, and more brutally organized. The supernatural vocabulary remains, but the central imagery now comes from dictatorship, trauma, social control, slavery, extermination, and the deliberate construction of a new order. The music no longer appears to summon evil from elsewhere. It imagines evil as administration.
“Dictatorial Laws” establishes this transformation across more than thirteen minutes of pounding industrial rhythm, orchestral menace, distorted voices, and repeated commands. The pace is slow enough to feel unavoidable. Nothing needs to rush because the system represented by the music already possesses authority, machinery, and time. Percussive strikes resemble factory presses, armored movement, or enormous doors closing inside a concrete complex. Synthesizer choirs supply ceremonial grandeur, but there is no warmth or collective humanity in them. They sound like a state manufacturing its own sacred music.
The title is important because laws normally claim legitimacy through order, consent, precedent, or shared protection. Dictatorial laws retain the appearance of legality while removing meaningful participation. Violence is translated into procedure. A command written on paper can produce imprisonment, removal, hunger, or death while allowing those who administer it to imagine themselves merely operating a system. Melek-Tha’s repetitive structures capture this impersonal character. Once the loop begins, no individual instrument appears responsible for stopping it.
“Pain, the Infinite Trauma” moves from political machinery into the interior consequences it produces. At sixteen minutes, it is the longest track and one of the album’s most exhausting environments. Low drones, grinding pulses, distant cries, and orchestral layers accumulate without offering a stable point of relief. Pain is not treated as a single event with a beginning and conclusion. It becomes a permanent climate whose repetition destroys ordinary measurements of time.
The word “infinite” may initially seem like theatrical exaggeration, but the music gives it psychological credibility. Severe trauma often survives the original event through memory, bodily response, recurring images, altered trust, and the expectation that danger will return. Melek-Tha does not dramatize this through one explosive climax. The track remains inside the pressure until the listener begins losing confidence that the structure will change. Duration becomes the principal instrument.
This is where the album’s industrial method is most effective. A guitar-based composition might communicate suffering through expression, variation, or cathartic release. Melek-Tha treats suffering as a system that continues whether expression occurs or not. Voices appear, but they do not become protagonists whose stories can guide us. They are reduced to traces inside the machinery. The individual remains audible only as evidence of what the structure has consumed.
The title composition, subtitled “Apocalyptic Fear,” converts the fantasy of perfection into annihilation. A “perfect world” can sound benevolent until one asks who defines perfection and what happens to everything that does not fit. Eradication supplies the answer. Difference becomes defect, human complexity becomes contamination, and destruction is renamed improvement. The phrase exposes the totalitarian seed inside every purified utopia.
Musically, the track combines Melek-Tha’s ritual history with a more cinematic industrial scale. Synthetic brass, choirs, impact sounds, and dark electronic layers create the impression of a civilization witnessing its final engineered transformation. The apocalypse is not natural disaster or divine judgment. It has been planned. Fear comes from recognizing intelligence behind the destruction.
The music’s scale can be thrilling, and that attraction matters. Authoritarian imagery frequently borrows the emotional tools of spectacle: massed voices, enormous architecture, synchronized movement, flags, uniforms, and the appearance of absolute purpose. Melek-Tha uses sonic equivalents. The listener feels small before the production, but smallness can become intoxicating when it appears to relieve the individual of uncertainty and responsibility. One can disappear inside the machine and mistake submission for transcendence.
“Terminal Suffering” removes even the false promise of perfection. Terminal can mean approaching death, but it also suggests a station through which bodies and information are routed. The title therefore joins biological ending with technological organization. Suffering becomes both destination and process.
The track relies upon some of the album’s harshest textures. Rhythms scrape and strike, voices appear disfigured by effects, and orchestral elements rise like emergency signals over industrial debris. Yet the composition remains controlled. Chaos never fully escapes the grid. This discipline is what separates Perfect World Eradication from simple noise accumulation. Every layer appears to have been placed inside a hierarchy, reinforcing the album’s fixation upon systems of domination.
“Doctrines of the New Society” expands the political imagination further. A new society requires more than destruction. It requires teachings capable of explaining why destruction was necessary and why the survivors should accept the resulting order. Doctrine converts power into worldview. It supplies vocabulary, enemies, sacred history, and an account of the future in which obedience becomes virtue.
Melek-Tha’s repeated sampled voices resemble propaganda broadcasts stripped of specific language. Their meaning lies less in individual words than in tone, placement, and authority. They sound official because they arrive from outside the human scale of the music, embedded within machinery larger than any speaker. The voice no longer communicates between equals. It descends.
This is also one of the album’s limitations. Its imagery of dictatorship, masters, slaves, eradication, and suffering is intentionally blunt, and the compositions do not always provide enough internal contrast to deepen those themes beyond atmosphere. Long sections depend upon sustained intensity and familiar industrial vocabulary. Mechanical percussion, ominous choirs, sampled commands, and low electronic pressure recur so consistently that individual tracks can blur into one prolonged campaign.
Yet that blurring also supports the concept. Perfect World Eradication behaves less like six independent songs than six departments inside the same regime. Law produces trauma; trauma enables fear; fear prepares eradication; suffering removes resistance; doctrine explains the new order; hierarchy declares who will rule it. Each title names another function of the machine.
“You Are the Slaves, We Are the Masters” closes the album with its shortest composition and most explicit statement. After more than an hour of impersonal oppression, the system finally speaks in the first person. “We” and “you” divide the world completely. There is no shared humanity, negotiation, or uncertainty. One group commands and the other exists to serve.
The brevity gives the track unusual force. Earlier pieces create immense structures through duration, but the final declaration requires no elaboration. The hierarchy has already been built around the listener. The sentence merely names it. By ending here, the album refuses liberation or collapse. The masters remain masters when the recording stops.
The title can also be heard as an accusation directed beyond imaginary dictatorship. Modern life contains numerous systems in which people surrender time, attention, privacy, labor, or autonomy to institutions whose operations they barely understand. Melek-Tha exaggerates those relationships into apocalyptic slavery, but the exaggeration works because it grows from recognizable anxieties about administration, technology, mass persuasion, and concentrated power.
Released in 2003, the album also belongs to a period saturated with fears of surveillance, permanent war, terrorism, collapsing public trust, technological control, and societies reorganized around security. Perfect World Eradication does not document those events directly, yet its emotional architecture fits the era. The future no longer appears as liberation through technology. It resembles a command center.
Compared with Astrum Argentinum, the production is heavier and more unified. The percussion possesses greater physical force, sampled material is integrated more convincingly, and the synthesizer layers create scale without relying entirely upon Gothic or infernal imagery. The earlier album built occult rooms from inexpensive devices. This one turns those devices into weapons, factories, loudspeakers, and institutional architecture.
Its long running time remains demanding. Several tracks could lose minutes without damaging their central ideas, and uninterrupted oppression can eventually become predictable rather than frightening. Still, Melek-Tha’s refusal of ordinary musical relief is fundamental to the experience. A dictatorship would not insert a melodic interlude merely because the listener requires comfort.
Perfect World Eradication is therefore less a collection of dark industrial compositions than a model of power rendered as sound. Its rhythms regulate movement, its choirs manufacture grandeur, its voices issue commands, and its drones remove any reliable horizon beyond the system. The album’s world is “perfect” only because everything resistant, vulnerable, irregular, or human has been classified for removal.
The horror lies not in disorder but in flawless operation. Every mechanism works, every doctrine circulates, every command reaches its destination, and suffering continues without interrupting production. Melek-Tha imagines evil no longer wearing the ceremonial robes of Astrum Argentinum. It now wears a uniform, carries authorization, and knows exactly which form must be signed before eradication begins.

Parker Drumm Zerang - 2003 - Out Trios Volume Two

 

Atavistic – ALP147CD  273.71MB FLAC

Out Trios Volume Two begins with the familiar outline of an improvising trio and immediately smudges it beyond recognition. Jeff Parker and Kevin Drumm are both credited with guitars, but their instruments rarely behave like two guitars occupying separate positions. Parker may release a clean jazz-inflected phrase, strike a chord that hangs briefly in open air, or feed a small melodic object into electronic treatment. Drumm transforms strings and signal into abrasions, low electrical pressure, metallic flutter, and broadcasts from machinery that seems to have developed its own nervous system. Michael Zerang does not stand beneath them as the drummer responsible for holding time together. He enters the same textural field with cymbal vibration, scraping surfaces, rolling drums, wooden clicks, dull impacts, and sounds whose sources are often as difficult to identify as anything produced by the electronics.
“Lacerate” occupies nearly sixteen minutes and immediately demonstrates that the title does not describe simple aggression. The music cuts, but it also examines the edges created by each cut. Drumm’s processed guitar spreads across the recording as a dense electrical environment, while Parker moves through it with phrases that occasionally retain the curved motion of jazz guitar before being swallowed by distortion or redirected into abstraction. Zerang responds not by establishing a pulse but by finding places where percussion can alter the apparent shape of the electronic mass. A cymbal roll can make a drone appear to rise; a sudden drum impact can reveal that what seemed like one continuous surface contains several separate layers.
The trio’s achievement is not call-and-response in the ordinary sense. One musician does not make a statement and wait for another to answer. Their sounds often overlap so thoroughly that cause and response become impossible to separate. A metallic scrape may have originated from Zerang’s cymbal, Drumm’s tabletop guitar, or Parker’s processing. The uncertainty forces the listener away from personality and toward collective behavior. Instead of following three soloists, one hears a temporary organism learning how its limbs operate.
This makes “Lacerate” less directional than much free jazz. There is no saxophone line or rhythmic figure leading the group toward a recognizable peak. The piece grows by changing density, grain, and internal pressure. Moments of near silence do not feel like restful spaces between events. They resemble exposed wiring after part of the machinery has been removed. When sound returns, it does not resume a previous argument. It reconfigures the whole room.
“Electric” is shorter and more transparent. Parker’s cleaner guitar language can be heard more distinctly, though it remains surrounded by tones that make every phrase unstable. His relationship to jazz tradition is crucial because it gives the record an intermittent memory of harmony and line. Even a few gently placed notes can imply an enormous musical history before Drumm’s electronics distort the context around them. Parker does not defend jazz language against noise. He allows it to become another vulnerable material inside noise.
Drumm’s work is equally important because he refuses the guitar’s ordinary social role. The instrument is not there to provide riffs, accompaniment, harmonic direction, or recognizable virtuosity. It becomes an electrical source capable of producing friction, frequency, and material resistance. His sounds often seem impersonal, but their placement is highly sensitive. A burst of static may appear brutal in isolation, yet within the trio it can function as shading, interruption, or a wall against which Parker and Zerang discover new contours.
Zerang faces the unusual problem of playing percussion in music that neither requires meter nor leaves him an obvious foreground. His solution is to treat the drum kit as a collection of surfaces rather than one integrated instrument. He can produce deep resonance without suggesting a beat, or use a series of light taps to give electronic noise a temporary skeletal structure. His restraint is as important as his activity. He does not attempt to prove that an acoustic drummer can overpower amplified electronics. He searches for sounds capable of entering them.
“Onslaught” carries the record’s most openly violent title and the greatest concentration of pressure. Yet even here the trio avoids continuous maximum volume. The onslaught comes through unpredictable accumulation. Electronic tones thicken, percussion grows more physical, and Parker’s guitar moves between compact figures and eruptions whose edges blur into Drumm’s signal. The music can feel less like three musicians attacking than like three separate weather systems colliding over one small area.
The track reveals why some listeners may hear the album as static or indulgent. Its transformations are rarely announced through obvious thematic changes. The trio can remain inside one family of textures for several minutes, asking the listener to notice variations in pressure rather than melody. Those expecting improvisation to produce escalating solos or dramatic conversational turns may hear only abrasive drift.
But the drift is not empty. The musicians continually negotiate proximity. One sound may mirror another, crowd it, carve space around it, or make it appear to change source. The pleasure lies in these minute shifts of relationship. A drum resonance seems to become part of an electronic drone; a guitar tone develops the dry attack of percussion; a cymbal scrape takes on the pitch behavior of a synthesizer. Instrumental identity becomes porous.
“Miss Big Meen” closes the album with a title that sounds playful beside the severity of the music. Its ten minutes contain some of the record’s most spacious interaction. Parker’s lines occasionally emerge with enough clarity to suggest a melody trying to survive inside a damaged communication system. Drumm answers with shapes rather than notes, while Zerang alternates between delicate activity and heavy punctuation. The trio sounds less confrontational here, though not more conventional. The final piece allows more air to circulate through the circuitry.
That air reveals the album’s relationship to Chicago’s broader experimental culture. Parker stood between Tortoise, Isotope 217, jazz ensembles, and the AACM-adjacent improvising world. Zerang belonged to a deep lineage of Chicago percussionists able to move through free jazz, theatre, world traditions, and collective improvisation. Drumm connected tabletop guitar, electroacoustic improvisation, noise, and the severe reduction of sound to signal and texture. Their meeting is therefore not a genre crossover arranged for novelty. It reflects a city where post-rock, improvised music, electronics, jazz, and noise had already been exchanging methods for years.
The Atavistic Out Trios series formalized that exchange by placing unusual three-person combinations inside the open architecture of the trio. Volume Two is especially successful because it does not resolve the differences among its players. Parker remains capable of lyricism, Drumm continues dissolving instrumental identity, and Zerang keeps acoustic gesture physically present. The record gains energy from their refusal to meet at one safe midpoint.
Its title may imply that this is simply the second installment in a series, but the album feels more self-contained than that numbering suggests. The four pieces form one forty-five-minute investigation into how much instrumental identity can be erased before collective identity disappears as well. The trio repeatedly approaches that boundary. At times the sounds fuse into one dense body; at others, Parker’s guitar, Drumm’s electronics, and Zerang’s percussion separate briefly enough for their individual histories to become visible.
The recording quality is central to this effect. Todd A. Carter’s engineering and mixing preserve detail without cleaning away abrasion. Quiet sounds retain physical presence, while dense passages remain layered rather than collapsing completely into one block. Parker’s subsequent editing and remixing suggest that the final album was not merely a neutral document of spontaneous performance. Improvisation continued into post-production, where duration, sequence, and sonic relationships could be reconsidered.
This does not betray the supposed purity of live interaction. It extends the trio’s logic. Just as the musicians treat their instruments as unstable sources, the recording itself becomes another instrument whose material can be shaped. The final object preserves spontaneity without pretending that spontaneity must remain untouched.
Out Trios Volume Two is difficult because it refuses to explain where attention should settle. There is no lead voice, reliable beat, central motif, or emotional narrative guiding the listener. Its violence and beauty exist in timbre, proximity, and the temporary agreements formed among sounds that might otherwise repel one another. The record asks for a kind of listening closer to observing matter under pressure than following a composition from beginning to end.
For those willing to enter at that level, the apparent chaos becomes surprisingly intimate. Every scrape, electrical bloom, drum resonance, and wounded guitar phrase represents three musicians listening closely enough to surrender control without surrendering responsibility. The music may sound as though it is generating itself, but that illusion depends upon exceptional attention. Parker, Drumm, and Zerang do not tame the noise. They discover the social life already moving inside it.