Woods Of Infinity - 2005 - Hej Då

 

Total Holocaust Records – THR-88  313.46MB FLAC

Hej då means goodbye, but Woods of Infinity does not deliver the word with clean closure. There is no firm door shutting between one life and another, no dignified farewell followed by silence. The album inhabits the unstable period after departure has been announced but before the emotional debris has settled. Affection, disgust, childhood memory, coldness, ridicule, sexual unease, sentimentality, and hatred remain tangled together, refusing to separate into morally convenient rooms. Woods of Infinity makes black metal from that tangle. The music is raw enough to feel damaged, melodic enough to become intimate, and strange enough that intimacy never becomes safe.

The duo’s method is immediately recognizable but difficult to classify precisely. Melkor’s guitars and programmed drums establish the black-metal skeleton, yet the songs rarely behave with the ceremonial severity expected from the form. Riffs can sound mournful, triumphant, awkward, naïve, or deliberately overripe, sometimes within the same passage. Ravenlord’s vocals move even more unpredictably, shifting among shrieks, whispers, muttering, wounded cries, deranged laughter, and voices that resemble private characters escaping from an internal theatre. The production leaves everything slightly exposed and unbalanced. Instead of correcting the instability, Woods of Infinity treats it as the album’s emotional truth.

“Rationen krymprygg” opens without politely introducing the world to follow. Its compact duration gives it the feeling of a grotesque little doorway, a fragment whose meaning may be clear to the people inside the song but remains deliberately crooked to everyone else. The music already refuses the ordinary heroic posture of black metal. There is grandeur in the guitars, but it is continually compromised by vocal behaviour too uncomfortable, comic, or vulnerable to preserve a majestic mask. Woods of Infinity understands that ugliness can become more disturbing when it retains traces of play.

“Köld,” simply “Cold,” might appear to promise a familiar black-metal landscape, but the cold here is psychological rather than geographical. It is the temperature produced when closeness fails, when affection remains present but can no longer reach its object cleanly. The guitar melodies carry genuine sorrow, while the voice resists becoming a noble sufferer. Ravenlord sounds needy, hostile, theatrical, frightened, and mocking, sometimes all at once. This is not the purified loneliness of a solitary figure standing above a frozen valley. It is the messier cold of being trapped beside one’s own memories.

“Under färden,” “During the Journey,” expands that condition into movement. Travel ordinarily suggests progress, but Woods of Infinity makes the route feel circular. The guitars advance while the emotional situation returns repeatedly to the same damaged center. Samples and vocal interruptions create the sensation that other times are leaking into the present, as though the journey cannot proceed without carrying every previous room, relationship, humiliation, and desire along with it. The track’s length allows melancholy to become strangely immersive, yet the band never lets atmosphere settle into harmless beauty.

“Kärlek och vänskap,” “Love and Friendship,” places two of the most reassuring human ideas inside a record that distrusts reassurance. Woods of Infinity does not attack love because love is weak. The music is disturbing because love possesses enormous power and can become entangled with dependency, jealousy, memory, fantasy, and harm. Friendship can protect people, but it can also provide the language through which boundaries become confused or betrayal becomes possible. The song’s melodic tenderness is genuine, which makes its surrounding discomfort more difficult to dismiss as mere provocation. Something precious is being handled badly, and the listener is left close enough to notice.

“Piskar ut mitt hat,” roughly “Whipping Out My Hate,” converts private emotion into physical action. The phrasing is intentionally excessive, almost adolescent in its desire to make hatred visible and bodily. Yet the song’s force comes from the suspicion that hatred may be grief wearing protective equipment. Woods of Infinity repeatedly places aggression beside wounded sentiment, allowing each to expose the other. The harsher the declaration becomes, the more clearly one hears the emotional dependence beneath it. Hatred cannot stop circling what supposedly deserves rejection.

“En förgången tid,” “A Bygone Time,” is the album’s broadest and most emotionally ambitious movement. Its extended form gives the melodies enough space to acquire the scale of memory rather than ordinary composition. A bygone time is never recovered accurately. It survives through selected images, repeated stories, shame, nostalgia, and details that may become more vivid after their original context has disappeared. The track sounds almost triumphant at moments, but the triumph belongs to memory’s power, not to the life being remembered. The past wins because the present cannot prevent it from returning.

“Det som hände,” “What Happened,” follows with a title so plain that it becomes ominous. The phrase suggests an event too central to ignore but too difficult, shameful, or unstable to name directly. What happened? The album does not provide a dependable account. Instead, it demonstrates how recollection changes under emotional pressure. Voices multiply, textures blur, and musical beauty coexists with the sense that something remains profoundly wrong. The listener receives atmosphere rather than testimony, which means interpretation must remain cautious. Woods of Infinity creates a disturbed perspective, not an objective record of events.

Then comes Barry Manilow’s “Old Songs,” one of the strangest cover choices in black metal and one of the clearest statements of the duo’s purpose. The original song concerns old music awakening memories of love, exactly the sentimental mechanism operating throughout Hej då. Woods of Infinity does not cover it merely as a joke or an act of genre desecration. They reveal the darkness already present in extreme nostalgia. An old song can return a lost person with terrifying immediacy, reopen an emotional period thought to be finished, or make an invented past feel more real than the present. By forcing Manilow’s sentiment through their damaged black-metal language, the duo shows that easy-listening tenderness and underground despair may be feeding upon the same human weakness.

The cover also punctures the expectation that black metal must defend itself from softness. Woods of Infinity is willing to appear ridiculous because ridicule is one of the risks of emotional honesty. The performance does not wink safely at the audience and return to seriousness afterward. It allows the sentimental song to alter the album’s balance. Once “Old Songs” has passed through, the preceding melodies sound even more openly nostalgic, while the band’s supposed perversity begins to resemble a malformed response to ordinary needs for affection, remembrance, and connection.

“Sakrament” closes the record by giving those needs a ritual form. A sacrament turns material action into a carrier of invisible meaning. Water, bread, wine, touch, confession, or repeated words become more than their physical ingredients because a community agrees that transformation has occurred. Woods of Infinity makes its own damaged sacrament from distortion, memory, taboo, cheap programming, melodic beauty, and a voice unwilling to remain socially presentable. The ceremony offers no purification. It consecrates contradiction.

The album’s controversial lyrical reputation cannot be ignored, but neither should it become a carnival banner replacing the music. Woods of Infinity repeatedly approaches subjects involving sexuality, childhood, violated innocence, emotional dependency, and grotesque fantasy. The value of confronting such material depends upon what the confrontation reveals. Hej då is strongest when its ugliness exposes the unstable border between tenderness and possession, or shows how memory and desire can become corrupted. It is weakest when provocation threatens to turn another person’s vulnerability into scenery for transgression. The discomfort should remain active rather than being neutralized through either censorship or collector admiration.

What ultimately distinguishes Hej då is the absence of a clean position from which to judge its narrator. The voice is not a trustworthy confessor, heroic villain, detached storyteller, or uncomplicated victim. It is an unstable bundle of impulses attempting to turn private confusion into music. That instability does not excuse anything suggested by the record, but it prevents the songs from functioning as simple declarations. The listener enters a psyche where love can become threat, comedy can become self-protection, nostalgia can become imprisonment, and beauty can appear in places where one would rather not encounter it.

The goodbye announced by the title therefore feels less like farewell to a person than farewell to an earlier artistic self. Woods of Infinity keeps the crude emotional immediacy of its earlier work while allowing melody, memory, and compositional ambition to grow around it. The result is neither polished nor mature in the reassuring sense. It is more dangerous because the band has become capable of making its disorder beautiful.

Hej då ends without assuring us that whatever happened has been understood, forgiven, or left behind. Old songs remain capable of opening old rooms. Love and friendship retain their shadows. The cold has entered the journey, and the past keeps singing from inside the distortion. Goodbye is spoken, but Woods of Infinity already knows that certain things do not leave merely because language tells them to go.

Woods of Infinity - 2008 - Hopplos Vantan

 

Supernal Music – FERLY059MCD  191.12MB FLAC

Woods of Infinity’s Hopplös Väntan is a half-hour room with no clean exit. Its title translates as “Hopeless Waiting,” but the waiting described here is not passive stillness. It is the condition of being trapped between an event and its consequences, between childhood and whatever adulthood did to childhood, between the protective fiction of national innocence and the violent fantasies concealed inside it. The six listed tracks continually cross those borders. Gentle, almost devotional melodies are attached to programmed drums, abrasive vocals and lyrics about psychic injury, suicide, sexual predation and racial mythology. Ordinary Swedish roads and forests become sites of private nightmare. Humor appears, but it is the humor of someone drawing a smiling face on a locked door. Beauty appears even more frequently, and that is where the record becomes genuinely difficult. Woods of Infinity do not merely alternate beauty and ugliness. They allow each to occupy the other, so that a melody may be consoling and contaminated at the same time.
Formed in Umeå in 1999 by Melkor and Ravenlord, Woods of Infinity began as a raw, private black-metal project and gradually became something far stranger. By the middle of the following decade, the group had moved beyond the recognizable grammar of primitive Scandinavian black metal without abandoning its thin guitars, programmed percussion or wounded vocal extremity. Melkor described this development as a personal metamorphosis, with obscure records, films, homemade recordings and scraps of environmental sound entering the music alongside the guitars. The project’s objective was not technical perfection or genre discipline but emotional reaction. Apathy was the enemy. That intention helps explain why Woods of Infinity can resemble depressive black metal, folk music, homemade sound collage, adolescent confession, obscene comedy and provincial surrealism within the same composition. Hopplös Väntan, recorded between 2006 and 2008 at the appropriately named Evilmusic Studios, may be the most concentrated expression of that method. It appeared after the comparatively expansive Hamptjärn and the Frozen Nostalgia EP, compressing the band’s entire unstable emotional world into the dimensions of a mini-album.
The cover presents the contradiction before a note is heard. Its dark principal image is nearly swallowed by blackness, suggesting the standard promise of hidden evil, but the adjoining photograph shows Melkor and Ravenlord cheek-to-cheek, grinning and mugging for the camera. Rather than protecting the music with anonymous silhouettes or ceremonial severity, the photograph exposes two ordinary men enjoying their own company. This does not make the record harmless. It makes it more unsettling. Black metal often depends upon distance, transforming musicians into remote figures inhabiting forests, ruins or metaphysical darkness. Woods of Infinity repeatedly destroy that distance. Their cruelty, melancholy and absurdity come from recognizable human beings, not mythological monsters. The ridiculous and the frightening share a face because, outside music as well as within it, they frequently do.
Melkor handles the instruments, noises and programmed percussion, while Ravenlord supplies the vocals, lyrics and samples. That economical division gives the record an unusually unified psychology. The guitars rarely behave as displays of force. They establish repeating emotional environments, melodies whose apparent simplicity permits them to become obsessive. The programmed drums can sound deliberately unyielding, less like the physical turbulence of a live player than a clock continuing after the person listening has ceased to believe in time. Over this machinery, Ravenlord’s voice moves through rasping accusation, injured declamation and forms of near-theatrical character performance. Samples do not decorate the songs so much as open trapdoors inside them. The result is not a seamless atmosphere. Woods of Infinity cultivate seams, abrupt changes and incompatible materials because psychic experience itself does not arrive as a perfectly mastered album. Memory interrupts. Shame changes the lighting. Something ridiculous wanders into the funeral and refuses to leave.
“Labrador” opens with childhood shelter already understood as something irretrievable. Its narrator remembers a loving home and years of protection, then describes a later possession by a demon, whether read literally, psychologically or as a metaphor for trauma. The protected period has become an epilogue to a happiness that will never return. Emotional numbness follows, expressed not as fashionable sadness but as a kind of internal necrosis: the body continues smiling and seeing while those outward signals have become messages sent by someone already dead. Near the song’s end, the language turns toward violation and immobilization, suggesting that the break between childhood and adulthood was not natural maturation but an act committed against the self. The title remains unexplained, and that opacity is valuable. “Labrador” may denote a place, an animal, an association known only to the writers or simply a word whose private emotional weight cannot be recovered by outsiders. The music does not solve it. Instead, the title sits beside the song like an object preserved from childhood whose original meaning has been forgotten while its emotional charge remains.
As an opening track, “Labrador” establishes the wounded subject from whom much of the album’s later violence will radiate. Its importance lies in the refusal to organize that wound into a redemptive story. There is no claim that suffering produced wisdom, character or artistic nobility. The song describes damage as damage. The melody provides tenderness, but tenderness is not presented as a cure. It becomes evidence of what was once available and can now only be remembered. This is one of Woods of Infinity’s most effective techniques: writing music beautiful enough to evoke safety while using the lyrics to demonstrate that safety has already disappeared. The listener is not escorted back to childhood. The listener is shown the illuminated window from outside, in the cold, after the door has ceased to open.
“Backenvägen” turns that interior damage outward in a graphic first-person fantasy of stalking, sexual violence and murder. The setting is not an abstract dungeon or gothic nowhere. It is a road in Umeå, surrounded by wet asphalt, late-summer darkness, damp vegetation and the warm lights of inhabited rooms. Those details make the song more disturbing than conventional horror imagery would. The narrator moves through a world in which other people are going home, families are eating and windows are glowing, while he converts a sixteen-year-old girl into an object of pursuit. Northern scenery is rendered with genuine affection at the same moment that the human being within it is stripped of personhood. The song therefore stages a collision between aesthetic sensitivity and moral vacancy. Its speaker notices moisture, fragrance, seasonal change and domestic warmth, but none of that perception develops into empathy. Sensitivity alone does not make a person good. It may merely furnish a predator with richer scenery.
Toward the end, the narrator’s threatening authority is punctured by an awkward stumble during the pursuit and by a grotesquely contradictory request for both forgiveness and further violence. This can be interpreted as black comedy, an attack on the glamorous serial-killer persona or a way of making the speaker contemptible rather than powerful. Yet satire does not automatically disinfect the material it handles. “Backenvägen” draws much of its force from placing the listener inside a predatory consciousness for an extended period, and the object of that consciousness remains a violated teenage girl rather than an abstraction. The clumsiness of the narrator may undermine his self-image, but it does not restore the imagined victim’s agency. Woods of Infinity often rely on uncertainty about whether something is confession, fantasy, parody or bait. Here that uncertainty becomes part of the moral pressure. The song cannot be made safe by choosing the most flattering interpretation.
The title Hopplös Väntan acquires another meaning through “Backenvägen.” Waiting is not only the depressed person’s suspension between life and death. It is also predation, the narrator anticipating the correct night and the vulnerable person who will enter it. The same word can belong to victim, predator and observer, which gives the album its claustrophobic quality. Everyone appears to be waiting, but they are not waiting for the same thing. One person waits for pain to stop, another for an opportunity to inflict it, another for a sleeping country to awaken. The record places these incompatible desires beside one another without constructing a stable moral speaker to guide us through them.
“Karnevals” is the emotional center of the EP and perhaps its most immediately beautiful composition. Its melody carries the gravity of an old hymn, and listeners familiar with Scandinavian devotional music have recognized its kinship with a traditional religious tune. Woods of Infinity redirect that inherited musical language away from salvation and toward suicide. Time inflicts wounds from cradle to grave; seconds accumulate into years; old pain returns with the reliability of liturgy. The narrator reaches blindly for a gun, imagines drowning in darkness, leaves loved ones behind and walks toward a private body of water while envisioning the parents who will eventually bury him. There is no promise of reunion or afterlife. When consciousness ends, nothing remains.
Using hymn-like music for such words is more than a simple ironic reversal. Hymns are communal structures. They organize breath, memory and belief among people singing together. “Karnevals” borrows that emotional architecture for a consciousness withdrawing from every community, including the family that will be left with the burial. The melody remembers consolation even when the lyric cannot believe in it. That produces a grief more complex than straightforward nihilism. A purely nihilistic song would not need to sound so much like something once trusted. “Karnevals” feels instead like faith’s empty house, still containing the shape of the furniture after everything has been removed.
The song’s title introduces another inversion. A carnival ordinarily suspends social order through public excess, disguise, noise and collective celebration. Woods of Infinity’s carnival is inward, solitary and terminal. The masks are not removed to reveal authentic identity because the record repeatedly questions whether an intact identity remains beneath them. Even the band’s humor has this carnivalesque function, upsetting distinctions between solemnity and vulgarity, sacred melody and profane speech, compassion and cruelty. “Karnevals” is where that disorder briefly becomes merciful. The music offers the narrator a dignity that the worldview denies him, and it offers the listener an emotional entry that the lyrics immediately turn into a precipice.
“Törnrosasömnen,” whose title invokes Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted sleep, shifts from personal despair into political myth. It begins by asking why Sweden has lost its pride and who stole it. The fairy-tale image of a sleeping nation awaiting restoration is familiar nationalist machinery: the country is personified as an innocent body, historical complexity becomes a spell, and awakening requires identifying contaminating outsiders. Woods of Infinity filter this material through bizarre images involving swamp creatures, gold teeth, treacherous vegetables and radioactive crops. On the page, parts can resemble a feverish parody of racist panic, as though the vocabulary of national decline has been left too long in a damp cellar and begun growing absurd new organs.
That absurdity does not neutralize the song’s politics. Ravenlord’s contemporaneous interviews included explicit admiration for Nazism and plainly racist and antisemitic claims. Whatever degree of private joking, contradiction or deliberate provocation surrounded those statements, they remove the comfortable possibility that “Törnrosasömnen” is merely an external satire of beliefs the band did not share. The surreal vegetables may mock the hysteria of racial mythology while simultaneously participating in it. This is not unusual in extremist subcultures, where jokes serve as both camouflage and recruitment, allowing a statement to be withdrawn as comedy when challenged and restored as conviction among sympathetic listeners. Irony becomes a revolving door rather than an escape.
Musically, the track belongs to the same emotional universe as the rest of the EP, and that continuity is precisely the problem. The melodic melancholy that dignifies the suffering in “Labrador” and “Karnevals” is now attached to a fantasy of national injury. Personal loss is enlarged into ethnic grievance. The wounded child becomes the violated homeland; private alienation seeks relief through an imagined collective purity. This is one of the paths by which authentic pain can be politically corrupted. A person’s loneliness may be real, yet the explanation offered for it can still be false and vicious. If “Labrador” mourns innocence, “Törnrosasömnen” weaponizes nostalgia by pretending that a country once possessed the same kind of unbroken innocence and that particular populations are responsible for its disappearance.
The song is therefore the album’s moral sinkhole, but also an essential part of understanding its design. Removing it would make Hopplös Väntan easier to admire and less truthful as a document of the minds that created it. Woods of Infinity’s emotional openness cannot be separated cleanly from the ideology that entered that openness. The record asks whether beautiful music can launder hateful ideas by making them feel wounded, intimate or eccentric. It cannot. Emotional sincerity does not transform racism into truth, and originality does not create an exemption from judgment. At the same time, recognizing the ideology does not require pretending the melody has ceased to be affecting. The danger lies partly in the fact that it remains affecting.
“Snår & skare” is the only listed instrumental, and its position after “Törnrosasömnen” functions as both relief and aftermath. The title evokes thicket and hard snow crust, a landscape that resists smooth passage. A thicket catches clothing and obscures direction; snow crust may support a foot for a moment and then collapse beneath it. That terrain describes the experience of the record better than an open Scandinavian forest would. Hopplös Väntan offers no romantic wilderness into which the listener can disappear. Its natural world has surfaces, impediments and evidence of bodies moving through it. Even without a lyric, “Snår & skare” does not arrive as innocence restored. The preceding words remain in the air, and the instrumental becomes a space in which their implications continue without being named.
The absence of Ravenlord’s voice also reveals how much narrative pressure it normally exerts. With no character speaking, accusing, confessing or performing, the music can be encountered as environment rather than testimony. Yet the environment is not empty. After four songs dominated by damaged narrators, victims, grieving parents and nationalist hallucination, silence from the human speaker feels less like peace than temporary disappearance. The landscape has outlasted the argument. Woods of Infinity’s use of nature differs from black metal’s frequent presentation of the forest as purity, transcendence or refuge from modern society. Here the physical world is neither morally pure nor spiritually instructive. It simply continues, indifferent to the meanings projected onto it.
“Taken” closes the visible sequence with a title that can be read as the album’s final condition. Childhood has been taken, emotional vitality has been taken, a girl is imagined as being taken, life is surrendered, and nationalists imagine that their country has been taken from them. The same verb circulates through experiences that must not be treated as morally equivalent, but the repetition reveals the record’s obsession with lost autonomy. Every narrator locates meaning in something removed or threatened with removal. In the depressive songs, that structure generates mourning. In the predatory song, it generates entitlement to another person’s body. In the nationalist song, it generates resentment toward invented enemies. The belief that something essential has been stolen can produce grief, art, self-destruction or violence depending upon where responsibility is placed.
As a conclusion, “Taken” refuses the emotional release that “Karnevals” might have supplied had it ended the record. The album does not climax and resolve. It contracts into absence, leaving the listener with the sensation that something has happened without becoming fully recoverable as narrative. That is appropriate for a collection preoccupied with memory and damage. Traumatic experience often survives not as a coherent account but as fragments, bodily reactions, disconnected images and words carrying more weight than their definitions can explain. Hopplös Väntan is assembled according to that logic. It knows that sequence can suggest causality while never proving it.
The original CD then opens a concealed passage backward. After the six credited tracks, unlisted material associated with “Darkness and Death” returns from the 2000 Gaggenau demo period. These brief hidden pieces make the 2008 release fold back toward the band’s beginning. Instead of presenting Woods of Infinity’s development as a clean ascent from crude demo black metal into mature experimentation, the disc allows the earlier self to haunt the later one. The primitive material has not been surpassed. It survives beneath the polished catalog entry, waiting after the apparent ending. This is another form of hopeless waiting: the past remaining inside the present until the listener reaches the correct point of silence and discovers that it never left.
Hidden tracks were once a common physical-media ritual, but here the device carries unusual conceptual weight. A listener examining only the printed sequence encounters a thirty-minute mini-album. A listener who allows the disc to continue finds an archaeological chamber containing the project’s earlier identity. Digital files can expose these pieces immediately through track lengths and waveforms, yet the idea remains intact. The release has an official body and a secret remainder. That division suits a band whose work continually moves between disclosure and concealment, sincerity and performance, ordinary friendship and constructed monstrosity.
The 2010 vinyl edition complicates the object further. It rearranges the sequence, begins with “Backenvägen” rather than “Labrador,” and adds “Thule Vaknar” and “Rent Hat.” Opening with “Backenvägen” makes the record more immediately confrontational, placing predation before the childhood wound that might otherwise appear to contextualize it. The original CD sequence is psychologically more revealing. “Labrador” first establishes vulnerability and lost innocence, after which “Backenvägen” demonstrates that suffering does not necessarily produce sympathy and may coexist with fantasies of domination. The vinyl order withholds that route and forces the listener to confront the perpetrating voice before being shown any wounded interior. Neither sequence excuses the other; they simply alter the direction from which the locked room is entered.
The added vinyl tracks also turn a compact mini-album into a broader statement, while the original CD retains the concentrated unease of an object discovered between categories. It is longer than an EP in emotional reach but shorter than an album capable of building a stable world. That incompleteness serves it. Hopplös Väntan feels interrupted rather than concluded, as though its contents had accumulated until the container became intolerable and had to be sealed. Even the modest production contributes to this intimacy. The music does not possess the monumental distance of expensive atmospheric black metal. It remains close, handmade and faintly airless, with programmed mechanisms, guitar melody, voice and borrowed sound pressed into a small domestic chamber.
Woods of Infinity are frequently placed under the depressive or suicidal black-metal umbrella, but Hopplös Väntan exposes the limitations of that classification. The record contains depression and suicide, yet it is also interested in provincial geography, childhood memory, sexual horror, folk inheritance, political resentment, absurd comedy and the unstable relationship between personal testimony and invented character. It is less a representation of one mood than a collection of damaged methods for producing meaning. Depression is one room in the structure, not the whole house.
The album’s strongest musical quality is its refusal to treat melody as emotional decoration. Melody is an ethical and psychological force here. It creates sympathy, nostalgia and the possibility of communion, then exposes how those feelings can attach themselves to incompatible subjects. The sorrow surrounding a suicidal narrator may invite compassion. The same sorrow surrounding a nationalist fantasy may attempt to convert prejudice into bereavement. Listeners must distinguish between recognizing an emotion and accepting the explanation attached to it. One can hear loneliness without endorsing hatred, just as one can acknowledge musical beauty without declaring the object innocent.
That distinction is especially necessary with Woods of Infinity because parts of their audience have treated the band’s extremity as a puzzle that can be solved by the word “sarcasm.” The word is inadequate. Sarcasm may describe a tone, but it does not erase repeated ideological statements, and it cannot carry the entire ethical burden of violent sexual narratives or racist mythology. Art permits role-playing, contradiction, obscenity and unreliable speakers. It does not guarantee that every role is critical merely because it is excessive. Sometimes a grotesque performance attacks the worldview it depicts. Sometimes it indulges that worldview. Sometimes it does both, alternating so rapidly that the uncertainty becomes the work’s central mechanism.
Hopplös Väntan occupies that third and most uncomfortable territory. Its ambiguity is genuine, but ambiguity is not absolution. The record can be musically singular, emotionally perceptive and morally compromised at once. In fact, reducing it to either “great art” or “disgusting ideology” would flatten the very collision that makes it historically and psychologically revealing. The music deserves close attention because it demonstrates how tenderness, self-pity, humor, trauma and hatred can coexist without resolving one another. Human beings rarely divide themselves into the clean categories that record collections prefer.
This does not mean every listener owes the album engagement. “Backenvägen” may be intolerable for people whose histories make its imagined violence more than an aesthetic problem. “Törnrosasömnen” may make continued listening feel like granting access to a worldview that deserves none. Refusal is a legitimate critical response, not evidence that a listener failed a test of extremity. Black metal has often mistaken endurance for insight, as though remaining in the room with anything automatically produced deeper understanding. Sometimes leaving is understanding. Sometimes staying long enough to identify the mechanism is useful. The record offers no universal answer because the cost is not distributed equally among its listeners.
For those who do enter it, Hopplös Väntan is one of Woods of Infinity’s most concentrated and revealing releases. It contains their peculiar gift for melodies that seem remembered rather than composed, their use of cheap or deliberately unpolished means to create a densely private atmosphere, their collision of sacred feeling with vulgar interruption, and their refusal to maintain the protective theatrical distance of conventional black metal. It also contains the point at which openness curdles into ideological poison. The album’s achievement and its corruption are not stored on separate tracks. They leak into one another.
The smiling photograph may finally be the most honest image attached to the record. It prevents the listener from pretending that these songs emerged from supernatural darkness. They were made by two friends in Umeå, collecting sounds, programming drums, writing melodies, constructing voices and choosing words. That ordinariness neither condemns nor forgives them, but it returns responsibility to the human scale. Evil does not require grandeur. Neither does beauty. Both can be assembled in a small room by people laughing together, and both can travel inside the same thirty minutes of recorded sound.
The waiting is hopeless because no final verdict arrives to purify the experience. The wounded child does not recover. The predator’s absurdity does not restore his victim. The hymn does not produce an afterlife. The sleeping nation awakens only into a poisonous fantasy. The landscape offers no instruction, and the hidden tracks lead back to the beginning rather than forward to an answer. What remains is the knowledge that beauty and ugliness can inhabit the same riff, and that hearing both clearly is not the same as forgiving either.

Textbook Of Modern Karate - 2006 - Pilot (Man With The Meat Machine)

Code666 – Code 032  359.50MB FLAC

Pilot (Man With the Meat Machine) is less an album than an imaginary film whose reels have been cut apart, misplaced and reconstructed by someone remembering the plot after a fever. The musicians formerly known as Thee Maldoror Kollective appear here under the wonderfully unlikely name Textbook of Modern Karate, abbreviating themselves to TMK while continuing their departure from the progressive and extreme-metal framework of their earlier work. Guitars, bass and drums remain available, but no instrument is permitted to establish permanent government. Noir jazz, electronics, industrial noise, gothic storytelling, western-film atmosphere, lounge music, post-rock and synthetic chase sequences keep seizing control from one another. The result is not random genre collecting. It is cinematic montage translated into sound, with every abrupt transition functioning as a cut to another room, vehicle, decade or level of consciousness.
Recorded and mixed across Killpop! Room, Driller Worm Studio and One Voice Studio during 2005 and 2006, Pilot uses the studio as a film set. JD supplies voices, lyrics and programming, Eve handles synthesizers, HK plays guitar and bass, and Drakon provides drums, with guest voices and strategically placed noises expanding the cast. The musicians do not merely combine styles; they assign each style a dramatic role. Morricone-like guitar figures suggest exposed landscapes and approaching trouble. Electronics produce the sealed interiors of surveillance rooms, laboratories and machines. Jazz becomes nocturnal movement through cigar smoke and weak light. Heavier passages provide physical collision, but even these rarely settle into conventional metal songs. The record is always looking over its shoulder for another exit.
“Exile (In Serenity)” establishes this method immediately. Its western spaciousness seems recognizable, but the scenery is quickly invaded by electronics, disembodied voices and unstable shifts in pressure. It resembles a traveler entering a landscape that has already been converted into a simulation. “Microphones & Flies” then behaves like a Dadaist broadcasting accident, moving between rhythmic machinery, fractured vocal material and sounds that appear to have escaped from adjacent compositions. The title captures the album’s strange balance between technology and decomposition: microphones promise transmission, preservation and public speech, while flies gather around matter that has begun returning to nature. Throughout Pilot, machines record the body while the body threatens to contaminate the machine.
“Zombie Children Do Synthetic Dreams” gives the album one of its finest pulp titles and a concentrated version of its retro-futurist imagination. The piece carries the swagger of a poisoned western into a world of artificial sleep, where childhood, death and manufactured fantasy have fused. TMK’s music often sounds as though cultural memories have survived after their original meanings disappeared. Spy music, gothic rock, industrial rhythm, metal and cinema-score gestures arrive not as quotations displayed for recognition but as damaged behavioral programs. They continue acting out their old functions even though the film surrounding them no longer exists.
“Welcome to the Golden Dove Society!” introduces another secret chamber. Marta Timon’s guest voice helps turn the piece into an initiation scene, though it remains uncertain whether the society offers enlightenment, criminal membership, spiritual transformation or a drink in a very questionable private club. That uncertainty is essential to Pilot. The album provides abundant scenery but withholds a reliable map. Its titles suggest characters, organizations and incidents from a larger narrative, yet no complete screenplay is supplied. The listener must connect the clues, and each attempted connection creates a slightly different film.
The eleven-minute “The Night Mr. Clenchman Died” is the record’s great dimly illuminated centerpiece. Here the rapid montage slows enough for a character and atmosphere to accumulate. The song draws upon the tradition of baritone storytellers, murder ballads and nocturnal gothic rock, moving with the deliberate gravity of someone recounting an event whose details have become inseparable from legend. Z’EV contributes additional noises, an inspired choice given his lifelong exploration of percussion as physical vibration, ritual system and architecture rather than ordinary rhythmic accompaniment. His presence does not announce itself through a decorative solo. It deepens the room. Metallic and environmental sounds become part of the death scene, less an illustration of what occurred than evidence left behind by it.
The three-part title sequence opens another wing of the imaginary production. “The Modernist Matador Mansion” combines architectural luxury, ritual violence and theatrical masculinity in a phrase that could name either a residence or a psychological disorder. “Mauve Molls Moonlanding” is shorter and more destabilized, a burst of noise-pinball in which pulp criminals, lunar spectacle and an aggressively specific color collide. “Man With the Meat Machine” finally states the album’s central tension. The machine is not replacing flesh from a safe distance. Flesh has entered its mechanism. Technology becomes bodily, while the body becomes repeatable, editable and subject to synchronization.
That relationship receives its clearest visual form in “A Gasoline Hero,” the brief closing track and video. Director Alessandro Pacciani built the clip from vintage technological imagery, retro-futurist design and sharp synchronization between sound and movement, consciously reviving the industrial visual language associated with Fritz Lang through digital editing. The music is compact but vivid, an urban-cowboy transmission driven by synthetic fuel. Ending with this piece makes the entire album feel like the pilot episode promised by its title: a complete introduction to a series that never quite existed, containing enough characters and unresolved machinery to imply seasons of unseen continuation.
The enhanced-CD video is also where this particular post acquires a second history. The YouTube copy embedded here comes directly from the Shoestringchaos account. That name began long before YouTube as Shoestring Chaos, the first zine made and circulated in Minot, North Dakota by the person behind this archive and fellow military punk Trevor Cobb. It belonged to the pre-digital mechanics of copying pages, assembling ideas, circulating discoveries and creating culture with whatever materials were available. Trevor eventually began writing faster than the collaboration could absorb, leading to the solo zine Dork Book. Years later, Shoestringchaos became the name of a YouTube channel preserving another kind of underground artifact. The medium changed from stapled paper to uploaded video, but the original impulse remained: locate something compelling, carry it across distance and place it where another curious person might encounter it.
That small lineage suits Pilot unusually well. This is an album fascinated by the way information changes when it passes between formats. Films become music. Musical genres become scenery. Analog technology becomes digital imagery. Human voices become characters. An enhanced-CD bonus becomes a YouTube upload, then reappears inside a blog post accompanied by a FLAC archive. None of these forms is merely a transparent container. Each leaves fingerprints on what it carries. The Shoestringchaos name quietly joins Minot punk zines to Italian cinematic avant-garde music, not through a planned historical argument but through the stranger logic of personal preservation.
Pilot was promoted as “cinematic avantgarde music,” which remains more useful than forcing it into industrial metal, experimental rock or any other single enclosure. Its closest relatives may be records by Foetus, later Ulver, Devil Doll, Ephel Duath or Angelo Badalamenti, but the comparisons only describe individual rooms. TMK built the hallway connecting them. The album’s achievement is not that it contains an enormous number of ideas. Plenty of records are overcrowded. Its achievement is that those ideas behave like participants in the same hallucinated production, each entering at the precise moment when the previous scene has become too stable.
The album demands active listening because predictability is one of the comforts it deliberately removes. Yet beneath all the disruption is an unusual playfulness. Pilot does not approach experimentation as academic punishment or proof of superior taste. It enjoys trapdoors, disguises, sudden costume changes and absurdly evocative titles. It remains dark without becoming humorless, technically constructed without losing its handmade eccentricity, and cinematic without needing the listener to see the same film. Nearly twenty years after its appearance, it still feels like an intercepted broadcast from a parallel cultural timeline, one where metal musicians escaped the genre map, stole an editing suite and returned with a noir serial about machines learning the smell of human flesh.

Thee Maldoror Kollective - 2007 - Themes From Proxima

Foreshadow Productions – FSHCD005  217.51MB FLAC

Themes From Proxima occupies a fascinating airlock in the history of Thee Maldoror Kollective. Released after the group had begun using the Textbook of Modern Karate identity, it returns to the older name for a compact soundtrack that has almost entirely escaped the gravitational pull of metal. Distorted guitar and industrial force remain possible, but neither is treated as a permanent foundation. Programming, metallic percussion, synthesizers, orchestral color, disembodied voices and electroacoustic textures become the principal means of travel. The record lasts less than half an hour, yet it feels spacious because its six pieces do not behave like conventional songs. They are coded environments, each marked by a color and number, as though recovered from a laboratory, an alien archive or a classified psychological experiment.
The music was composed for Carlos Atanes’s independent science-fiction film Proxima, whose premise makes the existence of a separate soundtrack especially meaningful. Tony owns a failing video store devoted to science fiction. His relationship is deteriorating, his business is disappearing, and the culture that gave his life shape is being treated by the surrounding world as an adolescent refuge he should finally abandon. At a convention, the celebrated writer Félix Cadecq announces that he will no longer write fiction because he has discovered a genuine means of reaching another world. The method is contained on an audio CD. Tony listens, follows its instructions and finds that recorded sound may be not a representation of travel but the vehicle itself. The distance between imagination, delusion, initiation and physical transportation begins to collapse.
That premise alters how the album should be heard. Themes From Proxima is not merely music placed beneath images. It belongs to a story in which listening can change reality. Every synthetic pulse, metallic vibration and hovering voice carries the possibility of being instruction disguised as atmosphere. Is the recording opening a portal, inducing hallucination, recruiting the listener into a cult, overwriting memory or revealing a layer of existence hidden beneath ordinary perception? The soundtrack never identifies which explanation is correct. Instead, it preserves the uncertainty that powers the film. Sound becomes persuasive before it becomes understandable.
“Gorilla Move [Grey 01]” begins close to the ground. The piece has weight, impact and an industrial bodily presence suggested by both the gorilla of its title and the grey designation attached to it. Grey belongs to concrete, machinery, dust, old screens and the exhausted daylight of Tony’s terrestrial life. Metallic percussion and programmed motion suggest a world still governed by physical resistance. Yet the track is never stable enough to feel merely mechanical. Its materials shift against one another, making the familiar environment seem subtly unreliable. Earth has not disappeared, but it has begun producing signals that cannot be accounted for by its ordinary rules.
“Ouranian Tablet [Brown 05]” condenses the album’s central contradiction into its title. “Ouranian” points toward the celestial or heavenly, while a tablet may be a sacred inscription, a medicine, a technological device or an object containing instructions. Brown immediately drags those possibilities back toward dirt, age and matter. The heavenly message arrives in earthly packaging. This reflects the film’s refusal to present transcendence through immaculate futuristic machinery. The supposed gateway to the stars is a commercially reproducible compact disc acquired at a science-fiction convention. Revelation does not descend in a blazing spacecraft. It travels through the same modest media system used for audiobooks, music and independent distribution.
“Tryptamine [Yellow 03]” makes the relationship between altered consciousness and cosmic travel more explicit. Its title invokes a family of biological compounds that includes substances associated with psychedelic states, while yellow can suggest illumination, warning, chemical intensity or sickness. The track seems to loosen the distinction between internal and external space. The journey may be occurring across astronomical distance, within neurochemistry, or in the unstable overlap between the two. That uncertainty is not a puzzle the record expects us to solve. It is the condition under which its music operates.
“Io [Magenta 08]” moves toward the album’s most weightless territory. Io is simultaneously a mythological figure and one of Jupiter’s moons, joining ancient narrative to modern astronomy. The music becomes more vaporous and lyrical, with the human voice entering not as a commanding narrator but as another atmospheric body. The change parallels Tony’s movement away from the industrial and domestic world into a sidereal environment. Yet the increased beauty does not guarantee safety. Weightlessness can mean liberation, but it can also mean the loss of orientation, leverage and any dependable way home.
The trailer embedded in this post makes that progression visible. Its deepest meaning is not simply that a discontented science-fiction fan might travel to another planet. It presents a conflict between two definitions of reality. In one, Tony’s obsession is evidence that he has failed to mature: his store is collapsing, his relationship is strained, and his imaginative life appears socially useless. In the other, his devotion to science fiction has prepared him to recognize a genuine rupture that more respectable people dismiss. The trailer therefore does not ask only whether the journey is real. It asks who possesses the authority to decide what reality is, especially when experience exceeds the categories accepted by family, doctors, audiences or institutions.
Félix Cadecq is modeled upon Philip K. Dick, including an echo of Dick’s notorious 1977 appearance at a science-fiction convention in Metz, where he proposed that reality might contain overlapping timelines. The film transforms that historical rupture into its initiating event. A writer announces that fiction has become obsolete because its speculative territory has invaded actuality. The audience ridicules him, but Tony listens. That act of listening is the hinge. The film’s supposedly marginal fan becomes its protagonist not because he knows more facts than everyone else, but because he remains receptive to a possibility that consensus has already rejected.
The trailer also reveals that this is deliberately handmade science fiction rather than frictionless spectacle. Its world is built from digital effects, ordinary interiors, convention spaces, open landscapes, industrial remains and a vast Spanish mine transformed into alien terrain. The limited resources become philosophically appropriate. Proxima is about people trying to comprehend realities larger than the systems available to represent them. Its rough visual seams are not merely budgetary shortcomings; they expose the labor of imagination. The film asks the viewer to participate in creating the world rather than surrendering to a perfectly sealed illusion.
The music performs the same operation. Its metallic opening textures give the physical world density, while strings, synthesizers and lyrical voices gradually reduce that density as Tony enters the sidereal realm. The transition is not simply from ugliness to beauty or confinement to freedom. The terrestrial pieces already contain mystery, and the celestial pieces retain menace. The unknown does not become benevolent merely because it sounds beautiful. Space may be revelation, abandonment, manipulation or another level of captivity.
The two Little Birds remixes extend this uncertainty beyond the apparent ending. “Ouranian Tablet” and “Io” return in expanded forms, as though the original events have been remembered from alternate timelines. Elements once serving a cinematic moment become environments in their own right. The remixes suggest that no encounter with the unknown remains fixed after it occurs. Memory edits it, belief reorganizes it, and repeated listening reveals structures that may have been present all along. The soundtrack therefore completes an outward journey and then circles back through altered recollections of two of its most significant locations.
The presence of the trailer on Shoestringchaos gives this post another meaningful layer. The video has moved from an independently produced Spanish film into a YouTube upload, then into this archive beside the music that helped create its atmosphere. Shoestring Chaos began as a photocopied zine made and circulated through the mail in Minot, North Dakota. Decades later, the same name carries another underground cultural object through digital space. The technology changed, but the action remained recognizable: find a transmission worth preserving, move it across distance and place it where another receptive person might encounter it.
That history resonates uncannily with Proxima. Tony receives a recording that may contain passage to another world. A viewer encounters a trailer through an old zine name that became a YouTube channel. The listener downloads a soundtrack separated from its original film and reconstructs the missing images internally. Media do not merely store content here. They create routes between people, times and realities. A CD, video, upload or archive may appear to be only a container until someone listens closely enough to discover where it leads.
Themes From Proxima is therefore more than a minor soundtrack EP between larger entries in Thee Maldoror Kollective’s catalog. It is a concentrated work about the transportation of consciousness through recorded sound. Its color codes, metallic bodies, chemical alterations, mythological moons and returning remixes construct a passage from material heaviness into unstable suspension. The trailer supplies the human stakes of that movement: the possibility that imagination can save a life from confinement, but also the danger that every promised escape may conceal another system of control. The transmission never confirms whether Tony has found truth, delusion or both. It only asks the listener to place the disc inside the machine and decide whether to press play.

 

Textbook Of Modern Karate - 2009 - Need The Needle

Aentitainment – Aent 009  337.73MB FLAC

 The first thing preserved here is not merely an album cover but the full exterior body of the digipak. The back, spine and front are presented as one continuous black field, allowing the eye to travel from the phrase “Hate Songs for Mary / Love Songs for Lucy,” through fifteen unusually cinematic track titles, across the narrow identifying spine, and finally toward a pale human figure suspended inside horizontal bands and fragmented blocks. The figure may be falling, rising, restrained, transmitted or trying to swim through a damaged signal. Its body is recognizable but no longer securely attached to ordinary space. That visual uncertainty is the perfect entrance to Need the Needle, an album designed less as a collection of compositions than as a stage containing props, characters, possible clues and objects whose importance changes depending upon who is looking.

The title offers several needles at once. It can be the hypodermic needle suggested by the group’s imagery of addicted musicians improvising in peripheral clubs. It can be the stylus that enters a record’s groove and releases stored information. It can be a compass needle searching for direction inside an unstable landscape, or a sewing needle attempting to join materials that were never meant to touch. All four meanings fit a record made from jazz physicality, programmed electronics, sample debris, blues shadows, progressive-rock memory, guitar noise, live drums and electroacoustic interruption. The album needs the needle because it requires injection, playback, orientation and stitching simultaneously. It does not hide its seams. It makes the seams into part of the composition.
The subtitle, “Hate Songs for Mary / Love Songs for Lucy,” provides an emotional axis without explaining the story. Mary carries religious, maternal and institutional associations: sanctity, obedience, protection, judgment and an inherited model of purity. Lucy feels more intimate and unstable, potentially a lover, a psychedelic figure, a bringer of light or even a softened echo of Lucifer. The opposition is further scrambled by assigning hatred to Mary and love to Lucy. What culture has labeled holy receives hostility, while the ambiguous or forbidden figure receives affection. Yet the album resists turning these names into a tidy theological code. They are characters who speak only through atmosphere, titles and abrupt changes in musical behavior. The listener has to decide who Mary and Lucy are, whether they know one another, and whether the division between them can survive the record.
JD’s programming and sampling, Eve’s synthesizers, H:K’s guitars and noises, and Drakon’s selective live drumming produce a music that is constantly changing its degree of humanity. Several tracks contain Drakon’s physical percussion, while others move according to programmed systems, making the boundary between played and constructed rhythm continually flicker. The electronic presence is heavier than on the group’s earlier recordings, yet the album often feels bodily because it borrows the gestures of jazz, blues and improvised performance. It suggests musicians working at the edge of exhaustion, passing a phrase between a double bass, a damaged synthesizer and a radio that has begun receiving tomorrow’s news. The record’s most useful imaginary venue might be a small club where Charlie Parker, Philip K. Dick, an industrial sound technician and several unreliable witnesses have all been booked without being told about one another.
The track titles function like scene cards from a lost film. “The Burglar, the Herdsman & the Jew” introduces three figures without revealing whether they are archetypes, suspects or aspects of one person. “Major Problem in Washington DC” sounds like a classified political emergency reduced to a pulp headline. “A Gibbet Rootwork” joins execution apparatus to folk magic, while “The Saigon Reduxes” implies that historical trauma is being edited, repeated or repackaged. “Clearwater Mumbo Jumbo,” “3 Pennies National Messiah” and “Pushers from Shangri La” combine spirituality, commerce, crime and counterfeit salvation. These are not conventional song titles describing lyrical subjects. They are objects placed on the stage, each suggesting a larger world that exists only for the duration of its appearance.
The geographical movement is equally unstable. Washington, Saigon, Shangri-La, Tokyo and Sicily appear beside imaginary procedures and unidentified characters. “From Railroad to Skyline (Tokyo 1975)” sounds like a transition from industrial movement to vertical futurism, fixed to a year that may be historical memory or invented nostalgia. “Sicilian Lunch,” lasting less than a minute, reduces an entire region and social ritual to a miniature interruption. The album travels constantly without producing a dependable map. Places are treated the way sampling treats recordings: extracted, reframed and placed into relationships their original inhabitants never authorized. The result resembles a psychic atlas assembled from political broadcasts, crime fiction, travel memories, occult terminology and half-remembered cinema.
This continuous displacement explains why the album can initially seem chaotic. TMK do not use abrupt transitions merely to demonstrate range. Each change behaves like an edit that removes the listener from a scene before its meaning has settled. Softer passages do not resolve the abrasive ones, and jazzier movements do not humanize the electronics permanently. Every apparent destination is another temporary set. The record’s form asks the listener to become an active participant, retaining fragments and testing possible connections while the music keeps moving. What appears disjointed during one encounter may reveal recurring gestures during another, but the completed plot will never be exactly the same between two listeners.
The final sequence tightens the Mary-and-Lucy tension. “Pink Boogeymen at the Speed of Light” suggests childhood fear accelerated through futuristic technology, turning the monster under the bed into a transmission capable of arriving before perception. “Burn Lucy, Burn,” featuring Marta Timon’s voice, sounds by title alone like the album’s threatened sacrifice, although the affection promised to Lucy complicates the command. Is she being punished, purified, transformed into light or protected through a theatrical destruction? The record refuses to provide a legal transcript of the event. Lucy remains mobile precisely because no official interpretation can hold her. As JD suggested when discussing the album, Lucy would allow the record to travel outward, change shape and multiply in the minds of the people receiving it.
Then “Sorcellerie Bruitiste,” or noise sorcery, consumes more than thirteen minutes, dwarfing most of the preceding pieces. After fourteen compressed scenes, the album enters a final environment large enough for its fragments to circulate without being forced into resolution. The title names the group’s method directly: sound is being treated as a form of practical enchantment. Samples, machines, physical percussion and electronic repetition do not illustrate a magical ceremony from outside. They become the ceremony’s materials. The long finale gathers the record’s multiple needles into one operation, injecting disorder, tracing grooves, spinning without a stable north and sewing together enough of the debris to create a temporary body.
The cover figure now appears less like a victim of fragmentation than a person being assembled by it. The horizontal stripes resemble scanning lines, musical staffs, architectural beams or strips of film. Parts of the body pass behind them while others emerge, suggesting that identity is being produced through interruption rather than preserved intact beneath it. This is particularly appropriate because y8 created the layout as a response to listening. The artwork is not a diagram handed down by the musicians to explain their concept. It is another listener’s completed version of the stage, one interpretation permitted to become the physical container for all the others.
Showing the entire digipak matters for that reason. A cropped front cover would retain the floating body but remove “Hate Songs for Mary / Love Songs for Lucy,” the sequence of scene-like titles, the spine and the Aentitainment identity anchoring the object in an actual independent-label economy. The wraparound image allows the release to remain a manufactured artifact rather than dissolving into an isolated square JPEG. The download beneath it carries the sound, but the image carries evidence of how that sound originally entered the world: as an object with folds, surfaces, catalog information and a visual interpretation created through listening.
Placed after Pilot and Themes From Proxima and before Knownothingism, Need the Needle also becomes a chapter within a carefully maintained mutation. The group had already escaped its earlier black-metal identity, moved through cinematic collage and composed for an independent science-fiction film. Here it builds an almost entirely instrumental narrative whose meaning depends upon circulation and listener participation. The post does not smother that openness with explanation. It places the complete exterior object beside the complete audio archive and allows another person to cross the threshold. In that sense, the album and its preservation share a method: construct the stage, arrange the charged objects, transmit them, and trust that somebody elsewhere will discover a story inside.

Thee Maldoror Kollective - 2014 - Knownothingism

 

Argonauta Records – REX17  475.29MB FLAC

The image preserved with this post immediately distinguishes Knownothingism from the nervous cinematic machinery of the preceding Thee Maldoror Kollective releases. The full exterior of the CD stretches across one continuous field: track titles and label information hover over a faded landscape on the back, the narrow spine acts as a hinge, and the front places an intricate circular tree over an old East Asian scene of mountains, water and human figures. Above it appears the character 明, associated with brightness or illumination through the joining of sun and moon. Yet the album is called Knownothingism. Illumination and unknowing occupy the same package, suggesting that clarity may not arrive through collecting more facts but through accepting how little the controlling intellect can finally contain.
That idea also explains the album’s relationship to its predecessors. Pilot, Themes From Proxima and Need the Needle constantly changed sets, characters and technologies, often treating music as an imaginary film under aggressive editing. Knownothingism remains stylistically restless, but its changes feel less like trapdoors and more like currents moving through one large organism. The permanent center is Pina Kollars, whose voice gives emotional continuity to arrangements assembled from Marco Castagnetto and Norbert Bieber’s laptops, Anna Airoldi’s synthesizers, multiple guitarists, bass, accordion, tenor saxophone and David Piribauer’s drums. The group is still a kollective in the truest sense: not a fixed rock unit protecting one signature sound, but a temporary social body whose identity emerges from the interaction of its parts.
“Clarity, Oh Open Wound!” begins with a title that overturns the usual promise of enlightenment. Clarity is not healing, closure or intellectual mastery. It is an exposed injury. The music moves from crooked chamber music and cabaret unease into heavier electronic and rhythmic pressure, as though a ceremonial ballroom has developed a pulse beneath its floor. Accordion and synthetic orchestration give the opening an intentionally artificial theatricality, but Kollars prevents it from becoming clever scenery. Her voice is bodily, unpredictable and emotionally direct. The album repeatedly constructs elaborate conceptual rooms only for her singing to open a window through them.
“An Uncontrollable Moment of High Tide” continues that movement from the cerebral toward the elemental. Drums, cymbals, bass and synthesizers gather gradually rather than arriving as a conventional riff, producing the sensation of water exceeding the structures designed to contain it. The song’s imagery of wading, daughters and rising water places feminine energy beyond passive softness. Here Yin does not mean weakness or decorative calm. It is depth, receptivity, darkness, fertility and the enormous pressure of something capable of surrounding every rigid object placed within it. The high tide is uncontrollable because the music does not seek to dominate its subject. It allows accumulation to become form.
The twelve-minute “Cordyceps” introduces a darker version of surrender. The cordyceps fungus is famous for entering an insect host and altering its behavior so that the organism becomes a vehicle for the fungus’s reproduction. That biological horror fits a record concerned with unstable boundaries between self and environment. Kollars’s voice drifts through distortion and electronic space as though identity has become porous. The track eventually grows more rhythmic and physical, but the transformation does not feel like escape. The body has been returned with uncertain ownership. Laptop processing, guitar, bass and live drums become difficult to separate into natural and artificial sources, mirroring the parasite’s erasure of the line between inhabitant and inhabited.
“Mariguanda” provides the album’s most immediate physical release. Psychedelic guitar, forceful drumming, bass and Herbert Könighofer’s tenor saxophone gather into a dense, swinging procession. The title sounds half like a person, half like a plant, ritual or altered state, and the music thrives in that ambiguity. Kollars can sound commanding one moment and carried by the band the next. The saxophone and bass add a humid, nightclub quality that keeps the psychedelic rock from becoming a nostalgic reconstruction. This is not 1960s revivalism. It is older countercultural matter being fed through laptops, multinational collaboration and twenty-first-century studio consciousness until it grows unfamiliar organs.
“Lhasa & the Naked West” creates another revealing collision. Lhasa evokes Tibet, altitude, pilgrimage and an imagined spiritual East, while the “naked West” suggests a modern culture stripped of its technological armor, exposed without the systems through which it normally defines progress. The title could easily have become exotic tourism, but the music is too unstable to provide a comfortable spiritual postcard. Dub-like depth, electronics, guitar and Kollars’s voice produce a terrain in which East and West are not fixed territories. They are competing fantasies inside the same listener. The song asks what remains when cultural identity is removed from its costume, and whether the Western hunger for Eastern wisdom is itself another form of acquisition.
“Nirguna” moves closer to the album’s philosophical center. In Indian thought, nirguna refers to the divine without qualities, attributes or limiting form. This does not mean an empty nothingness but something that cannot be adequately captured by names and categories. The concept quietly unlocks the title Knownothingism. The record’s knowing-nothing is not stupidity or proud ignorance. It is resistance to the assumption that naming a thing exhausts it. TMK began within extreme metal, moved through industrial and cinematic experimentation, changed names, expanded personnel and continued shedding every description that threatened to become permanent. By 2014, not knowing what the group “is” may be the most accurate way to hear it.
The thirteen-minute “Ashima Complex” closes the album by turning that philosophy into architecture. Keyboards, rhythm, guitars, saxophone and electronic details accumulate in a long-form construction that seems capable of expanding in several directions at once. Rather than resolving the earlier contrasts between body and machine, feminine and masculine, East and West, knowledge and mystery, it lets them coexist as a complex. The word “complex” can mean a connected system, a psychological knot or a group of structures sharing one territory. All three apply. The piece gathers the album’s scattered languages without forcing them to speak with one accent.
The complete wraparound artwork displayed here becomes increasingly meaningful after listening. The circular tree is both crown and root system, an image of multiplicity contained within a single boundary. Its branches resemble nerves, rivers, fungi, handwriting and circuitry. Behind it, the traditional landscape continues beyond the circle, suggesting that the diagram is not the world itself but one temporary way of organizing perception. The back cover’s subdued continuation allows the track titles to appear almost like stages on a path, while the physical spine joins the two halves without pretending they are identical. Even the package participates in the album’s argument: a useful form can hold the work, but it cannot finally explain it.
This post also completes the four-release sequence assembled around TMK on the same day. Pilot presented the group as makers of imaginary cinema; Themes From Proxima converted sound into a possible vehicle between realities; Need the Needle built a stage of charged objects and incomplete narratives; Knownothingism arrives as the point where the urge to explain those objects begins to dissolve. The single image and large FLAC archive are sparse in presentation, but that sparseness is appropriate. The entire exterior object is visible, the music is available, and the listener is given room to enter without being told in advance what revelation should occur.
Knownothingism may be the group’s most welcoming album, but accessibility does not make it simple. Kollars’s voice provides an immediate human entrance while the arrangements continually rearrange the ground beneath her. Jazz, cabaret, psychedelic rock, drone, electronics, progressive composition and world-music textures pass through the record without becoming a checklist. The album’s real subject is the intelligence that appears when control is loosened: musicians listening across distance, styles surrendering their borders, and a singer moving through structures too strange to be reduced to accompaniment.
Its title finally becomes a declaration of freedom. To know nothing is not to have learned nothing. It is to reach the edge of accumulated definitions and remain receptive. The open wound becomes clarity because it has not sealed itself against sensation. The tide becomes wisdom because it ignores the walls built to contain it. The fungus, sacred city, unqualified divine and branching tree all describe forms of life that exceed the individual object. After years of changing identities, Thee Maldoror Kollective do not arrive at a final answer here. They create an hour of music spacious enough for the answer to remain alive by refusing to become final.

Thy Primordial - 1997 - Where Only The Seasons Mark The Paths Of Time

 

Pulverised Records – ASH 002  358.91MB FLAC

The wide scan chosen for this post lets the record announce itself as an object before the first note arrives: the severe band photograph on one side, an icy blue creature twisting through a barren, cosmic landscape on the other, and a web of ornamental symbols joining the human musicians to the imagined world they have summoned. O. Larsson’s cover artwork does not merely promise “cold” black metal in the familiar shorthand. It suggests a world where organic life, mythic life and geological time have become tangled together, which is exactly what the album’s title proposes. Seasons are the only remaining witnesses, marking paths after human calendars, institutions and names have disappeared. The post leaves that image almost entirely alone beside the original Pulverised Records catalog number and a large FLAC archive. That sparseness suits an album whose authority comes less from explanation than from the feeling that it has been excavated intact from its own climate.

Where Only the Seasons Mark the Paths of Time occupies a wonderfully crooked place in Thy Primordial’s chronology. The Mjölby band formed in 1994, first using the name Primordial, and had already recorded the material later issued as Under Iskall Trollmåne before entering Rolab Music Studio in August 1996 to make this album. Label delays reversed the intended order, so the second full-length they recorded became the first one listeners could actually buy. That accident matters. This is not quite a debut in the usual sense, full of musicians learning how to become themselves in public. It is a band arriving with an earlier album already behind them, even though almost nobody had heard it. The music therefore has both the violence of emergence and the discipline of a second attempt. Thy Primordial were surrounded by a Swedish black-metal culture famous for melodic precision, yet guitarist Mikael Andersson later described the group as leaning toward a less melodic, more Norwegian approach than many of their countrymen. The fascination of this record lies in the contradiction: it is relentlessly melodic, but the melodies are treated as cutting forces rather than decoration.

“The Conquest” opens without ceremony and establishes the album’s working physics: Morth’s drums drive at near-continuous attack velocity while Nisse Nilsson and Mikael Andersson build interlocking tremolo lines that seem to move in different directions through the same storm. One guitar often supplies the blade while the other supplies the horizon. Jonas Albrektsson’s bass does more than thicken the floor; when the arrangements briefly loosen, its movement helps prevent the high-speed passages from becoming a single gray surface. Isidor’s voice is pitched as a scorched, commanding rasp, mixed into the instrumental pressure rather than placed grandly above it. “Av ondskapens natur” and “Svart gryning” show how well the band understood momentum. The blast beats are not simply a permanent maximum setting. Small rhythmic contractions, descending turns, abrupt chord changes and short mid-paced sections keep resetting the listener’s balance. “Forthcoming Centuries” then enlarges the scale, turning the same vocabulary toward something almost processional. The songs remain concise, but they feel much larger because the guitars imply distances the recording never has to fill with keyboards or orchestral padding.

The three-minute title instrumental is the album’s hinge and secret center. After four songs of forward combustion, acoustic guitar, environmental sounds and brief clean vocal color open a clearing in the record. It is not a pleasant pastoral rest. It feels more like discovering that the blizzard has stopped because one has crossed into a place where ordinary weather no longer applies. The guest acoustic work by R. Larsson gives the title’s idea a physical shape: time becomes footsteps, rainfall, resonance and recurrence instead of a clock. When “Enrapture Silence” breaks the clearing apart, the second half feels newly sharpened. “Kristallklar vinternatt” and “Tronad av natten,” both connected to the band’s 1996 EP material, demonstrate how naturally Thy Primordial could join memorability to abrasion. Their melodic phrases are distinct enough to remain in the mind, but they never bloom into sentimental triumph. Even at its most beautiful, this music distrusts comfort. “Hail unto Thee... Who Travels over the Heavens” expands the album’s religious and cosmic language, while “Dödsskuggan” closes with the sensation of a shadow not falling across the world but rising from inside it.

The production deserves more attention than the usual praise for being “raw.” Recorded and mastered at Rolab Music Studio, the album was promoted as an unusually early underground metal release to use 20-bit mastering technology. Whatever weight one gives that claim, the audible result is an interesting collision between primitive atmosphere and deliberate separation. The guitars retain their frostbitten grain, the cymbals hiss and flare, and Isidor’s vocals remain harsh enough to feel physically weathered, yet the arrangements are not buried. This clarity is essential because Thy Primordial’s real strength is architectural. Their riffs are impressive individually, but the album’s power comes from how rapidly those riffs hand the listener from one elevation to another. Rolab was not primarily known as a black-metal studio, and the band reportedly chose it partly because they needed to record quickly after signing with Pulverised. That practical decision may have helped. The record avoids both the cavernous blur of imitation necro production and the lacquered brightness that later made some melodic black metal feel strangely weightless.

Its release route also belongs to the album’s meaning. Pulverised Records had only recently been founded in Singapore by musicians and tape traders, with Amon Amarth’s Sorrow Throughout the Nine Worlds as its first release; this CD followed as ASH 002. A young Swedish band from Östergötland reaching listeners through a young Southeast Asian label is the old underground at its most alive: geography reorganized by letters, dubbed tapes, magazines, parcels and obsessive attention. Roy Yeo, one of Pulverised’s founders, is credited with the layout, so even the physical design records that international collaboration. The album has since been reissued and absorbed into the canon of overlooked 1990s Swedish black metal, but its original character remains wonderfully unsettled. It belongs beside the period’s faster, melodic records without sounding reducible to any one famous neighbor. Where Only the Seasons Mark the Paths of Time is severe, technically alert and full of memorable guitar writing, yet its deepest achievement is atmospheric: it makes speed feel ancient. Anyone who heard the original Pulverised CD when it circulated, owns the limited vinyl, or knows more about Rolab’s claimed 20-bit mastering should add their piece of the weather record. Albums this enduring are rarely preserved by one official history; they survive through accumulated testimony, transfers, objects and listening.

Thy Primordial - 2001 - Under Iskall Troll Mane

 

WWIII – CD-71168  339.97MB FLAC

The single wide scan used here makes the 2001 edition feel less like a conventional album cover than an opened reliquary. On the right, a figure armed with blades steps away from a writhing mass of serpentine bodies in an image taken from Gustave Doré; on the left, the songs appear over a murky architectural interior, surrounded by small portraits of the band and repeated occult geometry. The design is considerably different from the crowded monochrome battle scene used for the scarce 1998 Gothic Records edition. WWIII was not merely putting an old recording back into circulation. It was giving the album another visual life, one that exchanged underground Scandinavian murk for the grand, theatrical antiquity of a nineteenth-century engraving. Even the title acquires an accidental second identity: the Swedish måne, meaning “moon,” appears on the cover as Mane, the ring over the å removed. Beneath an ice-cold troll moon becomes, through typography and international circulation, something slightly estranged from its own language.

Under iskall trollmåne is the debut album that arrived after its successor. Thy Primordial recorded it in 1995 and expected Gothic Records to release it in February 1996, but the label delayed it for approximately three years. Rather than wait for permission to have a career, the band recorded more music, signed with Pulverised Records and released Where Only the Seasons Mark the Paths of Time in 1997. When Gothic finally issued Under iskall trollmåne in August 1998 as a hand-numbered CD limited to 1,000 copies, listeners were receiving the band’s beginning after already hearing where that beginning had led. WWIII’s remastered 2001 edition complicated the chronology one more time. By then Thy Primordial had released several increasingly precise and technically forceful albums, making these raw 1995 sessions sound not merely old but archaeological. This post correctly identifies the artifact through the WWIII catalog number CD-71168: it is not simply “the 1995 album,” nor merely the elusive 1998 pressing, but the American reintroduction of a record already displaced inside its own history.

That displacement is present within the album itself. Tracks one through six were recorded and mixed at ABF:s Studio in June 1995, with drummer Morth handling the engineering and mixing. The final three tracks were made earlier, during February and March at Hypersonic Studio in Mjölby, with Patrik Jonsson recording and mixing. Those closing songs came from the band’s first demo, De mörka makters alla, issued while they were still using the shorter name Primordial. The finished album therefore moves backward as it progresses. Its newest recordings come first, while its oldest material waits at the end, like a buried foundation exposed after the building above it has been explored. That construction helps explain why the sound changes subtly during the final stretch. It is not simply uneven production. The listener is crossing the seam between two sessions and entering the band’s earliest preserved state.

“Mitt sökandes ritual” is a remarkable way to begin. At nearly nine minutes, it refuses the nervous efficiency associated with many first recordings and instead establishes the record through patience, repetition and gradual acceleration. Slower guitar figures create a ceremonial entrance before the band surges into faster passages, with the two guitars working less as rhythm and lead than as layers of moving weather. The production is thin compared with the greater separation and power of Where Only the Seasons Mark the Paths of Time, but thinness is not absence. It exposes the construction. Bass notes, pick attack, cymbal wash and small changes in the tremolo patterns remain audible because there is no enormous wall of studio mass covering them. Isidor’s voice is already severe, an abrasive rasp that sounds embedded in the room rather than theatrically suspended above the instruments. Morth’s drumming can be ferocious, but the music is not imprisoned inside continuous blasting. Its strongest passages are built from the tension between velocity and the slower, almost processional material that keeps returning beneath it.

Thy Primordial are usually placed within Swedish black metal, but this album reveals how porous that classification was. The precision, icy guitar tone and melodic motion belong to the Swedish environment that also produced Dissection, Dawn, Marduk and Dark Funeral, yet the atmosphere frequently leans toward the earlier Norwegian model: elongated repetition, raw spatial production and riffs intended to induce a state rather than merely display compositional skill. The melodies are already memorable, but they are not offered as heroic resolutions. They circle, descend and reopen the wound. “Den ondes klor” carries its title, “the claws of the evil one,” through music that repeatedly seems to seize and release the listener. The title track does not turn trolls or moonlight into folk-metal pageantry. Its landscape is older, emptier and less domesticated. The “troll moon” is not a cartoon creature in the sky but a sign that the familiar world has entered another jurisdiction.

The Swedish titles intensify that private geography: “Blodsgräs” evokes blood grass, “De viskande trädens skog” the forest of whispering trees, and “Bortom nattsvart himmel” a place beyond the night-black sky. These are not simply interchangeable declarations of darkness. Together they create a landscape in which natural things have become witnesses, conspirators or entrances. Trees whisper, grass holds blood, the sky becomes a barrier that might be crossed. “Bortom nattsvart himmel” is especially effective because the bass rises more clearly through the mix while the fast melodic guitars seem to widen the song rather than merely increase its aggression. The record’s language and sound are doing the same work: taking tangible objects and pulling them toward an unseen world. Even without keyboards, acoustic interludes or decorative folk instruments, the album creates a sense of ancient terrain through guitar intervals, repetition and pacing.

The final three songs reveal the rougher skeleton beneath Thy Primordial’s later identity. “De mörka makters alla,” “The Impression of War” and “Mörkrets fäste” originated on the 1995 demo, although “Mörkrets fäste” had originally appeared there under the English title “Dancing in Blood.” Their inclusion does more than fill out the running time. They preserve the moment when the group was separating itself from its earlier death-metal background and discovering what its version of black metal could become. The transitions are more abrupt, the performance less polished, and the guitar solos in the latter portion of the album can arrive with a surprisingly direct heavy-metal character. Rather than weakening the atmosphere, these moments reveal that black metal had not yet hardened into a single approved vocabulary. Melody, blast beats, raw production, traditional soloing and remnants of death metal could still coexist without needing to be reconciled into a marketable subgenre.

The 2001 remaster by Rick Plester does not conceal those origins. It places a frame around them. There is an important difference between restoration and modernization: a useful reissue should allow an old recording to speak more clearly without forcing it to pretend that it was made later. This edition retains the narrow, abrasive dimensions of the sessions while giving the instruments enough definition to expose the band’s early arrangement choices. The result may sound less massive than Thy Primordial’s subsequent records, but its limitations are inseparable from its character. One can hear five musicians solving problems in real time: how long a riff can remain hypnotic before it must change, how melody can survive violent drumming, how a bass line can quietly redirect a song, and how a Swedish band can absorb the Norwegian second wave without becoming a replica of it.

Under iskall trollmåne should not be treated merely as the primitive draft of the album reviewed immediately beside it. Its delayed appearance made it stranger and, in some ways, more revealing. Where Only the Seasons Mark the Paths of Time introduced Thy Primordial as a fully operating force; this record exposes the workshops underneath that force, including the earlier demo, the two studios, the uncertain contract and the years when the album existed without reaching its intended audience. Its history demonstrates how underground music can refuse a clean timeline. A record may be composed first, released third, remastered later, repackaged beneath unrelated artwork and finally encounter many of its listeners decades after the band has disappeared. Here it arrives once more as a large FLAC archive beneath an unfolded scan, carrying every stage of that journey at once. Anyone who owns the hand-numbered Gothic pressing, the WWIII edition, or another reissue may hear meaningful differences in mastering and presentation. Those impressions would add another layer to an album that has always reached the world by delayed and circuitous routes.

Thy Primordial - 1999 - At The World Of Untrodden Wonder

 

Pulverised Records – ASH 007   460.36MB FLAC

The extraordinary cover is almost a diagram of Thy Primordial’s music. A cold moon hangs over mountains, waterfalls and dark forests, but the landscape has split open to reveal an orange world of stone towers burning beneath it. At the World of Untrodden Wonder similarly places melody inside violence, allowing flashes of grandeur and strange beauty to appear through an otherwise relentless surface. It is less raw than Under iskall trollmåne and more expansive than Where Only the Seasons Mark the Paths of Time, capturing the band at the point where its speed, atmosphere and technical control had fused into a particularly complete language.

Recorded at Stockholm’s Sunlight Studio with Tomas Skogsberg and Fred Estby, the album has greater weight and definition than Thy Primordial’s earlier work without losing its abrasive edge. Morth’s drumming drives the songs with astonishing endurance, while the two guitars pour out tightly interlocked tremolo melodies that keep changing direction inside the attack. “For Fires to Burn” begins at full velocity, but this is not speed used as camouflage. Beneath the blast beats are carefully constructed riffs, active bass movement and melodic phrases strong enough to remain recognizable after the storm has passed. The title track briefly opens the music into cleaner, almost heroic spaces, while “Amongst the Chosen Lost,” “The Burden of Time” and “To Ruin and Decay” demonstrate how effectively the band could make continuous motion feel dramatic rather than mechanical.

The album’s ten songs rarely remain still long enough to settle into one emotional temperature. Triumph becomes desolation, forward movement folds into repetition, and moments of clarity are swallowed by another rush of guitars. Isidor’s scorched voice belongs inside this weather rather than above it, functioning as another jagged texture within the arrangements. Released by Pulverised Records in 1999, At the World of Untrodden Wonder stands among the more overlooked achievements of melodic Swedish black metal: furious without becoming shapeless, intricate without sacrificing instinct, and atmospheric without relying on keyboards or ornamental excess. The landscape on the cover may be imaginary, but by the end of these fifty-one minutes Thy Primordial have supplied it with climate, distance and its own brutal laws of motion.

Kristallnacht / Blessed In Sin / Seigneur Voland - 2001 - Gathered Under The Banner Of Concilium

Warspirit Productions – WSB CD001  162.25MB FLAC

 The stark monochrome scan presents this three-way split less as a casual compilation than as a declaration of alliance: three French black-metal entities assembled beneath the Concilium emblem, their individual identities compressed into one severe visual field. That presentation cannot be separated from the openly fascist and antisemitic ideology surrounding parts of this circle. The politics are not harmless gothic decoration, and acknowledging the music’s construction does not require treating its ideological content as neutral atmosphere.

Musically, Gathered Under the Banner of Concilium functions like a compact dossier rather than a unified album. Kristallnacht opens with a programmed, ceremonial introduction before “Legitimate Defence (The Law of Blood)” turns toward raw guitar motion and a rigid martial pulse. Blessed in Sin’s longer “Himmelfahrtskommando” introduces a more expansive and keyboard-colored approach, while Seigneur Voland occupies the center of gravity with three tightly packed songs driven by thin, cutting guitars, rapid drumming and vocals that seem scraped directly across the recording. The shared personnel help the transitions feel less abrupt than the three names suggest, but each project preserves its own temperature.

The final live cover of Beherit’s “The Gate of Nanna” strips away what little studio distance remains. Rough, unstable and partly swallowed by the room, it closes the disc as underground documentation rather than polished conclusion. Recorded across several sessions in 2000 and 2001, with the Beherit cover captured live in Saint-Orens, France, the split preserves a small interconnected scene at the moment it was defining itself through shared musicians, symbols and ideology. Its musical value lies in that concentrated collision of primitive black-metal abrasion, melody and ritual atmosphere; its historical value also requires facing exactly what banner these musicians chose to gather beneath.