Naer Mataron - 2013 - Και ο λόγος σάρξ εγένετο

 

Qliphot 11 Records – 31  432.77MB FLAC

The cover is printed in a red so immediate that it seems less like a background color than a material condition. Everything else has been reduced to black lines: two columns, a seated winged being, a child held across its body, an inverted or prostrate human figure below, and a radiant disc containing a dark bird, flame or spirit above its head. The drawing resembles an image copied from an unidentified occult manuscript, but its roughness prevents it from acquiring the authority of a carefully preserved historical artifact. It feels newly made and artificially aged at once, a modern diagram pretending to have survived from a prohibited scripture. Across the top, Greek letters declare “And the Word became flesh.” A Hebrew rendering of the same biblical idea runs beneath the scene. Christianity’s central image of divine incarnation has been removed from the orderly white space of a Bible and placed around an ambiguous birth or sacrifice whose participants cannot be assigned reassuring roles.
The image is powerful precisely because it does not tell us whether the child is being protected, offered, generated or consumed. The winged figure might be parent, demon, goddess, idol or intermediary. The person beneath its feet may be crushed, worshipping, surrendering or serving as the physical ground upon which the incarnation takes place. The columns suggest a temple, yet no roof connects them. The rite occurs under an open and hostile sky, watched by the black form inside the sun. Instead of illustrating a known myth, the artwork creates the remains of one. The listener has to infer a theology from posture, sequence and pressure.
The title is taken from John 1:14, one of the most consequential sentences in Christian thought. In the Gospel, the Logos, the divine Word through which creation is ordered, becomes human flesh and dwells among humanity. Naer Mataron retains the sentence while redirecting its force. Their own announcement described forgotten knowledge passing from divine speech into the bodies of chosen people. Incarnation is no longer the unique entrance of Christ into history. It becomes an occult method, a transfer of concealed power from word into initiated flesh. The cover gives that transfer a body without confirming whose body it is.
This inversion is more interesting than ordinary anti-Christian blasphemy. A simple reversal would replace Christ with Satan and preserve the rest of the theological structure. Και ο λόγος σάρξ εγένετο is concerned with something less stable: the capacity of spoken, written and sung language to alter matter. A word becomes a belief, the belief enters a person, and the person reorganizes behavior around it. Doctrine becomes posture, clothing, ritual, political action, music and eventually history. Every ideology relies upon some form of incarnation. Abstract concepts become dangerous or beautiful only when bodies agree to carry them.
The album itself behaves like such an incarnation. Naer Mataron announced that this was not intended as a normal entry in their catalog but as a deliberate return to early-1990s occult black metal. That period was treated not merely as an old production style to be imitated, but as forgotten knowledge requiring another body. The band had spent its preceding albums becoming increasingly modern, precise and militarized. Praetorians sounded like an imperial formation recorded in an Oslo command center. Ζήτω ο θάνατος compressed black and death metal into a dense, professionally engineered weapon. This record turns away from straightforward progression. It looks backward, summons older practices and allows them to inhabit the experienced musicians Naer Mataron had become by 2013.
The result is not truly retro. It cannot be, because the players know too much and the studio reveals too clearly what has happened during the intervening decades. The guitars possess greater weight and definition than most obscure early-1990s recordings. Asmodeus Draco Dux performs with a technical control unavailable to many of the musicians whose atmosphere is being invoked. Fotis Benardo’s Devasoundz production can expose small instrumental details without dissolving the darkness around them. The album therefore resembles a séance conducted with modern equipment. The dead period is invited back, but it speaks through a living and substantially stronger body.
“The Magus” establishes this principle immediately. It does not begin by throwing the listener into blast beats or presenting a memorable guitar hook. The opening is spacious, slow and declarative. Acherontas V.P. enters through ritualized speech, his voice occupying a position between narrator, priest and initiator. The sparse arrangement gives each word physical room, making the voice seem to alter the pressure around the instruments. When Kaiadas finally enters with his harsher delivery and Indra’s guitar thickens into recognizably Hellenic black metal, the transition feels like the completion of an operation. Spoken formula has become metallic flesh.
The title “The Magus” also carries a complex lineage. A magus can be priest, astrologer, magician, wise man, impostor or person claiming access to concealed correspondences. The word sits between religion and technique. A priest appeals to an established divine order; a magician attempts to understand and manipulate the mechanisms through which that order operates. Naer Mataron places the magus first because this album is constructed as a manual of transformations rather than a straightforward narrative. The opening figure does not tell a story. He activates the record.
Acherontas’ presence matters beyond guest prestige. His own work belongs to a Greek occult-metal current in which ceremonial language, esoteric systems and music are deliberately treated as parts of one practice. He sounds completely at home because “The Magus” does not ask him to perform a theatrical cameo. His voice establishes the rules by which the remainder of the album will be heard. Guitar, drum, folk instrument, cover song, sacred quotation and ambient space will all function as different methods for giving the invisible a temporary body.
“Demon’s Lord” expands the first track’s premise into more than ten minutes. The title appears grammatically crooked, retaining a possessive form that makes the relationship ambiguous. Is this the lord who belongs to the demon, the lord ruling over demons, or an invocation whose imperfect English preserves a private formula? The music does not correct the ambiguity. It advances through large mid-paced riffs, faster eruptions and passages whose traditional heavy-metal movement reaches back toward the foundations of Greek black metal.
This is where the record’s tribute to the early 1990s becomes most musically convincing. Hellenic black metal did not initially define darkness through unbroken speed or extremely thin guitar tone. Bands such as Rotting Christ, Varathron, Necromantia and Thou Art Lord found menace inside heavy-metal rhythm, warm low frequencies, repetitive bass movement and melodies that could be simultaneously heroic and subterranean. “Demon’s Lord” remembers that black metal once had hips and shoulders. It can move bodily rather than merely slicing through the air.
The track’s length allows riffs to become architectural. Instead of presenting ten minutes of constant new information, Naer Mataron repeatedly walks the listener around several central forms. A guitar figure that initially sounds blunt begins acquiring ceremonial authority through recurrence. Faster sections do not erase the slower material; they energize it, allowing the next return to feel heavier. The song becomes an underground temple built from repeated passageways. One recognizes the same stones but meets them under different light.
“Eternal Ice” is barely more than a minute, yet it performs one of the album’s strangest acts of desecration. Its composition has been described as a dark inversion or parody of “Silent Night.” Ereshkigal’s female voice passes through a cold, suspended arrangement whose familiarity is felt before it is consciously recognized. A Christmas melody associated with domestic calm, infant holiness and communal reassurance has been frozen, partially concealed and returned as an occult miniature.
This connects directly to the title’s treatment of incarnation. “Silent Night” is one of the most culturally durable musical containers for the Christian birth. Even people with little theological commitment may carry its melody from childhood. By deforming it, Naer Mataron does not merely mock a hymn. The band demonstrates how inherited sacred sound can be emptied, refilled and made to serve another ritual. Melody becomes a captured vessel.
“The Light Bearer” then names the figure traditionally translated as Lucifer, but the song avoids presenting him as a cartoon adversary. Light itself is the problem. The biblical title of the album associates the Word with divine illumination; the cover places a black being inside a radiant disc; and this track makes the bearer of light the central presence. Illumination can reveal, seduce, blind, judge or burn. Knowledge is never treated as emotionally neutral. To receive it is to become responsible for what it changes.
Musically, “The Light Bearer” reconnects the album with the force of Ζήτω ο θάνατος, but its structure breathes more freely. Indra’s riffs move among Celtic Frost-like weight, early Norwegian coldness and the recognizably Greek attraction to mid-tempo grandeur. Asmodeus does not remain trapped inside one extreme technique. He blasts, drives and withdraws, giving the guitar enough room to change its symbolic function. A fast riff can feel like attack; the same harmonic shape at a broader tempo can become proclamation.
Kaiadas’ voice remains blunt and physically grounded. He does not possess Vicotnik’s many-character theatrical range, nor the distant venom of the band’s earliest vocalists. His delivery is closer to a body being forced to pronounce a doctrine under pressure. That quality suits this record better than a more elegant performance might have done. The Word does not float above the music. It strains through throat, breath and distortion.
“The Hunt” opens the record’s first fully nonmetallic chamber. Aitnaios contributes Hellenic lyre, yaylı tanbur and Tibetan singing bowls, instruments associated with different geographies and historical practices. Their coexistence is syncretic rather than reconstructive. Naer Mataron is not attempting to recreate one documented ancient Greek rite. The track assembles a portable antiquity from whatever timbres can produce the desired psychological space.
The lyre immediately carries the authority of Greek cultural memory, but its use is not decorative nationalism. Its plucked strings remain exposed, small and physically vulnerable beside the enormous electric sound surrounding them elsewhere on the album. The bowed yaylı tanbur introduces a long, nasal resonance whose motion seems suspended between voice and string. The singing bowls add vibration without ordinary melody, allowing resonance itself to become the event. Each instrument holds a different relationship to time. The lyre articulates moments, the bowed string extends them, and the bowl allows them to decay.
Calling this piece “The Hunt” changes how those sounds are heard. The music is quiet but not peaceful. A hunt depends upon attention, tracking, waiting and the gradual narrowing of possibilities around another body. The absence of percussion makes every small movement significant. One begins listening for the prey, then slowly suspects that the listening consciousness may itself be what is pursued.
“Nightmare” brings the body back through a cover of Sarcófago. Choosing a Brazilian band is essential to the album’s historical argument. Early black metal was never exclusively Norwegian, Scandinavian or even European. Sarcófago’s 1980s recordings spread a filthy, accelerated Satanic language whose visual and musical impact traveled globally through records, photographs and tape exchange. Their influence entered the second wave before later histories organized that wave around a narrower northern mythology.
Naer Mataron does not reproduce “Nightmare” at its original nervous speed and primitive violence. The cover is substantially expanded, crossing seven minutes and acquiring a darker, doomier mass. Talos’ vocals preserve the hostility, but the band treats the song as buried scripture rather than a sacred recording requiring exact imitation. The original’s bones are recognizable, while the surrounding flesh belongs to another organism.
This is one of the best demonstrations of the record’s central method. Tribute does not mean taxidermy. Naer Mataron allows an old song to decompose, absorb local material and rise in a changed body. The Brazilian source becomes Hellenic without ceasing to be Sarcófago. The process resembles translation at its most productive. Meaning survives because form is permitted to alter.
“Νύχτα παγανή,” or “Pagan Night,” is the album’s emotional and cultural center. The track removes conventional metal instrumentation and draws upon Hellenic lyre, bowed strings, resonant bowls and the female voices of a Polyphonic Chorus of Epirus. The change is not a quaint folk interlude added to provide variety. It is the point where the album’s proclaimed return to ancient knowledge enters a living regional vocal practice rather than remaining inside generalized occult imagery.
Epirote polyphonic singing depends upon voices assuming distinct functions inside a group, including melodic initiation and sustained drone. No single voice contains the complete song. The music exists through negotiated relation, breath passed among people and the collective maintenance of a tonal ground. This offers a profound counterimage to the solitary magus. Forgotten knowledge may enter the chosen individual, but tradition survives through several bodies coordinating in real time.
The song reportedly describes the joy and birth of an ancient god in opposition to the mourning of Christian Good Friday. That reversal gives “Pagan Night” a precise calendrical force. Good Friday organizes Christian time around execution, grief and suspended hope before resurrection. Naer Mataron places another birth inside that mourning, allowing an older divine presence to emerge while the Christian community is ritually concentrated upon death. The pagan god does not merely predate Christianity. It uses Christian sacred time as the night of its own return.
The female chorus is crucial because it prevents the concept from remaining an abstract masculine declaration of ancestral identity. The voices are social, embodied and unmistakably different from Kaiadas’ harsh command. They do not sound as though they have been summoned merely to decorate a metal band’s fantasy of antiquity. Their overlapping lines possess their own gravitational system. The instruments follow an older and less rigid sense of time, while the voices make community audible.
This is also where the album’s Hellenic identity feels most convincing because it is least interested in proving itself through slogans. No Greek column, warrior helmet or mythological name is required. Language, timbre, vocal organization and melodic contour carry the place from within. The song does not claim that modern Greek musicians possess an unbroken, pure route into antiquity. It creates a meeting among present performers, inherited forms and an imagined pagan event. Its historical truth lies in the meeting, not in a fantasy of untouched continuity.
“A Secular Pursuit of Coffins” snaps that communal spell apart. Previously associated with the Εγώ ειμί το φως του κόσμου EP, it restores Vicotnik on vocals and Warhead on drums, briefly reopening the Praetorians-era machinery. The piece is direct, hostile and recognizably modern in comparison with the preceding ritual. Its title is among the album’s best. Coffins are normally pursued through religion, mourning or family obligation; making the pursuit secular removes transcendental consolation while preserving the attraction toward death.
Vicotnik’s voice immediately introduces instability. He can make a phrase sound sneering, inhabited and electronically fractured even without obvious processing. Warhead’s drumming has the hard forward pressure familiar from the band’s middle period. This track is not presented as the album’s definitive center, but as another body through which the project has previously spoken. The sequence momentarily folds time. The vanished lineup returns after the folk ceremony, performs one concentrated burst and disappears again.
Its placement is especially effective because it prevents the album’s return to Hellenic occultism from becoming pastoral self-romance. “Νύχτα παγανή” could leave the listener inside the warmth of collective tradition. “A Secular Pursuit of Coffins” reminds us that Naer Mataron also became a colder, more industrial and ideologically rigid organism. The past being honored is not one coherent golden age. It is an archive of conflicting selves.
The fourteen-minute title track gathers these contradictions without attempting to resolve them into a conventional metal finale. Folk, ambient, ritual percussion, drone, blues-tinted guitar and choral material unfold at a scale closer to procession or meditative installation than a closing anthem. The title phrase from John is reportedly narrated through thin choral voices, making scripture itself one of the track’s sound objects.
This is the point where the album most completely abandons genre obligation. After promising a tribute to early occult black metal, Naer Mataron ends with music that barely resembles metal at all. That is not a failure of the concept. Early occult black metal was valuable partly because its borders had not yet become fully regulated. Ritual intros, primitive electronics, horror samples, folk instruments, spoken texts and crude ambient experiments were methods through which musicians could suggest worlds unavailable to guitar riffs alone. The title track restores that permission to wander.
Its duration changes the listener’s relationship to sound. Fourteen minutes is long enough for an atmosphere to stop functioning as introduction and become the primary environment. Percussion no longer announces that a metal song will begin. Drone does not bridge two riffs. Chant is not a dramatic accessory. Each element is permitted to exist without serving a more socially recognized center.
This gives the title a second musical meaning. The Word becomes flesh when an idea ceases to remain explanatory and takes over the sensory field. The album does not conclude by telling us what incarnation means. It forces language, breath, skin, string, membrane and resonance into the same extended room. The theological sentence becomes an acoustic organism.
There is something unexpectedly gentle about portions of this conclusion. Naer Mataron’s catalog often presents force as discipline, war, imperial order or ideological certainty. Here force becomes attention. The listener is not struck into submission but asked to remain with subtle events whose meaning cannot be measured through aggression. Even the blues-like guitar phrasing introduces a human looseness rarely heard in the band’s stricter work. The instrument bends rather than commands.
The red cover begins to make fuller sense at this point. Red is blood, fire, political color, sacred cloth, warning and the interior of the body. The image is not printed upon flesh, but it makes the paper resemble flesh made diagrammatic. Black lines sit on red as writing sits upon the body of an initiate. The Greek and Hebrew texts frame the central figure like two linguistic doors opening onto the same impossible event.
Using both languages also complicates the band’s frequent emphasis upon Greek ancestry and identity. The Johannine phrase was composed in Greek but emerges from a Jewish scriptural world, while the album’s instruments and guests connect Greece to Anatolia, Tibet, Brazil, Norway and the wider Balkans. Its most persuasive music is not culturally sealed. It is produced through circulation.
This does not erase the political circumstances surrounding the band in 2013. Kaiadas was not merely experimenting with severe imagery in private. By the time the album appeared, Giorgos Germenis had been elected to the Greek parliament as a representative of Golden Dawn. Naer Mataron’s earlier use of blood, land, hierarchy, loyalty and anti-modern Traditionalism had acquired an unmistakable public dimension. Any account of this album that presents occultism as floating free from politics would be incomplete.
Yet Και ο λόγος σάρξ εγένετο is not organized like a party manifesto. Its most important movement is away from uniformity. Guest voices interrupt the principal singer. Folk instruments suspend the metal machinery. A Brazilian song enters the Greek sequence. A female regional chorus becomes more powerful than individual command. The album’s strongest quality is plurality, even though that plurality exists beside a political ideology hostile to many forms of plural social life.
That contradiction should be preserved rather than solved. Art is capable of producing meanings larger, stranger or more humane than the stated beliefs of its makers, but it does not automatically cleanse those makers. The communal breath of “Νύχτα παγανή” does not acquit anyone. The political context does not make the music’s formal achievement imaginary. Both facts remain inside the same object, refusing the simplicity of either worship or dismissal.
The band’s press language declared that “the king is dead, long live the king.” The phrase traditionally announces continuity through succession: one embodied ruler dies, but kingship immediately takes residence in another body. It is therefore another incarnation formula. The office survives by changing flesh. Naer Mataron applies this principle to occult black metal. The early 1990s are dead as a historical present, but their atmosphere can inhabit new musicians, new studios, new formats and listeners who did not participate in the original scene.
The guest list reinforces that sense of succession. Acherontas V.P., Ereshkigal, Talos, Vicotnik, Warhead, Aitnaios and the Epirote chorus do not form a conventional permanent lineup. They constitute a temporary assembly around one rite. Each carries a different piece of the band’s history or its wider cultural environment. The album becomes less the declaration of a stable trio than a meeting place.
Indra remains the compositional anchor. His guitars move convincingly between primitive heaviness, Hellenic melody, blackened thrash, doom and open ritual space without making the record feel like a compilation of disconnected experiments. Kaiadas supplies the recurring voice and bass foundation, while Asmodeus gives the metallic tracks enough technical integrity that their deliberate archaism never becomes incompetent imitation. The musicians are experienced enough to choose roughness rather than merely suffer from it.
Fotis Benardo’s production is equally important. The album needs clarity because its contrasts carry meaning. A lyre must retain the sound of fingers and strings. The Polyphonic Chorus must remain human rather than being transformed into a synthetic pad. The Sarcófago cover must hit with enough weight to justify its expansion. The title track must contain quiet space without sinking into inaudibility. Devasoundz gives every chamber a distinct acoustic identity while preserving a continuous atmosphere around the whole sequence.
The 16-page original booklet apparently extended the medieval and occult visual language through demons, bishops, magicians, fires and prophetic texts. The post reproduces only the severe red cover, leaving most of that visual theology inaccessible. This creates a different digital experience. The listener sees one condensed emblem and receives nearly an hour of FLAC files without the printed sequence of images and lyrics through which the physical edition originally guided interpretation.
The post also identifies the Qliphot 11 cassette edition rather than the original BlackSeed digipak. That choice gives the album another body. A compact disc with a substantial booklet becomes a small hand-numbered tape with pro-printed panels, then becomes a lossless archive whose exact source is not stated. The sound has moved through media that treat time differently. CD permits immediate track selection. Cassette creates continuous sides and requires physical waiting. FLAC separates the audio from both mechanisms while preserving it at full digital resolution.
The album’s concept is almost uncannily suited to this migration. The Word becomes flesh, flesh becomes recording, recording becomes object, object becomes data, and data waits for another listener to give it air. The material carrier changes, but the pattern survives. Every playback is a temporary incarnation.
This is why Και ο λόγος σάρξ εγένετο may be Naer Mataron’s most revealing album even though it was announced as an abnormal or “special” release. Their normal albums frequently insist upon identity through force. This one reveals identity as possession, borrowing and transmission. The band becomes most Greek when it opens itself to a regional chorus; most faithful to early black metal when it stops imitating one established black-metal sound; most historically conscious when it accepts that history returns in distorted forms.
The record does not merely celebrate the past. It asks what happens when the past enters flesh that has already been shaped by everything occurring afterward. Sarcófago returns through Greek musicians using modern production. Epirote polyphony enters an international black-metal release. Christian scripture becomes occult formula. “Silent Night” becomes eternal ice. Former band members return as guests. A dying era becomes another king.
Its nearly sixty minutes could easily have become indulgent, particularly with two songs exceeding ten minutes and several nonmetallic sections. Instead, the record’s variety produces momentum of another kind. The listener does not wait for a riff to resolve. One waits to discover which form the rite will assume next. The album moves from invocation to extended metal, frozen hymn, Luciferian declaration, instrumental hunt, Brazilian nightmare, pagan birth, coffin pursuit and final incarnation. It is structured like a series of transformations rather than a sequence of songs competing for individual memorability.
That makes the cover’s uncertain central act the correct image. Something is being born, but birth and sacrifice have become indistinguishable. A body lies below so that another body may appear. Wings promise transcendence while the child insists upon flesh. The black sun watches without explaining whether it blesses or consumes the event. The columns provide the outline of a temple, but the rite exceeds its architecture.
The record ultimately finds its greatest power not in political certainty or Satanic opposition but in the ancient and frightening proposition that words create bodies. The names people repeat become the worlds they can perceive. Songs taught across generations alter how grief, birth, land and death are experienced. A slogan enters a crowd. A prayer enters a child. A melody enters memory and waits decades for one phrase to revive it. An album enters a digital archive and begins again in a room its makers will never see.
Και ο λόγος σάρξ εγένετο understands this, perhaps more completely than its creators intended. It is an album about incarnation that has continued incarnating. The post gives it another red doorway, another label line, another body of files and another chance to speak.

Morbid - 2000 - December Moon

 

Reaper Records – RR 002-CD  151.72MB APE

Kristian Wåhlin’s cover creates a complete nocturnal country for a recording that originally had to survive with far fewer resources. A castle rises behind iron cemetery gates, its towers sharpened into blue-black points beneath a moon partly severed by cloud. Bats cross the illuminated opening in the sky. Bare trees tighten around the road, mountains stand beyond the walls, and a solitary dark figure approaches from the foreground without revealing whether it is visitor, resident or returning dead. Almost every surface is blue, yet the image never feels cold in a clean or crystalline way. The color has depth and humidity. It resembles moonlight absorbed by wet bark, old stone and earth disturbed by roots. The Morbid logo hangs above the castle like metal cut from the same night, while the title has disappeared completely from the visible front. The landscape itself has become December Moon.
Nothing resembling this fully developed Gothic kingdom surrounded the music when five Stockholm teenagers recorded it in 1987. The castle was painted for the 2000 compact-disc edition, thirteen years after the original cassette and nine years after Per Yngve Ohlin’s death. It is therefore not an illustration carried out alongside the songs, but a later listener’s visualization of what those songs had become in collective memory. The painting gives architectural permanence to seventeen minutes originally created in extreme haste. A two-day studio session becomes an ancient stronghold. A young underground band becomes a foundational legend. Four songs made before Swedish death metal or Norwegian black metal had settled into recognizable forms are placed inside the visual world those forms would later build.
That distance between recording and presentation is the essential subject of this edition. The post correctly identifies the 2000 Reaper Records CD rather than pretending it is the original 1987 tape. The distinction matters because December Moon has never existed as only one stable object. Dead supplied artwork for the self-released cassette. Reaper Records remastered the audio in Belgium and issued it on vinyl in 1994 with a Kris Verwimp cover. The same remaster was placed on this limited CD six years later beneath Wåhlin’s now-familiar castle. Each version carries the same performances into a different imaginative environment. The music remains from December 1987, but every sleeve tells us what a later period wanted that winter to mean.
Morbid entered Thunderload Studio in Stockholm on December 5 and 6 and completed the entire demo in approximately sixteen hours. The opportunity arose through Sandro Cajander of Mefisto, who introduced the band to the people connected with Heavy Load and their studio. Uffe Cederlund later remembered that the session cost around 2,600 Swedish kronor, a considerable amount for teenagers, and that he brought a small Peavey amplifier. The musicians allowed the more experienced studio operator to control much of the process. Cederlund felt the unmixed recording had been considerably rawer, but the band was too young and uncertain to challenge the older engineer. That memory is valuable because it punctures the illusion that December Moon emerged according to a perfectly controlled aesthetic doctrine. Its sound is the result of ambition, limited money, borrowed authority, sixteen hours of concentration and decisions the musicians might already have changed if they had possessed more confidence.
The credited lineup gives the record its extraordinary historical density. Dead performs the lead and backing vocals and wrote the lyrics. Uffe Cederlund appears under the name Napoleon Pukes on guitar and backing voice. John Hagström, called John Lennart or Gehenna, supplies the other guitar and backing vocals. Jens Näsström is Dr. Schitz on bass, while Lars-Göran Petrov, then known as Drutten, plays drums and also adds backing vocals. Several of these musicians would soon enter other histories: Cederlund and Petrov became central to Nihilist and Entombed, while Dead moved to Norway and joined Mayhem. December Moon consequently sits at a crossing where several future roads briefly occupy the same room.
It is easy to hear those futures backward into the recording, but doing so can make the actual music disappear. This is not a miniature Entombed record awaiting a lower guitar tuning, nor a preliminary Mayhem release waiting for Norwegian forests, corpse paint and the second wave. Morbid belongs to the more unstable moment before those identities had hardened. Thrash metal supplies much of the speed and the sharp palm-muted guitar language. Early death metal contributes physical ugliness, horror and an attraction to voices no longer expected to sound fully human. First-wave black metal contributes Satanic atmosphere, primitive theatricality and the idea that a recording can function as an occult object rather than merely an exhibition of instrumental skill. Punk and local underground culture remain present in the economy, humor and refusal to behave like a professional career project. The demo is exciting because none of those elements yet understands that it will later be separated into marketable genres.
The 2000 cover conceals that uncertainty beneath an image of perfected black-metal atmosphere. Wåhlin had already become one of extreme metal’s defining visual architects, giving bands imaginary landscapes whose mountains, castles and winter skies could appear older than the recordings they accompanied. His December Moon painting is so persuasive that it risks making the music seem inevitable. The blue castle looks as though it had been waiting for these songs since the Middle Ages. In reality, the music is much more energetic, humorous and recognizably teenage than the solemn landscape suggests. The musicians race, overshoot, laugh, switch direction and test ideas with the pleasure of discovering that their instruments can open spaces unavailable in ordinary life.
“My Dark Subconscious” begins by demonstrating that contradiction. Before the main attack, the recording incorporates a fragment associated with the Swedish children’s television program Trazan och Banarne. What may have belonged to familiar domestic entertainment is detached from its original setting and placed before a song about recurring visions of death, darkness and a world beyond ordinary perception. The gesture is partly horror technique, taking something innocent and altering its meaning through context, but it also exposes the actual cultural environment surrounding Morbid. These musicians had not materialized inside an isolated necropolis. They had grown up with television, jokes, cartoons, record shops, imported horror films and the everyday absurdities of Swedish adolescence. Their darkness was constructed from materials already available around them.
Once the song begins, its arrangement is remarkably assured. The guitars do not remain attached to one primitive riff and hope that atmosphere will compensate. They move through a sequence of sharp, related figures, with each transition making the preceding section feel purposeful. Rapid thrash picking gives way to broader chords; a lead appears, cuts across the rhythm and disappears before becoming ornamental; the drums mark the changes with much more definition than the demo’s reputation for rawness might suggest. Petrov was extraordinarily young, but his performance already contains the physical confidence later associated with his voice and presence in Entombed. The snare is bright, the cymbals articulate the upper edge of the mix, and the double-bass work gives the song forward pressure without turning into mechanical perfection.
Dead’s vocal performance is equally distinct from the later Mayhem recordings through which many listeners first encounter him. His voice here is not yet the long, agonized shriek suspended over “Freezing Moon,” nor the wounded theatrical rasp preserved on Live in Leipzig. It is closer, throatier and more mischievously malignant. Certain words are stretched as if he is tasting their texture, while others are pushed through a dry whisper that seems to come from immediately behind the listener. He does not simply sing about a dark subconscious. He makes the vocal track behave like one: a second personality pressing upward through the otherwise agile thrash-metal body.
The lyrics possess the absolute seriousness available to youth before embarrassment begins policing imagination. Death is remembered before it happens. Another land has been glimpsed repeatedly. Hatred changes the color of the sky. The language is direct, grammatically irregular and unconcerned with whether the listener regards it as profound. This sincerity is one reason later black metal musicians responded so powerfully to Dead. He was not presenting darkness as a tasteful literary interest. He was trying to report an interior reality using whatever vocabulary, drawings, stage names and vocal noises were available to him. The report may be exaggerated, theatrical or psychologically tangled, but it does not feel detached.
“Wings of Funeral” opens through a sample from The Evil Dead, another example of Morbid treating contemporary horror media as raw ritual material. The film’s scream is followed by a clean guitar figure whose relative calm creates one of the demo’s most memorable thresholds. The notes do not sound technically elaborate, but their exposed repetition changes the room. After the crowded movement of “My Dark Subconscious,” the listener is left for a moment with an open path and the knowledge that something is approaching along it. When the distorted guitars enter, the effect is not simply louder. The slow introduction has given the aggression a destination.
The title joins flight to burial, two movements normally pointed in opposite directions. Wings lift the body, while a funeral returns it to the earth. The song lives within that contradiction. Its faster riffs surge forward and upward, but the vocal line continually pulls them toward cemetery imagery and fatal certainty. This is one of Morbid’s central musical achievements: the guitars can feel exhilarated without making the atmosphere cheerful. Speed becomes a form of attraction toward death rather than an escape from it.
The twin-guitar construction is crucial. Cederlund and Hagström do not operate through a polished rhythm-and-lead hierarchy. The parts overlap, reinforce and occasionally interfere with each other, producing the jagged density associated with musicians discovering how two distorted guitars can create a larger psychological space. Solos arrive as nervous eruptions rather than carefully prepared showcases. Notes are bent, accelerated and thrown across the rhythm with the unrefined excitement heard in Bathory, early Slayer, Possessed and countless underground tapes where lead guitar functioned as a tear in the song rather than a professional recital.
“From the Dark,” the longest piece, reveals how much Morbid might have developed had this lineup remained intact. Across six minutes, the band moves among rapid attack, doom-laden weight, cleaner atmosphere and extended transitions without losing the central sensation of something emerging. The title describes direction rather than identity. Whatever speaks has come from darkness, but it is never completely named. The music therefore has to create the approaching presence through changes in distance and density.
The slower sections are especially important because they prevent December Moon from being reduced to a historically early blast of death-thrash. The guitars open space rather than filling every second, allowing Petrov’s drums to become heavier simply by striking less often. Dead’s voice gains mass when it no longer has to chase the rapid riffing. He can inhabit the pauses, turning silence into another component of the threat. When the band accelerates again, the change feels like movement across a boundary rather than a routine tempo shift.
This song contains the clearest evidence that atmosphere was already structural to Morbid’s writing. Later black metal would sometimes achieve atmosphere by intentionally dissolving instrumental definition into a continuous wash. Morbid works almost oppositely. The instruments are relatively clear, and atmosphere arises from arrangement: when a clean figure appears, when a solo breaks loose, how long a slower riff is allowed to remain, where the vocal track withdraws, and how the next fast section enters. The darkness is not an audio filter placed over the song. It is the relationship among parts.
The bass is the least prominent element of the 2000 presentation, but its reduced audibility should not be mistaken for irrelevance. Näsström follows and thickens the guitar movement, giving the relatively lean distortion enough lower body to avoid becoming brittle. In a later Swedish death-metal production, bass and detuned guitar might merge into one enormous physical block. Here the guitars remain higher, sharper and more thrash-derived, so the bass performs quiet architectural work. It supports the floor even when the listener’s attention is directed toward Dead or the solos tearing across the upper levels.
“Disgusting Semla” closes the recording by puncturing nearly every solemn mythology later built around it. A semla is a Swedish cardamom bun filled with almond paste and whipped cream, a beloved seasonal pastry whose presence beside funeral wings, cemeteries and dark subconscious visions is inherently ridiculous. The title may be grotesque, comic, an inside joke or all three. Its importance lies in refusing the idea that genuine darkness requires an uninterrupted ceremonial face. Morbid could be fascinated by death and still find a cream-filled bun disgusting or funny enough to place beside it.
The song is short, fast and unusually playful in its ugliness. The central riffs retain the sharp death-thrash momentum of the preceding tracks, but the vocal behavior becomes increasingly unstable. Near the end, the voices move into strange sing-song sounds and laughter, as though the carefully maintained horror performance has cracked open to reveal the teenagers inside it. That crack does not weaken the atmosphere. It makes it more convincing. Real obsession does not erase humor, boredom, appetite or stupidity. People can build a cemetery world together and still laugh when the machinery produces an unexpectedly absurd noise.
This final piece is a useful defense against the posthumous transformation of Dead into a one-dimensional icon of suffering. His later history has encouraged listeners to interpret every utterance as evidence pointing toward his death, turning a young person’s entire creative life into foreshadowing. December Moon certainly contains an intense preoccupation with mortality, altered states and the world beyond the visible one. It also contains wordplay, borrowed horror, television fragments, pastry humor, group laughter and the evident pleasure of making a loud recording with friends. Respecting the music means permitting all those elements to coexist instead of allowing the tragedy that followed to colonize every earlier moment.
The 2000 edition itself participates in that mythology while also preserving a way out of it. The booklet dedication remembers Per Ohlin by name and dates, and the castle cover creates an idealized monument around the recording. Yet the audio remains stubbornly social. Backing voices break the image of the isolated visionary. The guitars continually remind us that the song structures came from several writers, with Uffe Cederlund later crediting much of the basic material to earlier guitarist TG as well as Hagström, Klacke and himself. Petrov’s drums are too energetic to be treated as anonymous accompaniment. December Moon belongs to a band.
Cederlund’s later recollection is particularly revealing on this point. He said Morbid rehearsed several times a week and took those rehearsals seriously rather than treating them as drunken chaos. They did not play covers. The original songs were being actively rearranged when he joined. Their studio visit happened because they noticed other bands selling demos through a Stockholm record store and thought they could do the same. This is not the story of an inaccessible supernatural artifact descending into history. It is DIY reasoning at its purest: other people had made tapes, so they saved money, found a studio and made one too.
That ordinariness is not an enemy of magic. It is the mechanism through which magic becomes possible. Five teenagers pool money. One brings an amplifier. Someone knows a person who knows a studio. Sixteen hours are purchased. A children’s-program fragment and a horror-film scream are inserted into songs. Artwork is drawn. Tapes reach a shop. Copies travel farther than expected. One reaches listeners outside Sweden, and the imaginative scale expands with every transfer. Underground culture does not require its participants to begin as legends. It creates legends by allowing small physical acts to accumulate consequences.
The term “demo” can also obscure what December Moon actually accomplishes. A demonstration recording normally points toward something more complete: a contract, improved studio session or future album version. These songs received no definitive full-length rerecording by the same lineup. The provisional object became the final object. Its limited time, mix and performances cannot be treated as preparatory flaws that a later album corrects. They are the permanent form through which the compositions exist.
This gives every imperfection unusual authority. A guitar phrase that might have been tightened during another session remains suspended at its first recorded level of urgency. A vocal line that could have been doubled differently or pronounced more clearly never receives that revision. The abruptness of certain transitions is not an early sketch beside a finished painting. The sketch is the only surviving painting, which makes its visible construction part of the experience.
The 1994 remaster and 2000 CD complicate this idea because they alter the sound’s container without changing the performance. Reaper Records did not return Morbid to Thunderload Studio or rebuild the music with modern overdubs. DLM Studio worked upon the existing recording, after which it was pressed as a compact disc capable of entering the increasingly global extreme-metal market at the turn of the millennium. The audio therefore carries two historical moments: the teenagers of 1987 and the archival judgment of the 1990s deciding that their tape deserved renewed permanence.
The remaster cannot supply frequencies never captured by the original session, nor should it. The guitar tone remains lean and rasping, the bass partially buried and the vocal track unusually prominent. What it can do is give the demo enough definition to reveal how accomplished the playing was. The cymbals do not collapse into white noise. Petrov’s toms and double-bass patterns can be followed. Two guitars remain distinguishable even when their tones are similar. The music is raw in surface but not primitive in conception.
This distinction matters because December Moon is frequently described using language that transforms technical weakness into automatic authenticity. Rawness alone does not explain why listeners return. Thousands of underground tapes are distorted, poorly balanced and difficult to hear. Morbid’s endurance comes from memorable riffs, controlled tempo changes, vocal personality and the ability to establish an environment within seconds. The production contributes character, but there is substantial music beneath it.
The demo also belongs to Swedish death metal without sounding like the style that would soon make Stockholm internationally recognizable. The chainsaw guitar associated with Sunlight Studio and the HM-2 pedal had not yet become the local default. The drums are brighter, the riffs more visibly descended from thrash, and the vocal performance points toward black metal as strongly as death metal. Cederlund and Petrov would later participate directly in the transformation of Nihilist into Entombed, but December Moon documents their playing before that language had been discovered.
At the same time, calling the tape an early black-metal masterpiece can flatten its rhythmic life. Much of the music moves through death-thrash propulsion, and the instrumental performances possess a bodily swing that later deliberately inhuman black metal would often suppress. Petrov’s drumming does not try to make the band sound like weather or machinery. It sounds like an excited young drummer pushing musicians in the same room. The recording is dark, but it is alive in every sense.
This is the central paradox later mythology sometimes misses. Dead’s performance is compelling because the living band around him is so animated. His voice supplies death, distance and the sense of another consciousness entering the room. The guitars and drums supply movement, friction and youth. If every instrument had attempted to sound equally lifeless, the contrast would disappear. Morbid’s atmosphere depends upon a vocalist turning away from life while his bandmates rush toward musical possibility.
The name itself captures the balance. Dead reportedly drew “Morbid” from Celtic Frost’s Morbid Tales, a source linking the Stockholm teenagers to an earlier international underground where punk, metal, horror and occult imagery had not yet become cleanly separated. Morbid Tales offered permission to sound ugly while still writing riffs with enormous physical appeal. December Moon continues that permission. Its darkness is not ethereal. It arrives through amplifier grit, snare impact, guitar squeal, film samples and voices pushed until language begins to deform.
The demo’s later influence should be described with similar care. It did not single-handedly invent Swedish death metal or Norwegian black metal. Those histories were made by networks of musicians, tapes, venues, labels, magazines and international influences. December Moon matters because it occupied a highly conductive point within that network. It showed that a Stockholm group could combine professional-enough studio clarity with underground ugliness, horror atmosphere, Satanic imagery, distinctive vocals and songs strong enough to circulate beyond their local friendships. Its members then carried aspects of that experience into other groups, while listeners carried the tape into scenes still inventing themselves.
The 2000 CD arrived after those scenes had already become history, scandal, commerce and mythology. Black metal had developed a recognizable visual grammar of moonlit castles, bare trees, mountains and impossible blue night. Swedish death metal had become an international style. Entombed and Mayhem were established names. Dead had been dead for nine years, and stories about him had increasingly displaced the young musician preserved on Morbid’s tape. Reaper Records’ edition therefore gave December Moon the visual form of an acknowledged ancestor.
Wåhlin’s painting is beautiful, but its beauty is not neutral. It encourages the listener to hear the recording as a message from an ancient night rather than a 1987 Stockholm studio. The approaching figure may easily be imagined as Dead returning toward his castle, especially once the memorial dedication is known. Yet the figure could just as easily represent the listener. The cemetery gate stands open, and the road curves inward from the bottom edge. The castle does not belong exclusively to the musicians. It is a structure assembled by everyone who has carried the music forward.
The absence of a printed album title on the visible front strengthens that reading. The moon, castle and path identify the record without needing verbal confirmation. December Moon has been converted from a title into environmental conditions. Time of year becomes temperature, color and sky. The two words no longer describe when the demo was made. They describe where it now lives.
The compact running time is part of its strength. Seventeen minutes and forty-nine seconds leave no room for historical importance to become ceremonial padding. “My Dark Subconscious” opens the psychological gate, “Wings of Funeral” gives death movement, “From the Dark” provides the largest internal journey, and “Disgusting Semla” closes by allowing grotesque laughter to invade the monument. The sequence is balanced almost accidentally, yet it feels complete. The demo begins with a mind receiving visions and ends with the performers laughing inside the vision they have created.
Later official archival projects would greatly expand Morbid’s surviving world. Year of the Goat assembled rehearsals and live recordings, permitting multiple versions of these songs to be compared and restoring the group’s broader repertoire. Those materials are historically invaluable, but the four-track December Moon retains a different force. It contains no alternate route, commentary or evidence of development around the central session. The listener enters one concentrated night and leaves before familiarity can domesticate it.
This post preserves the 2000 edition in another historically specific form: a 151.72 MB APE archive. Monkey’s Audio once circulated widely among collectors and lossless file-sharing communities, particularly when hard-drive space and bandwidth made compression ratios more consequential than they later became. An APE folder can now feel nearly as period-specific as a MiniDisc, NFO file or early CD-R trade. The format places a 1987 recording, a 1994 remaster and a 2000 CD inside another layer of digital history.
The page does not state who extracted the disc, which drive or software was used, whether the archive includes a cue sheet, log or complete scans, or whether the physical CD belonged to the uploader. Those details should remain open rather than being invented. What the post does establish is the edition, catalog number, file type and functioning archive. Anyone with the original RR 002-CD may be able to compare matrix details, booklet pages, poster imagery or peak levels and determine how this transfer relates to other circulating copies.
The first three hundred copies of the limited one-thousand-copy CD reportedly included a poster, adding one more physical distinction within an edition already devoted to transforming a demo into a monument. A poster takes private cover art and enlarges it for the wall, allowing the castle to become part of the listener’s room. The digital post reverses that enlargement. The painting is compressed back into a browser image while the audio becomes portable data. Yet the imaginative scale survives. The castle remains larger than the screen because the music has taught us what lies behind its walls.
December Moon should finally be valued without requiring a verdict on the later bands connected to it. It need not be described as better or worse than Mayhem, Nihilist or Entombed. Such comparisons make a teenage demo compete against futures it did not know existed. Its achievement is more singular. Five musicians entered a studio before their scene had received an official history and created something vivid enough that history later reorganized itself around the recording.
The record is morbid, but not dead. It contains jokes, borrowed screams, television debris, youthful discipline, strong drumming, restless guitars and a vocalist already developing a means of turning interior estrangement into sound. The 2000 cover gives all of this a silent castle, but the music within the castle remains noisy, social and unstable. Doors slam, voices overlap, drums run ahead, solos scrape the walls and someone laughs near the end.
That laughter may be the most important sound on the demo. It refuses the clean boundary between performance and person, evil atmosphere and ordinary friendship, immortal artifact and seventeen minutes made by teenagers. The castle is real because they imagined it together. It is also made from cardboard, amplifiers, television, pastry, horror films, nicknames and money saved for studio time. Those materials do not diminish the fantasy. They reveal how fantasy enters the world.
This is why December Moon continues to feel alive beneath the enormous posthumous weight placed upon it. The recording is not merely evidence supporting the legend of Dead, a prototype of Swedish death metal or an ancestral relic of black metal. It is an event in which several young people discovered that sound could join private imagination to physical reality. An internal landscape passed into riffs, voices and magnetic tape. The tape passed into vinyl, compact disc and lossless files. Wåhlin painted the country that listeners had begun hearing around it. The road on the cover still curves through the gate because the transfer has never finished.

Midgard - 1998 - Mystic Journey Through The Ages

 

Unter Null Productions – TSR002  313.60MB FLAC

The cover resembles a ritual photograph interrupted by an enormous act of seeing. Three figures in black robes occupy the foreground, their bodies partly swallowed by grain, shadow and overexposure. Large crosses hang from their clothing, while staffs, blades or ceremonial objects rise through the crowded composition. Behind them, a gigantic eye and partial face emerge from a rough stone-like surface, magnified so far beyond human scale that the musicians seem less photographed before it than observed by it. The red Midgard logo spreads across the upper half with an inverted cross and pentagram embedded in its thorny construction. The title appears below in equally red Gothic letters. Black, white and blood color are enough to transform a band portrait into a fragment of private theology.
The 2012 presentation subtly changes the familiar original object. Early copies used gold-toned lettering over the same basic photographic composition, while the later digipak turns the logo and title red. That shift may appear minor, but it changes the image’s temperature. Gold suggests relic, authority, old metalwork and something preserved from an extinct order. Red suggests blood, activation and a dormant symbol returning to circulation. The reissue does not replace the past with a modern design. It reawakens the old photograph by changing the color of its inscriptions, much as the disc itself carries music made in 1998 back into a scene that had already spent fourteen years changing around it.
The eye is the most important element because it reverses the expected relationship between performer and viewer. Corpse-painted or robed musicians ordinarily stare outward, confronting the listener and controlling the spectacle. Here the figures are themselves beneath a larger gaze. Whatever stands behind them may be deity, demon, stone idol, human consciousness enlarged into landscape or the eye of an initiated listener looking backward through time. The title Mystic Journey Through the Ages makes that last possibility especially productive. This is not merely an album offering a fantasy journey into antiquity. It is an object through which one period of black metal watches another.
The band name carries its own spatial promise. Midgard is the inhabited middle realm in Norse cosmology, the enclosure occupied by human beings between more remote divine, giant and underworld territories. Yet this Italian Midgard does not make a straightforward Viking-metal record or construct a Tolkien narrative. Its titles are concerned with aeons, masters, dreams, wandering souls, empires of sadness and possession. The middle world becomes less a specific northern geography than the unstable human zone through which supernatural and historical forces must pass before acquiring physical form. The musicians stand in that zone on the cover, suspended between the enormous eye behind them and the ordinary listener before them.
Midgard formed in Prato, Tuscany, in 1995, when symphonic black metal was still an unsettled proposition rather than a guaranteed style with a standardized orchestral sound. The group released the A New Aeon in Black cassette in 1997, then entered Planet Sound Studio the following April to create this full-length. Only two pieces from the demo, “A New Aeon in Black” and “Misanthropic Dream,” were carried into the album. The decision not to rebuild the entire tape as a professional CD matters. Mystic Journey Through the Ages is not simply a demo with improved equipment. It is a selective transformation in which two earlier songs act as surviving gateways into a broader and more deliberate world.
The personnel form a conventional five-piece band, but their roles are unusually well balanced for late-1990s symphonic black metal. Claudio supplies the guitars, Enrico plays bass, Leonardo Giannetti handles keyboards, Raffaele performs the drums, and Francesco Marchi delivers the vocals and writes the lyrics. The presence of a dedicated keyboardist does not turn the record into synthesizer music with guitars buried underneath. The keyboards establish architecture, weather and historical distance, while the rhythm section remains physically active enough to keep that architecture from floating away. The album’s symphonic identity comes from arrangement and proportion rather than from trying to impersonate a hundred-piece orchestra.
Luciano Zella, credited through his Felix Moon identity, recorded and mixed the album and contributed vocals to “Misanthropic Dream.” His involvement joins Midgard to a specifically Italian occult-metal lineage. Zella had played guitar with Death SS and had connections to Necromass, two groups whose theatricality and ritual atmosphere developed through Italian history rather than being imported wholesale from Norway. Death SS in particular had been combining horror, stage identities, esoteric imagery and heavy metal long before the second wave defined the visual grammar of black metal. Zella’s presence does not make Mystic Journey Through the Ages sound like Death SS, but it places the recording inside a local network where ceremony and performance already possessed their own ancestry.
This helps explain why the record never feels completely Scandinavian even when the usual reference points are audible. The fast guitar patterns and aggressive drumming can recall early Marduk. The combination of shrieked voice, keyboards and layered melodic movement naturally invites comparison with Emperor, Dimmu Borgir, Limbonic Art and Odium. Certain medieval colors in the title track approach the stately repetition associated with Summoning, while some of the colder transitions remember early Satyricon. Yet the album does not settle comfortably beside any one of those groups. Its clear production, active bass and occasional warmth pull it away from the fantasy of black metal as nothing but frozen air.
The production has sometimes been criticized for being too crystalline, but its clarity is one reason the album remains so revealing. Every musician can be heard making decisions. The guitar is not reduced to a continuous blur beneath keyboards. The bass possesses enough definition to move independently rather than merely duplicating the lowest guitar notes. The drums strike aggressively and sometimes strain at the fastest tempos, preserving effort where a more heavily edited modern production might create mechanical invulnerability. The keyboards can enter, alter the scale of a passage and withdraw without covering the route by which the band reached the next riff. The recording does not hide construction behind atmosphere. It allows atmosphere to emerge from construction.
That balance is essential because symphonic black metal easily becomes vertically crowded. Guitar, bass, drums, vocals and synthetic choirs can all compete for the same dramatic space until the music resembles several different climaxes happening simultaneously. Midgard takes a more horizontal approach. Sounds are often introduced in sequence. A keyboard phrase opens a chamber, the guitar enters and gives it motion, the bass enlarges the path underneath, the drums increase the pressure, and the vocal arrives as a presence moving through the completed environment. The songs feel travelled rather than stacked.
“A New Aeon in Black” opens without requiring a separate atmospheric introduction. Its brevity gives it the force of a proclamation. The new age is not patiently predicted; it is announced as already beginning. Guitars move with the directness of black-metal cavalry, the drums press hard beneath them and the keyboards remain integrated into the attack rather than asking the listener to stop and admire the scenery. Because the song had already appeared on the preceding cassette, it also functions as the old Midgard entering the new recording. The album’s first new aeon begins by carrying an earlier body through a different studio.
The word “aeon” is useful because it exceeds ordinary chronological time. An era may be measured through dates, governments or styles; an aeon suggests a spiritual order whose arrival changes what history itself means. Black metal has frequently been attracted to this language because it allows music to imagine itself as more than entertainment. A record can become the announcement of a new law, cosmology or species of perception. Midgard’s opening remains youthful and theatrical, but that youthful certainty is part of its force. The musicians are not cautiously suggesting that another age might be aesthetically interesting. They play as though the transition has begun and their instruments are among its first symptoms.
“The Coming of a New Master (And of a New Aeon)” enlarges the same premise. The parenthetical title joins ruler and historical order so completely that neither can arrive without the other. A master does not merely enter an existing world and take control; his coming produces the world in which his mastery becomes possible. The longer composition gives Midgard time to move between speed and ceremonial expansion. Keyboard layers make the space feel wider, while the rhythm section prevents the imagined procession from becoming passive pageantry. Up-tempo passages remain central, but they now operate inside a structure that can pause, gather power and resume with a changed sense of scale.
The master is never identified with enough precision to become a character in a conventional narrative. This anonymity works in the song’s favor. A named king, demon or god would arrive carrying established iconography. The unspecified master remains a pressure awaiting a face, and the enormous eye on the cover becomes one possible manifestation. It may belong to the power being summoned, but it could also represent the state of consciousness required to recognize that power. The music creates an arrival without reducing it to biography.
The title track is the album’s conceptual center because it makes journeying a musical action rather than merely a lyrical topic. Medieval keyboard colors and more atmospheric movement open the composition beyond the direct assault of the first song. The synthesizers do not produce a historically accurate Middle Ages, nor do they need to. They create a remembered antiquity assembled from fantasy literature, occult illustration, horror cinema, role-playing imagery and the electronic sounds available to young musicians in the late 1990s. The past being visited is not the past of professional historians. It is the psychologically useful past of people searching for a world less ordinary than the one surrounding them.
This kind of synthetic medievalism is sometimes dismissed as costume, but costume can be a serious technology of imagination. A keyboard patch does not need to reproduce an authentic shawm, choir or court ensemble before it can change the way a listener perceives time. It only needs enough suggestive information to open a historical distance. Midgard understands that the gap between the electronic sound and the impossible age it represents is not a defect. The listener’s imagination occupies that gap and completes the landscape.
The journey also passes through several styles of black-metal movement. Fast riffs provide physical transit, keyboards create architectural location, and more spacious passages alter the apparent speed at which time is passing. A six-minute track can therefore suggest centuries without pretending to narrate every event within them. The ages are not described individually. They are experienced as changes in musical climate. One section feels like an open field, another like an interior chamber, another like a force breaking through the chamber wall.
“Misanthropic Dream” is shorter and more concentrated, but its position immediately after the title track gives it a peculiar psychological depth. The journey through ages becomes a dream experienced by someone already estranged from humanity. Misanthropy is not presented merely as contempt shouted outward. The word “dream” turns it inward, suggesting an alternate world generated by withdrawal from the existing one. Black metal has often used social rejection as the first material of worldbuilding. The person who cannot or will not belong to ordinary society begins constructing another society, cosmology or private kingdom inside sound.
Felix Moon’s guest vocal makes this the one composition in which the person responsible for recording the album enters its performed world. Engineer becomes participant. The boundary between the person arranging the sounds from behind the console and the figure inhabiting the song becomes temporarily porous. This is appropriate for an album concerned with new aeons and possession. The recording process itself is shown to be capable of converting witness into voice.
The song had appeared on the 1997 demo, where its title was misspelled “Misantropic Dream.” The corrected spelling on the album reflects a small act of formalization, but the music retains the compact intensity of its earlier life. It is a bridge between cassette underground and professionally pressed disc, between an idea first circulated in a small local form and a composition now expected to enter a broader international scene. Its medieval atmosphere does not make it quaint. The old-world colors intensify the feeling that alienation has become a portal.
“Dark Revival of a Wanderer Soul” begins the album’s final movement. The title joins return to displacement. A wandering soul has no settled home, yet something dark has revived it and given the journey renewed direction. At more than seven minutes, the song has room to make that revival gradual. The keyboards establish another kind of entrance from those heard earlier, demonstrating how seriously Leonardo Giannetti treats his role. He does not simply choose one ominous pad and apply it uniformly across the record. Each later track begins by opening a differently shaped room.
The bass becomes particularly valuable in these longer arrangements. When guitar and keyboard are both carrying large melodic information, bass can easily disappear into support. Enrico’s lines instead help define changes in motion from below, giving the music a second pathway. This makes the wandering soul audible as more than a lyrical abstraction. Guitar may describe the horizon while bass supplies the actual movement of feet across ground. The listener can feel the journey even when the keyboards are directing attention toward something enormous and distant.
The song’s title also offers a productive way to understand the 2012 reissue. Midgard had become inactive after the original album, then returned years later with a substantially altered industrial-black-metal identity. Before presenting the fully transformed band, they revived the wandering soul of their debut through Unter Null Productions. The album returned to the world in its old musical body but under newly red inscriptions. A title written in 1998 had inadvertently become a description of its own archival future.
“Unpure Majestic Empire of Sadness” compresses nearly every contradiction of the record into one maximal title. An empire implies order, territory, hierarchy and monumental confidence. Sadness is inward, difficult to govern and capable of dissolving the value of external achievement. Majesty suggests purity and elevated form, but the empire is explicitly unpure. The phrase is adolescent in its emotional enormity, yet that enormity is precisely why it belongs to this music. Young artists often understand that private feeling can be large enough to require architecture, banners, kingdoms and centuries. The title refuses to reduce sadness to an individual mood. It gives sadness sovereignty.
The music similarly avoids treating melancholy as softness. Majestic keyboard movement and black-metal aggression coexist without one canceling the other. The sorrow is not a pause between violent passages. It is the emotional source from which the violence acquires scale. This is one of symphonic black metal’s deepest possibilities. Orchestral color can turn personal desolation into landscape, allowing one person’s interior condition to become something other listeners may enter and explore.
Calling the empire impure also protects it from becoming a sterile fantasy of perfection. The album’s rhythm can be untidy at its fastest, the vocals do not always dominate the arrangement with a conventionally charismatic performance, and the production exposes more human effort than later symphonic metal would often permit. Those irregularities are the impurity within the majestic structure. They keep the empire inhabited.
The closing piece introduces a minor archival riddle. Several contemporary and reissue-era sources identify it as “Chanting Possession,” while major discographic databases and some physical-release listings call it “Charming Possession.” The difference of one letter and one syllable changes the final scene. Chanting suggests an invocation repeated until another force enters the participants. Charming suggests seduction, enchantment or a possession whose danger is concealed by attraction. It is possible that one title results from an old transcription error, but both meanings fit the eight-minute composition and the album’s larger arc so perfectly that the uncertainty has become unexpectedly fertile.
If the title is “Chanting Possession,” the album ends with language completing the operation. The new aeon was announced, the master approached, the listener travelled through historical and psychic chambers, the wandering soul revived, and repeated vocal or instrumental formula finally allowed the summoned presence to enter flesh. The sequence becomes a ritual. Music does not merely describe possession; its repetition produces the mental state in which possession can be imagined.
If the title is “Charming Possession,” the same arrival is understood through attraction. The listener has not been conquered by force alone. Keyboards, melodies, medieval color and sadness have made the alternate world desirable. One enters because it offers something missing from ordinary reality. Possession becomes charming when surrender feels like discovery.
The best possibility is that the album contains both processes. A chant is itself a kind of charm. Repetition seduces the mind by removing alternatives, while melody makes surrender emotionally rewarding. By the time the final track reaches its extended conclusion, the journey is no longer happening safely before the listener. The record’s imagined history, eye, master and empire have entered the room. The traveller has become part of the terrain.
Francesco Marchi’s vocal performance is important precisely because it does not overwhelm these environments with theatrical excess. Some listeners have found the voice less evocative than the instrumental arrangement, but its dryness prevents the record from becoming operatic fantasy metal. The vocal remains abrasive, human and relatively narrow while keyboards and guitars open increasingly large spaces around it. This creates a useful scale difference. The world is immense; the person speaking inside it remains physically limited.
Raffaele’s drumming produces a similar tension. At high speed, certain passages can feel aggressively crowded or less precise than the surrounding studio clarity might suggest. Yet perfect percussion would change the emotional argument. The drums sound like a body attempting to keep pace with an aeon, not a machine programmed after the fact. The struggle becomes part of the recording. When the tempo relaxes, the playing gains weight because the listener has already heard what acceleration costs.
Claudio’s guitar writing prevents the album from becoming dependent upon its keyboard concept. Fast melodic black-metal patterns provide a recognizable foundation, but the riffs also carry traditional heavy-metal direction and occasional structures broad enough to support medieval atmosphere without collapsing into background texture. The guitar gives the journey muscle. It ensures that the record can still communicate when the synthesizers withdraw.
Leonardo Giannetti may nevertheless be the album’s quiet architect. The keyboards do not demand attention through maximum volume or constant complexity. They alter perspective. A phrase arriving behind the guitar can make a small riff seem to stand before a distant skyline. An introduction can turn the beginning of a song into the opening of another century. Three consecutive compositions can begin from three separate electronic climates while still belonging to the same record. This is orchestration understood as spatial intelligence.
The 1998 recording arrived at a moment when symphonic black metal was moving rapidly toward greater expense, density and technical polish. The most internationally successful bands would soon make orchestration more continuous, more cinematic and more central to their identities. Midgard’s album preserves another balance. The keyboards are essential, but the band still sounds like five people in a room whose individual instruments have not been absorbed into an enormous production system. The mysticism is constructed by a working group rather than delivered as a finished spectacle.
That human scale connects the music to the cover. The enormous eye and occult symbols may promise supernatural power, but the three figures remain visibly people wearing robes, holding objects and creating an image together. The photograph does not hide the act of self-invention. Fabric wrinkles, faces are painted, props occupy physical hands and the collage’s seams remain visible. These musicians were not documenting an ancient order that existed independently from them. They were bringing one into existence through rehearsal, photography, typography, recording and belief.
There is joy inside that process, even when every title insists upon darkness, misanthropy, impurity and possession. The joy is not cheerful emotion within the songs. It is the creative abundance visible in people refusing to accept the world as already complete. A room in Tuscany can become Midgard. A synthesizer can open a medieval hall. A studio can contain an aeon. A local occult-rock guitarist can become engineer, guest voice and bridge between generations. A small CD can survive long enough to require its own resurrection.
The original edition appeared through Zappa & Hemicrania Productions as HP 002 and became difficult to obtain after the band’s initial period ended. Midgard reactivated in 2009, by which time its interests had moved toward industrial black metal, programmed rhythms and a deliberately technological identity. The planned reissue was initially associated with Toxic Sound Records, but disagreements led the band to publish it through its own Unter Null Productions in early 2012. This history gives the reissue an unusual degree of authorship. It is not a distant label exploiting an obscure old record. It is the musicians reopening their earlier world before revealing what they had become.
The name Unter Null, “below zero,” belongs more naturally to the colder industrial identity of the reunited group than to the comparatively warm and medieval 1998 album. Placing Mystic Journey Through the Ages beneath that label joins two Midgards that might otherwise seem unrelated. The symphonic band and the later electronic project occupy separate eras but share a belief that sound can reorganize reality. One reaches backward through fantasy, mysticism and ritual; the other reaches forward through machinery. The reissue becomes the hinge between them.
This also makes the album title newly literal. The 2012 listener undertakes a journey through the age of the recording itself. The music carries the production habits, keyboards, lyrical scale and underground ambitions of 1998. The red typography belongs to its resurrection. The FLAC archive belongs to another era again, one in which a limited physical object can circulate across continents without its plastic case, booklet or original retail path. The ages do not merely appear in the lyrics. They accumulate around the files.
The post preserves only the square front image, Unter Null catalog number and archive. The eight-page reissue booklet, complete lyric presentation and other visual information remain outside the visible page. That absence makes the cover’s giant eye even more dominant. It is the sole witness carried into the post, staring outward while the rest of the package has been folded into the unseen archive or left behind with the physical disc.
The archive’s exact extraction provenance is not stated publicly. The label line associates the post with the 2012 edition, but it does not identify the optical drive, software, cue sheet, log, mastering comparison or ownership history of the disc used to produce the files. Those details may be present inside the RAR, but they should not be invented from the page alone. Owners of the original HP 002 CD or the TSR002 digipak could help determine whether the two editions share identical audio, whether their track indexing accounts for the conflicting total durations, and whether “Chanting” or “Charming Possession” is the wording actually printed in each booklet.
That uncertainty belongs naturally to an album about movement through time. Archives are rarely perfectly sealed. Titles mutate, durations change by several seconds, gold becomes red, a demo song receives corrected spelling and a once-local recording is gradually surrounded by testimony from listeners who encountered it years apart. The object does not become less real through those changes. It acquires additional lives.
Mystic Journey Through the Ages deserves this fuller attention because it occupies a beautiful middle position. It is neither primitively raw nor commercially grand. It belongs to symphonic black metal without allowing keyboards to consume the band. It clearly knows the northern records transforming the genre while remaining connected to an Italian occult tradition with different roots. Its musicians are technically capable but still audible as people attempting something larger than their immediate means. The album’s limitations and ambitions remain in productive contact.
The record’s deepest achievement is making mysticism feel architectural. Nothing here proves the existence of another aeon, master, wandering soul or empire of sadness. The music builds temporary rooms in which those ideas become emotionally plausible. A listener does not have to accept the theology of the cover. One only has to enter the arrangement and notice how quickly a keyboard line, bass movement and repeated riff can alter the apparent dimensions of an ordinary room.
The eye continues watching after the last track ends. At first it seems to belong to the force behind the band, the imagined master whose coming has organized the sequence. By the end, another interpretation has become possible. The eye is the recording itself, held open across decades. The musicians changed, stopped and returned. Labels appeared and disappeared. The compact disc became difficult to find, came back as a digipak, moved onto vinyl and entered digital archives. The album kept looking outward, waiting for another person to look back.

Massenvernichtung / Darkthule - 2005 - Magna Europa Est Patria Nostra

 

Der Sieg Records – DSR 05  297.60MB APE

The unfolded artwork does not divide the two bands neatly. Instead, it assembles an ideological panorama in which Germanic runes, classical statuary, monumental European architecture and a bleak coastal landscape are forced into one continuous field. The right panel layers a female stone figure, a shadowed face, columns and illuminated buildings beneath a composite rune-and-cross emblem, while the Darkthule logo hangs below like tangled roots. On the left, narrow standing stones or pillars frame a distant horizon beneath an extensive list of bands, labels and supporters. Across the middle appears the sentence “For a golden dawn to rise...,” and beneath it a quotation attributed to Heraclitus concerning the principle governing everything. The design is not merely pagan or historical. It attempts to create one imagined European spiritual continuity by placing Greek philosophy, Germanic symbols, modern nationalist language and black-metal correspondence networks inside the same gray collage.
The Latin title means approximately “Great Europe Is Our Fatherland.” It gives the split a political and geographical purpose before either band begins. Germany’s Massenvernichtung and Greece’s Darkthule are presented not as representatives of separate national scenes, but as regional voices within a larger imagined homeland. The collaboration is therefore part musical split, part declaration of alliance. Its concept depends upon collapsing differences between ancient Greece, northern European paganism, twentieth-century authoritarian imagery and the early-2000s underground into one myth of shared blood, memory and cultural rebirth. That construction should be recognized clearly rather than softened into generic language about pride or heritage.
Musically, the two sides create a strong contrast. Massenvernichtung occupies the opening six tracks but uses less than twenty minutes, favoring brief, hard-edged songs whose compressed structures resemble commands, marching signals and fragments of militant song. Darkthule follows with only five tracks yet takes almost thirty-three minutes, allowing melody and repetition to spread across much longer spaces. The split moves from German concision into Greek atmosphere, from clipped attack toward extended landscapes. This difference prevents the shared ideology from producing one undifferentiated musical block.
Massenvernichtung begins with “Overtuere,” a short ceremonial entrance that establishes scale without delaying the attack. “Feldzug Gen Morgenland,” roughly “Campaign toward the East,” then introduces the side’s military vocabulary through fast, straightforward black metal whose momentum matters more than ornamental detail. The guitar patterns are narrow and severe, the percussion drives them forward without elaborate deviation, and the vocals arrive as harsh proclamations rather than tortured introspection. These songs do not attempt to create a complex emotional world. Their force comes from exclusion: few textures, few pauses and little room for doubt.
“Isa” draws its title from the ice rune, traditionally represented by a single vertical line. Whether approached as occult symbol, image of stillness or emblem of rigid self-control, the rune suits Massenvernichtung’s severe construction. The music is not ambient or frozen in the atmospheric sense; it is disciplined into a narrow channel. Repetition becomes a kind of hardening process. The riff returns until it seems less like a musical idea being developed than an order being reinforced.
“Hexen-Holocaust (Die Hexe)” shifts from military imagery toward witch persecution, but its language remains deliberately inflammatory. The historical burning and execution of accused witches becomes another component in the band’s anti-Christian mythology, interpreted as violence committed against an older European spiritual order. “Heidenlied,” a heathen song, had already appeared on Massenvernichtung’s 2004 demo and functions here as the side’s most direct pagan statement. Its more memorable rhythmic movement gives the sequence a brief sense of communal song beneath the abrasive production.
“Des Teufels Leibstandarte” closes the Massenvernichtung half with its most politically loaded title. Leibstandarte was not a neutral German word for a bodyguard by 2005; it was inseparable from the SS formation that carried the name. Attaching it to the Devil combines black-metal Satanism with explicit twentieth-century military association. This is not ambiguity created by later interpretation. The band’s name itself means “mass extermination,” and its documented themes include National Socialism. The music’s harsh directness and authoritarian language were designed to support one another.
Darkthule enters through “Magna Europa,” immediately enlarging the split’s title into a six-minute atmospheric declaration. Where Massenvernichtung attacks through short formations, Darkthule allows tremolo-picked melodies to stream across a distant, reverberant production. The drums remain comparatively simple, but the guitars use that simplicity as open ground. Melodic lines repeat until they begin to resemble a horizon rather than a conventional riff. The Greek band’s black metal is raw without being entirely claustrophobic. Its most effective passages create the sensation of movement across barren plains under an enormous sky.
“The Voice of Heathen Blood” makes the ideological bond between the bands explicit, yet its musical language is more melancholic than triumphant. Darkthule’s melodies often carry a sense of loss, as though the ancestral world being invoked can only be experienced through distance. The vocals rasp from inside the mix rather than standing above it, while the guitars supply the emotional argument. This is one of the contradictions that gives the group greater musical depth than its slogans might suggest. The songs declare certainty, but their melodies frequently sound like longing for something inaccessible.
“Nykta,” the Greek word for night, is the split’s central nocturnal journey. Across more than seven minutes, Darkthule relies upon sustained repetition and modest variation rather than dramatic compositional display. The atmosphere becomes almost physical through persistence. A melodic phrase may initially seem simple, but its repeated passage through reverb changes the listener’s relationship to it. What begins as a riff gradually becomes weather, then memory. The night is not described through samples or elaborate keyboards. It is built from the distance between the guitar and the person hearing it.
“The Flame That Still Lights” extends this theme of survival. Flame is used throughout pagan and nationalist black metal as a symbol of suppressed knowledge, ethnic continuity or spiritual force believed to have survived Christianity and modernity. Darkthule’s eight-minute treatment is the longest piece on the original CD, giving the image room to become more than a slogan. The guitars rise and fall through bleak melodic cycles while the rhythm maintains a stubborn forward movement. The supposed flame is not bright or comforting. It is a small continuity preserved inside cold surroundings.
“The Coming from the Past” completes the album by turning historical memory into approaching presence. The past is not safely behind the musicians as inspiration or scholarship. Something from it is imagined moving toward the present, ready to reclaim authority. This is also the governing fantasy of the artwork: statues, runes, philosophy and architecture assembled as evidence that an older European essence can be awakened. Darkthule’s long final movement gives that arrival a melancholy grandeur, but the political implications remain inseparable from the atmosphere.
The split’s strongest musical quality lies in how differently the two bands express the same worldview. Massenvernichtung treats identity as command, compacting it into short songs, rigid rhythms and confrontational titles. Darkthule treats identity as landscape and inherited memory, using long melodic repetitions to create distance, loss and imagined continuity. One side sounds like mobilization; the other sounds like the territory the mobilization claims to defend.
That contrast also keeps the release historically revealing. Mid-2000s European black metal was not confined to one national style, even within explicitly National Socialist networks. German and Greek musicians could share symbols and political assumptions while retaining very different relationships to rhythm, melody and atmosphere. The split format made that alliance material. One compact disc, one title and one continuous design could join musicians who may never have occupied the same rehearsal room.
The quotation from Heraclitus adds another layer of appropriation. His thought concerned constant transformation, tension between opposites and the underlying logos through which the cosmos remains ordered. The artwork uses him to suggest ancient philosophical authority behind its modern political synthesis. Yet the music reveals a contradiction the design does not acknowledge. Everything here is already hybrid: Latin title, German songs, Greek songs, Norse runes, classical imagery, black metal developed through international tape exchange and a Polish-centered release network. The imagined purity of the message is carried by a form created through mixture.
The post preserves this original fifty-two-minute edition as a 297.60 MB APE archive. That older lossless format adds another period layer, recalling the era when complete CDs often circulated through private torrent folders and optical-disc archives as Monkey’s Audio files. Later editions added songs, new designs and remastered sound, but this post keeps the initial Der Sieg sequence intact: six short German tracks followed by five expansive Greek ones. The file therefore preserves not only the performances, but the deliberate 2005 architecture through which two distinct bands attempted to make one ideological country audible.

Mahr - 2018 - Antelux

 

Amor Fati – AFP080  519.88MB FLAC

Mahr - 2021 - Death Comes Adorned in the Sun

 

ASRAR – ASR198  229.67MB FLAC

Mahr - 2023 - Odium

 

Amor Fati – AFP250  459.78MB FLAC

Lycanthropy - 1998 - ...As The Mourners Arise

 

Path To Enlightenment Records – PtE 003  323.19MB FLAC

Kristallnacht - 2001 - Of Elitism And War

 

Warspirit Productions – WSB CD002  192.39MB FLAC

Kristallnacht - 2006 - Blooddrenched Memorial 1994 - 2002

Wotanstahl Klangschmiede – W.K.G. 2006  466.98MB FLAC

 

Inferno Requiem = 黑冥煞 - 2007 - Gloomy Night Stories

 

Hell Ambassador Records – HAR001  470.68MB FLAC

Hecate Enthroned - 1997 - The Slaughter of Innocence, a Requiem for the Mighty (1st press)

Blackend – BLACK004CD  336.21MB FLAC

 

Hecate Enthroned - 1998 - Dark Requiems... and Unsilent Massacre (1st press)

 

Dissonance Productions – DISS023CDD  315.74MB FLAC

Hecate Enthroned - 1999 - Kings Of Chaos

 

Blackend – BLACK020CD  224.33MB APE

Hecate Enthroned - 2001 - Miasma

 

Blackend – BLACK032CD  141.15MB FLAC

Hecate Enthroned - 2004 - Redimus

 

Blackend – BLACK071CD  319.16MB FLAC

Hecate Enthroned - 2013 - Virulent Rapture

 

Crank Music Group – CRK-003  508.10MB FLAC

Hecate Enthroned - 2016 - The Slaughter Of Innocence, A Requiem For The Mighty / Upon Promeathean Shores (Unscriptured Waters) (Reissue)

Dissonance Productions – DISS022CDD  625.26MB FLAC

 

Hecate Enthroned - 2016 - Dark Requiems... and Unsilent Massacre (Reissue)

 

Dissonance Productions – DISS023CDD  419.15MB FLAC

Hecate Enthroned - 2019 - Embrace of the Godless Aeon

 

M-Theory Audio – M-030  405.29MB FLAC

Haxan Dreams - 2019 - Path Through the Realm

 

Non Posse Mori Records – npm-019  525.63MB FLAC

Handful of Hate - 1997 - Qliphotic Supremacy

 

Northern Darkness Records – NDR-CD 014  348.03MB FLAC

Handful of Hate - 1999 - Hierarchy

Northern Darkness Records – NDR - CD 023  308.48MB FLAC