Handful of Hate - 2013 - To Perdition

 

Code666 – CODE091  346.09MB FLAC

To Perdition sounds like Handful of Hate taking the controlled violence of You Will Bleed and removing its final traces of hesitation. The 2009 album had deliberately reached backward toward the primitive foundations of black metal, allowing broader riffs, rougher instinct, and older influences to show through the band’s accumulated discipline. Four years later, To Perdition drives that history into a colder and more technically exact form. The guitars remain melodic, the vocals still carry Nicola Bianchi’s unmistakable rasped venom, and the lyrics continue to circle bodies, corruption, humiliation, disease, and spiritual punishment, but the machinery surrounding those elements has become tighter. This is not chaos spilling from an opened chamber. It is organized descent, every turn in the road already calculated to lead downward.
The title track enters without ceremony. A sharp guitar figure establishes the direction, the drums immediately begin applying pressure, and Nicola’s voice appears as though the sentence has already been pronounced. Perdition is not presented as a distant theological possibility awaiting the sinner after death. It is a destination being approached in real time. The song’s shifts between blasting speed and more measured rhythmic passages give that approach physical shape. Faster sections suggest panic and acceleration, while slower movements make the outcome feel unavoidable. Handful of Hate have learned that speed can frighten, but weight can condemn.
Andrea Bianchi’s drumming is crucial throughout the record. He possesses the endurance required for sustained black metal velocity, but the performance is more valuable for the way it shapes transitions. Blasts suddenly contract into precise accents, double-bass movement thickens the guitars, and brief interruptions create space for riffs to strike with renewed force. This is not percussion used merely to prove extremity. It governs the album’s internal hierarchy, deciding when each section may advance and when it must be brought to a halt.
“Cursed Be Your Breast” returns to Handful of Hate’s long-standing fusion of religious language and bodily fixation. A breast may represent nourishment, sexuality, maternity, vulnerability, or idealized femininity, but the curse contaminates every meaning simultaneously. The title has the rhythm of an inverted blessing, a sacred formula turned against the body it would ordinarily protect. Musically, the track contains some of the album’s clearest melodic guitar movement, with high lines cutting through the dense percussion. The melody does not provide tenderness. It sharpens the sense that something once associated with life and intimacy has been selected for desecration.
“Far Beyond All Scourges” pushes punishment beyond the instruments traditionally used to inflict it. A scourge is both a whip and a destructive affliction, so travelling beyond all scourges suggests pain surpassing ordinary physical or historical measurement. The song’s rapid movement creates that excess, but its strongest quality is the precision with which the guitars continue forming recognizable shapes inside the attack. Nicola and Deimos do not allow velocity to flatten the writing. Their riffs rise, turn, and return with enough clarity to leave marks after the percussion has moved onward.
“Swines Graced Gods” creates one of the album’s most revealing reversals. Grace traditionally descends from divinity toward imperfect humanity, but here the swine appear to grant grace to the gods. The hierarchy has inverted so completely that the despised animal becomes capable of sanctioning the sacred. Handful of Hate have always been fascinated by corrupted orders, crowns placed upon vice, masters ruled by appetite, and religious symbols dragged through flesh. This title condenses that entire history into three words. The music is darker and more atmospheric than the surrounding tracks, showing that the band’s brutality still contains room for shadows rather than operating through speed alone.
The brief “Caro Data Vermibus” interrupts the attack with Latin: flesh given to worms. The phrase reduces the body to its final material destination, stripping away identity, status, desire, and spiritual ambition. After decades of songs about domination and power, Handful of Hate place a small reminder at the album’s center that every ruler and victim eventually becomes food. The track functions as a hinge. It does not soothe the record or provide a beautiful interlude. It opens a grave beneath it.
“Larvae” emerges from that grave slowly enough for the listener to feel its change of temperature. The song uses a more spacious and ominous arrangement, including a midsection whose reduced pace allows the guitar lines to hang in the air rather than flash past. Larvae represent unfinished life, transformation not yet completed, and forms whose future appearance cannot be predicted from their current bodies. Within this album, however, development does not promise beauty. The larvae seem to belong to decay, feeding upon what “Caro Data Vermibus” has offered them. Life continues, but only because death provides matter.
The production allows every unpleasant detail to remain audible. The guitars possess a cold upper edge without becoming weightless, while the bass supports the lowest part of the structure rather than vanishing beneath the drums. Nicola’s vocals are placed clearly enough to maintain authority but retain their rough, corroded texture. The album sounds modern compared with Handful of Hate’s earliest work, yet it does not chase the enormous, polished density common to contemporary extreme metal. Its clarity serves the cutting edges. Each note is exposed enough to puncture.
“Ornaments for Derision” imagines mockery becoming decorative. Ornaments ordinarily beautify, commemorate, or display status, but here they exist for contempt. The victim’s humiliation becomes something worn publicly, perhaps by the oppressor or by the social order that enjoys the spectacle. The song moves with a controlled violence characteristic of the entire album. Stop-start changes and rhythmic cuts prevent the riffs from becoming predictable, while recurring melodic shapes bind the sections together. Derision is not spontaneous laughter. It has been designed and displayed.
“Ex Abrupto” announces suddenness through its Latin title, and the music follows with a sequence of sharp changes. Yet even these abrupt movements reveal the band’s discipline. Nothing sounds accidental. The song creates the sensation of surprise through careful preparation, making each cut feel like a trap whose mechanism was hidden until the instant it closed. This distinction matters. Handful of Hate no longer depend upon unstable performance to generate danger. They can manufacture instability deliberately.
“Words Like Worms” brings language into the album’s ecology of decomposition. Words crawl, enter wounds, consume from within, and multiply beyond the speaker’s control. They may be insults, doctrines, memories, accusations, or phrases repeated so often that they become internal parasites. The title recognizes that violence need not remain physical to alter a body permanently. Language can live inside its recipient long after the original voice has disappeared. The music’s repeated guitar figures support this idea, returning with the persistence of thoughts that cannot be expelled.
This track also connects the album’s bodily imagery to Nicola’s role as lyricist and vocalist. Handful of Hate use words to create wounds while simultaneously describing the wound-making power of words. The contradiction is productive. Extreme music can offer listeners a space in which hostile language is contained inside art, but containment does not make that language meaningless. The voice still acts upon the nervous system. It may repel, excite, disturb, or become attached to memories the writer could never have anticipated.
“Feeding Sufferings” is the album’s longest and most developed composition. Its grammar is deliberately strange, turning suffering into something plural that can be fed, maintained, and encouraged to grow. The song begins with greater patience than much of the record, allowing atmosphere to gather before the full assault resumes. This slower construction gives the track emotional depth. Suffering is not merely inflicted in one violent moment. It becomes an organism requiring nourishment. Resentment, memory, cruelty, shame, and repeated attention keep it alive.
The longer form allows the band to revisit several aspects of its history without losing the album’s concentrated identity. Melodic tremolo lines recall the more atmospheric early work, while the drumming and heavier passages retain the physical discipline developed through ViceCrown and You Will Bleed. To Perdition is strongest when these periods cease to feel like separate stylistic choices. On “Feeding Sufferings,” they become one language: melody as scar, speed as panic, rhythm as control, and atmosphere as the chamber in which damage continues breathing.
“Damnatio ad Bestias” closes the record by invoking the ancient Roman punishment of condemnation to wild animals. The victim was not simply executed but converted into public spectacle, placed before a crowd and destroyed by creatures whose violence could be presented as both entertainment and judgment. The title gathers many of Handful of Hate’s recurring concerns into one historical image: hierarchy, humiliation, flesh, institutional punishment, spectatorship, and the reduction of a person into an object upon which authority demonstrates itself.
The music refuses to turn that image into distant antiquity. The drums drive forward, the guitars retain their severe melodic edge, and Nicola’s vocals deliver the conclusion with no suggestion that the descent might be reversed. The album began on the road to perdition and ends inside an arena where punishment has become public ceremony. No supernatural demon is required. Human organization has already created the machinery.
This is where the Italian character of Handful of Hate’s black metal remains most compelling. Their music has long existed beneath the shadows of Catholic ritual, martyrdom, relics, crowns, bodily suffering, and Roman systems of authority. Even when the band rejects Christian morality, it remains fascinated by the physical and architectural language through which power becomes sacred. Latin titles appear not as exotic decoration but as surviving pieces of an inherited order. The band turns those pieces over, stains them, and rebuilds them into adversarial monuments.
To Perdition may not possess the youthful occult sprawl of Qliphotic Supremacy or the decisive rebirth represented by ViceCrown, but it captures Handful of Hate at a high level of compositional control. The lineup plays with unified intent, the production exposes rather than disguises the musicianship, and the record’s forty-five minutes contain enough variation to prevent the speed from becoming featureless. The slower sections matter because they create depth, while the melodies matter because they give each act of violence a recognizable outline.
The album’s greatest achievement is its refusal to romanticize descent. Perdition is not portrayed as heroic liberation or glamorous rebellion. It is populated by curses, swine, worms, larvae, derision, parasitic language, cultivated suffering, and public execution. The downward path does not reveal a magnificent infernal kingdom waiting to reward the outcast. It reveals matter consuming matter and institutions converting pain into order.
Handful of Hate nevertheless make that bleakness exhilarating through craft. Riffs cut cleanly, drums reorganize the air, and melodic lines burn briefly above the machinery before disappearing. The pleasure of listening exists in tension with the ugliness being described. That tension has always been central to extreme music: disciplined human creation used to represent degradation, suffering, and collapse. To Perdition does not resolve the contradiction. It sharpens it until beauty and cruelty travel down the same road, each making the other easier to see.

Handful of Hate - 2019 - Adversus

 

Code666 – code126  312.27MB FLAC

Adversus is built around opposition so completely that even its moments of forward movement feel like acts of resistance. The Latin title can be read as “against,” “opposed to,” or “facing,” and Handful of Hate use that position as both philosophy and compositional method. Six years after To Perdition, Nicola Bianchi returns with a record that does not attempt to rediscover the occult uncertainty of the band’s debut or the deliberate primitivism of You Will Bleed. Instead, Adversus gathers the precision, violence, melodic severity, and ceremonial imagery developed across more than twenty-five years, then directs them toward a single condition: standing against whatever claims the authority to define, govern, redeem, or absorb the individual. The album is not chaotic rebellion. It is hostility given discipline, heraldry, and architectural form.
“An Eagle Upon My Shield (Veteris Vestigia Flammae)” establishes that heraldic atmosphere immediately. The eagle is an old emblem of empire, vision, conquest, military authority, and spiritual ascent, while the shield turns identity into something carried defensively into conflict. The Latin phrase, drawn from the idea of recognizing traces of an old flame, introduces memory beneath the martial surface. Something once burning has left marks that remain active. Musically, the track is broad and carefully constructed, opening the album with more patience than a simple blast-beat assault would permit. Guitars establish severe melodic lines before the drums increase the pressure, creating the sensation of a banner being raised before the charge begins.
The production gives Handful of Hate’s music a sharp modern body without polishing away its abrasiveness. The guitars remain cold and serrated, but individual movements can be followed through the densest passages. Bass strengthens the lower structure, while the drumming combines sustained velocity with sudden changes of weight. Nicola’s vocals occupy the recording like corroded proclamations. He no longer sounds overwhelmed by the symbols he invokes, as he occasionally did on Qliphotic Supremacy. By this stage he sounds fully installed within the language he has spent decades constructing.
“Before Me (The Womb of Spite)” turns spite into a place of origin. The title suggests that whatever stands before the speaker has been born from resentment, opposition, and accumulated injury. A womb ordinarily represents protection and creation, but here it nurtures hostility. This reversal is characteristic of Handful of Hate, whose music repeatedly corrupts sacred, maternal, erotic, and ceremonial imagery by placing it inside systems of domination. The song’s riffs coil and release with remarkable control, allowing melody to emerge without weakening the violence. Spite is not an uncontrolled emotional outburst. It has gestated long enough to become a complete organism.
“Carved in Disharmony (Void and Essence)” treats conflict as an inscription placed permanently into being. To be carved in disharmony means opposition is not merely encountered from outside; it has entered the structure of the self. The parenthetical phrase joins emptiness and substance, two conditions that should cancel one another but instead become inseparable. The music mirrors this contradiction through dense attack interrupted by sudden spaces, rhythmic cuts, and melodic lines that appear to open the arrangement before being swallowed again. Handful of Hate’s writing has become especially effective at making absence feel active. The gaps do not offer relief. They resemble wounds cut into the surrounding sound.
The relationship between void and essence also captures the album’s spiritual position. Adversus rejects approved religious order, but it does not embrace simple meaninglessness. The record remains crowded with symbols, flames, shields, ruins, idols, redemption, psalms, and fallen figures. Its opposition to sanctity creates another sacred language rather than an empty world. Handful of Hate have always inverted hierarchy more often than they abolish it. Thrones are corrupted, grace is wounded, gods are humiliated, and vice receives a crown, but authority itself remains fascinating.
“Severed and Reversed (Feudal Attitude)” makes this fascination explicit. Feudalism organizes bodies through inherited rank, obligation, possession, and submission. The title imagines that structure being cut apart and turned backward, though reversal does not necessarily produce equality. The servant may become master while the logic of domination survives unchanged. The song is compact, violent, and rhythmically forceful, suggesting an overturning accomplished through physical action rather than philosophical debate. Handful of Hate’s rebellion rarely imagines a peaceful commons beyond hierarchy. It imagines the humiliated acquiring enough force to reverse the blade.
“Down Lower (Men and Ruins)” descends into one of the album’s most recognizably Italian landscapes. Ruins in this music are not distant fantasy scenery. They belong to a culture where collapsed empires, churches, fortifications, ossuaries, martyrdoms, and layers of political authority remain physically present. Men exist among ruins while also becoming ruins themselves. The song’s downward movement is both spiritual and historical. There is no promised ascent away from decay, only a deeper examination of what power leaves behind when its monuments outlast the bodies that built them.
This track also demonstrates how effectively the band now balances speed with weight. Earlier records sometimes treated acceleration as the primary proof of extremity. Adversus allows slower passages to strike with greater authority because they arrive after intense movement. The drums do not merely propel the riffs; they reshape the ground beneath them. A sudden reduction in speed can feel like a structure collapsing rather than the music simply relaxing.
“Celebrate, Consume... Burn!” provides the album’s most openly contemporary title. Celebration becomes consumption, and consumption ends in destruction. The sequence resembles a compressed portrait of a culture trained to experience desire through acquisition: obtain the object, display it, exhaust it, and discard or burn what remains. The song moves with startling speed, but its punctuation is equally important. The ellipsis creates a tiny pause between appetite and consequence. Burning is not an accidental ending. It is the final stage built into the ritual from the beginning.
Handful of Hate’s hostility here extends beyond religion into systems of social appetite. Consumption can refer to commodities, bodies, identities, ideologies, and even rebellion itself. Underground cultures are not immune. An image of transgression can be purchased, displayed, and replaced as easily as anything else. By placing celebration at the start of the sequence, the band suggests that participation may feel pleasurable even while it feeds destruction. The song’s exhilarating musical violence makes the listener part of that contradiction.
“Toward the Fallen Ones (Psalms to Discontinuity)” turns attention toward those who have dropped out of accepted order. The fallen may be defeated figures, rejected angels, lost companions, historical failures, or people unable to maintain continuity with the world around them. The parenthetical phrase imagines psalms written not for eternal unity but for interruption. Discontinuity becomes worthy of ritual address. Something has broken between past and present, body and identity, belief and experience, yet the break itself produces a new form of song.
This is one of Adversus’ deeper ideas. Opposition does not always create a coherent alternative. Sometimes it produces discontinuity, a refusal or inability to remain connected to inherited narratives. Handful of Hate do not repair that break. They honor it. Their psalm belongs to those whose lives, beliefs, and histories no longer form a smooth line.
“Thorns to Redemption (Gemendo Germinat)” places pain inside the route toward salvation. The Latin phrase suggests growth through groaning or lamentation, as though suffering itself germinates. Christian symbolism frequently joins thorns, blood, agony, and redemption, but Handful of Hate rearrange those materials until it becomes unclear whether redemption is being sought, mocked, or replaced. The music carries one of the album’s strongest combinations of melody and severity. The guitar lines rise with something approaching grandeur while the vocals and drums prevent the movement from becoming consoling.
This ambiguity is central to the band’s relationship with religious imagery. Nicola’s work rejects Christianity while remaining intensely engaged with its physical language: wounds, flesh, crowns, grace, damnation, relics, punishment, and salvation. Hatred does not erase fascination. The rejected system continues supplying the architecture through which rejection is expressed. Adversus is therefore not spiritually empty. It is a long argument conducted inside a cathedral whose altar has been overturned but whose stones remain standing.
“Idols to Hung” strips worship down to punishment. The unusual grammar makes the phrase feel blunt and foreign, but also gives it the quality of a command or inscription. Idols are ordinarily raised, displayed, and adored; here they are selected for hanging. Yet destroying an idol can become another ritual that confirms its power. People rarely execute symbols that mean nothing to them. The song’s heavy rhythmic sections give the act a public, almost processional force. This is not private disbelief. It is iconoclasm performed as spectacle.
“Icons with Devoured Faces” completes the album by attacking the part of the sacred image through which recognition occurs. A face allows an icon to look back, identify, judge, comfort, or command. Once consumed, the body of the image remains but its authority becomes unreadable. This is more disturbing than simple destruction. A ruined icon can still be recognized as holy, but an icon whose face has been eaten occupies an unstable space between reverence, corpse, and empty object.
The closing track therefore gives Adversus an appropriate final image. The album does not merely oppose authority from outside. It enters the image, removes its identifying center, and leaves the remaining structure standing. That process mirrors Handful of Hate’s entire musical history. The band has taken black metal, Catholic symbolism, occult hierarchy, erotic domination, historical ruin, and inherited forms of punishment, then repeatedly consumed and rearranged their faces. The underlying materials remain recognizable, but they now belong to a private language.
Adversus may not contain the youthful strangeness of Qliphotic Supremacy or the decisive transformation of ViceCrown, but it presents Handful of Hate at an unusually complete stage of development. The musicians no longer need to choose between raw instinct and technical precision, melody and violence, primitive black metal and modern production. Those elements have become integrated enough that the band can concentrate on shape, pacing, and symbolic continuity.
The album’s ten songs also benefit from their distinct identities. Each approaches opposition through a different object: shield, womb, carving, reversal, ruins, consumption, fallen bodies, thorns, idols, and faces. Together they form a sequence in which resistance moves from defense toward desecration. The record begins with an emblem held before the body and ends with the opposing emblem’s features consumed.
Adversus is therefore less a manifesto of freedom than a study of confrontation. It recognizes that prolonged opposition changes both sides. The enemy supplies language, symbols, and structure; the adversary sharpens identity through resistance. After decades of writing about domination, flesh, heresy, and punishment, Handful of Hate sound fully aware that hatred can become a bond as powerful as devotion. To stand permanently against something is still to face it, measure oneself by it, and carry its outline upon the shield.

Grabesmond - 1999 - Xenoglossie

Draenor Productions – DPR 007  285.80MB APE

 Xenoglossie feels like a book of short supernatural scenes whose pages have been scattered across several languages, centuries, and states of consciousness. Grabesmond’s second and final album is rooted in the Austrian black metal underground, yet very little of it behaves like a conventional metal recording. Guitars appear only as one possible color among synthesizers, bells, sampled voices, martial rhythms, choral textures, and small neoclassical figures. Most of its fifteen tracks are instrumental, and many last less than two minutes, giving the album the structure of an occult cabinet rather than a continuous symphonic journey. Open one drawer and there is a blood-dark procession; open another and a music box is turning inside an abandoned nursery; the next contains a ruined city, a black angel, a wolf, a dead god, or dancers moving around a grave.

The title refers to the supposed ability to speak or write in a language one has never consciously learned. That idea provides a useful way into the album. Xenoglossie does not settle into one stable musical vocabulary. It moves among English, German, Swedish, Latin, medieval imagery, Norse myth, Gothic horror, dark ambient, neoclassical composition, and the residual atmosphere of black metal without treating any single language as its permanent home. The album seems to speak through borrowed tongues, but those tongues emerge from one imagination. Lucia-M. Fåroutan-Kubik composed and performed everything, transforming the project from its earlier underground origins into a highly personal form of miniature musical theatre.

“Screams of the Past” opens with less a scream than the afterimage of one. Bells, echoes, and distant synthetic tones create the impression of sound surviving after its source has vanished. The past is not presented as a sequence of remembered events. It is an active acoustic presence, returning through architecture and repetition. The piece lasts under two minutes, yet it establishes the album’s entire method: suggest a location, allow a few details to become visible, then close the scene before the listener can determine exactly what happened there.

“Multiscum Lacrimis” introduces a more mournful and classically shaped melody. The Latinized title appears to invoke many tears, and the music carries grief without becoming grandly tragic. Its keyboard line is small, almost intimate, as though sorrow has been reduced to a private ritual repeated in an empty room. Grabesmond’s synthetic instrumentation is important here. The sounds do not convincingly imitate a real chamber orchestra, but that slight artificiality creates emotional distance. The music resembles an old ceremony reconstructed from fragments rather than performed intact by living musicians.

“Night’s Dominion” is one of the album’s longer vocal pieces and gives darkness something resembling political authority. Night does not merely fall across the landscape; it governs it. The rhythm grows more forceful, and the layered voices make the track feel populated by figures moving beneath a single nocturnal law. Yet even at its most dramatic, Grabesmond avoids the massed grandeur of symphonic metal. The arrangement remains strangely hollow, leaving enough space around its components for the listener to feel the darkness between them.

The brief “Isis-Noreja” adds another symbolic system without explaining how it connects to the others. This refusal to create a clean mythology is part of the album’s fascination. Egyptian, Germanic, Christian, folkloric, and invented images coexist like objects collected by a dream rather than organized by a historian. Xenoglossie is not a lesson in comparative religion. It is an atmosphere produced when unrelated sacred languages begin echoing inside one another.

“Min svart ängel,” or “My Black Angel,” gives the album one of its most recognizably Gothic forms. The black angel can be a fallen protector, an intimate embodiment of death, a corrupted guide, or the shadow side of the self. The music does not settle the image. Melody and darkness remain balanced, with enough beauty to make the figure attractive and enough unease to prevent trust. This ambiguity is central to Grabesmond’s work. Horror is rarely presented as pure ugliness. It arrives beautifully dressed, carrying a familiar face.

“D’helle phat wirt im entrant” is another tiny doorway, its archaic or deliberately distorted language adding to the album’s linguistic dislocation. Words throughout Xenoglossie often seem less important for their exact translation than for their age, texture, and foreignness. They behave as sonic relics. The listener recognizes that language is present but may not possess the key to unlock it, reproducing the condition suggested by the album’s title.

“Spectacle of Death” gives mortality a public stage. The piece is stately rather than savage, suggesting procession, display, and ritualized observation. Death becomes something arranged for witnesses, perhaps a funeral, execution, dance, or theatrical pageant. The music’s synthetic dignity recalls the old danse macabre tradition in which every rank of society is eventually drawn into the same procession. Grabesmond repeatedly treats death not as an isolated biological event but as a social and aesthetic structure built around the dead.

“Blodström,” or “Bloodstream,” is among the album’s darkest passages. Deep synthesizer tones and more abrasive textures create the sensation of movement through an interior channel. The title turns blood into landscape, allowing the listener to travel inside the body rather than merely observe it from outside. Its darkness is unusually physical for an album often concerned with ruins, myths, and spectral distance. Here the environment pulses, circulates, and carries life while remaining inseparable from injury and death.

“Fabula” briefly opens a lighter medieval space. Its melody resembles a tale told in a few illuminated panels rather than a full narrative. The Latin word can mean story, fable, or dramatic plot, and the track feels aware that the entire album may be a collection of fabricated histories. Grabesmond does not ask the listener to believe these scenes literally. Their truth lies in how quickly they produce an emotional world.

“Vom Wolfe” summons the wolf through another compressed instrumental. The animal is never fully pictured, but its cultural weight enters immediately: wilderness, appetite, danger, exile, pack loyalty, and the boundary between human settlement and whatever watches beyond it. The piece works because it does not overdescribe. The wolf remains partly outside the music, moving parallel to it in darkness.

“Obscene Obsession” is the album’s longest track and one of its most developed vocal compositions. The title joins fixation with violation, suggesting desire that has crossed beyond socially permitted form. Its length allows the arrangement to gather dramatic weight, and the vocals give the obsession a human center absent from many of the shorter instrumentals. Yet the song remains less confessional than theatrical. The speaker appears as another figure in Grabesmond’s gallery, consumed by an appetite whose object is never fully revealed.

“At the Edge of Our World” creates a threshold rather than a destination. Its placement late in the sequence suggests that the preceding tracks have gradually carried the listener toward a border where ordinary geography and language begin to fail. The piece is brief and suspended, offering no assurance about what exists beyond that edge. It may be death, dream, myth, or simply the point where known forms no longer organize experience.

“Totgeboren,” meaning stillborn or born dead, gives that threshold a brutal human image. Birth and death occur in the same word, eliminating the interval in which identity ordinarily develops. The instrumental treats this contradiction with restraint. It does not become melodramatic or graphically horrific. Instead, the music creates a cold vacancy, a place prepared for life that remains unoccupied.

“Balder’s Sturz” invokes the fall of Balder, the radiant Norse god whose death signals cosmic disorder and contributes to the coming of Ragnarök. At barely more than a minute, the piece does not attempt to narrate the myth. It presents the fall as a symbolic flash: beauty struck down, divine immunity failing, and an apparently stable world revealing the fatal weakness already hidden inside it. The use of Balder also connects Grabesmond to the mythological interests of the Austrian black metal circle, but the musical treatment remains more like dark chamber music than metal.

“Totentanz” closes the album with the dance of death. After so many isolated images, the finale gathers them into movement. The dead are no longer silent objects arranged in crypts and memories. They dance, and through dancing briefly regain social form. The melody is dark but not hopeless, carrying an almost bittersweet quality. Death becomes the one language every preceding fragment has been approaching, the common tongue beneath Latin, Swedish, German, English, mythology, and dream.

That conclusion clarifies the title. Xenoglossie may describe speech in languages never learned, but music itself is the album’s deeper foreign tongue. Synthesizers allow Lucia-Mariam Fåroutan-Kubik to speak as choirs, bells, orchestras, ghosts, wolves, gods, dancers, and ruined architecture without requiring those things to exist physically. The artificial sounds do not conceal their artificiality. They transform it into evidence that imagination can inhabit forms unavailable to the body producing them.

Compared with Mordenheim, this album is darker, more fragmented, and more willing to approach ambient unease. It retains the earlier record’s medieval and neoclassical beauty, but that beauty is repeatedly interrupted by harsher rooms. The short tracks make the experience resemble turning through an illustrated manuscript whose pictures have been damaged, reordered, and partially translated. There is continuity, but it comes from mood rather than narrative.

Xenoglossie also captures a particular late-1990s underground freedom. A project connected to black metal could release an album largely composed of keyboards, programmed textures, and miniature instrumental scenes without needing to resolve whether it belonged to dungeon synth, darkwave, neoclassical music, dark ambient, or something else. Those categories can help listeners locate it now, but the record itself feels less interested in genre than in permission. It uses whatever sound will open the next chamber.

Grabesmond ended after this album, leaving only a small body of work. That brevity strengthens Xenoglossie’s aura. There was no long career in which its strange decisions became ordinary habits, no sequence of later albums explaining what every symbol meant. The record remains a closed object filled with partial languages. Its ruins have not been restored, and its dead have not stopped dancing. Listeners who know more about the recording, the titles, the Austrian circle around the project, or the exact meanings hidden in its multilingual fragments may be able to illuminate further rooms, but some doors are probably better left half-open.

Grabesmond - 1997 - Mordenheim

 

Draenor Productions – DPR004  199.43MB APE

Mordenheim sounds like a medieval town reconstructed from dreams rather than historical evidence. Its towers lean at impossible angles, moonlit celebrations occur behind locked gates, graves speak in Swedish, and every ballroom appears to have been waiting for centuries for the same solitary visitor. Grabesmond’s first full-length emerged from the Austrian black metal underground, but it uses almost none of the standard equipment of black metal aggression. There are no shrieked vocals, distorted guitar assaults, or blast beats governing the journey. Instead, Lucia-Mariam Fåroutan builds the album from synthesizers, piano-like melodies, programmed rhythms, choral textures, bells, and brief neoclassical miniatures. The result is connected to black metal less through sound than through imagination: nocturnal solitude, ruined grandeur, death, folklore, and the creation of a private world standing outside ordinary time.

Grabesmond had originally been formed in 1995 by Peter Kubik and Richard Lederer, musicians connected to Abigor and Summoning, as an experiment in creating atmosphere beyond their primary bands. After that first incarnation dissolved, Fåroutan revived the name and redirected it toward a far more personal form. Mordenheim therefore feels like both a debut and a reclamation. It inherits an underground identity but refuses to obey the expectations attached to it. The record does not sound like a side project trying to imitate the parent bands in softer form. It establishes an independent musical country whose laws are written by mood, image, and movement rather than riffs.

“Evocation” opens the gate in barely more than a minute. Its stately keyboard figure acts less like an introduction than a small ceremonial key. There is no long atmospheric buildup because the album assumes the world already exists. The listener is simply being admitted. “Min grav,” or “My Grave,” then establishes the record’s emotional center. Its melody is mournful without becoming oppressive, carrying the peculiar peace that can arise when death is imagined as a place of rest rather than an approaching catastrophe. The synthetic tones have a delicate, slightly unreal quality, suggesting not a physical burial site but an interior chamber prepared inside memory.

This artificiality is essential to the album’s power. Mordenheim does not attempt to disguise keyboards as a convincing orchestra. Its strings, choirs, horns, and piano tones remain recognizably electronic. Rather than weakening the illusion, this gives the music the texture of an old computer dreaming about castles, forests, and funerals. The distance between the modest equipment and the enormous world being imagined creates much of the beauty. Every synthetic note asks the listener to complete the architecture.

“Hoffest” brings life into the town. The title suggests a court festival, and the music carries a lighter, almost processional movement. Yet the celebration never feels completely safe. The melodies retain a crookedness, as though the dancers may be ghosts repeating an event whose original participants have long disappeared. Grabesmond’s medieval atmosphere differs from the heroic pageantry often heard in dungeon synth. There are no obvious victories or noble quests. Courtly beauty is present, but it has already begun decaying around the edges.

The seven-minute title track is the album’s central structure. “Mordenheim” can be read as a constructed place-name, joining murder or death with home. The music enters this city gradually, moving through several melodic rooms without reducing them to a simple narrative. A solemn opening gives way to more animated movement, then withdraws into shadow again. Because the piece is entirely instrumental, the listener is free to decide whether Mordenheim is a haunted settlement, an afterlife, a memory of Europe, or an inward refuge built from darkness. The strongest imaginary places are never explained completely. They become durable because each visitor is allowed to populate them differently.

“Mitternachtsball” compresses a midnight ball into just over a minute. Its brevity makes it feel like a glimpse through an open doorway: chandeliers, revolving figures, fabric, candlelight, then the door closes before anyone inside notices the observer. This miniature form becomes one of the album’s defining methods. Several pieces last less than ninety seconds, but they do not function as incomplete sketches. They behave like illustrated panels separating the larger chambers. Their smallness gives the record the rhythm of a storybook whose pages turn unexpectedly.

“Gravlik stämma” deepens the sepulchral atmosphere. The title suggests a grave-like voice, yet there is no literal singing. The melody itself becomes the voice, speaking without language from below the visible surface. The use of Swedish titles alongside German and English contributes to the sense that Mordenheim exists outside one national or linguistic identity. Words act as runes attached to locations rather than complete explanations. Their foreignness, depending upon the listener, leaves part of each room locked.

“Tränenmeer,” or “Sea of Tears,” is another brief composition, but its image expands far beyond its duration. Tears become a landscape capable of swallowing the individual sorrow that produced them. The piece is delicate enough to feel almost weightless, yet it carries the accumulated sadness of the album’s graves, midnight rooms, and vanished courts. Fåroutan rarely forces emotion through overwhelming crescendos. She places a small melody in the air and allows its repetition to enlarge it.

“Dimman kommer rullande,” meaning “The Fog Comes Rolling,” gives motion to the atmosphere itself. The fog is not merely present; it approaches, covers distance, and gradually alters what can be seen. The music moves with similar patience, allowing layers of synthesizer to obscure and reveal one another. This track provides one of the clearest links between Grabesmond and the atmospheric imagination surrounding black metal. Fog removes ordinary spatial certainty. Familiar buildings become silhouettes, distances collapse, and the world briefly appears available for supernatural reinterpretation.

“Traumwelt” enters the dream world openly. Its melody is warmer than much of the album, but warmth here is not the same as daylight. It resembles the comfort of becoming aware that one is dreaming and choosing not to wake. The track captures why fantasy music can offer more than simple escape. A dream world reorganizes emotions that waking life leaves scattered. Fear becomes architecture, grief becomes weather, and loneliness becomes a road through an empty kingdom. By giving those conditions form, the music makes them inhabitable.

“Fortuna” lasts less than a minute, introducing the old figure of fate or fortune as a tiny turning mechanism within the album. Its brevity resembles the sudden rotation of a wheel. One condition becomes another before anyone can prepare. The piece leads into “Carnival of Fear,” where the record’s courtly and Gothic tendencies meet most vividly. Carnival traditionally permits masks, inversions, excess, and temporary suspension of social order. Grabesmond’s carnival is not loud or chaotic, however. It feels like a miniature procession assembled from painted figures, mechanical dancers, and smiling faces whose expressions have been fixed too long.

“Midnattssol,” the midnight sun, introduces another contradiction: illumination arriving at the hour reserved for darkness. The piece glows gently, suggesting that the album’s night is not completely without light. Yet this light does not restore normal daytime reality. It belongs to the same dream geography, revealing objects without explaining them. The final “Endzeit,” or “End Time,” then closes the record in under a minute. There is no enormous apocalypse and no attempt at a triumphant finale. Time simply contracts and stops. The modest ending suits an album whose power has always come from suggestion rather than spectacle.

Compared with Xenoglossie, Mordenheim is gentler, more medieval, and more unified. The later album would introduce harsher dark ambient textures, sampled voices, machinery, linguistic fracture, and a stronger sense of supernatural disturbance. Mordenheim remains closer to dream, melancholy, and neoclassical fantasy. Its darkness is softened by curiosity. Even the graves and ruined chambers seem available for exploration rather than designed solely to threaten.

That balance makes the album difficult to place neatly. It can be described as dungeon synth, neoclassical darkwave, dark ambient, or an offshoot of the Austrian black metal underground, but none of those labels fully contains it. Mordenheim predates the moment when “dungeon synth” became a widely stabilized contemporary identity with recognizable visual codes, cassette rituals, and online micro-scenes. It belongs to an earlier freedom in which musicians connected to metal could make keyboard records without needing to decide precisely which adjacent genre would claim them.

The album’s compact running time also protects its atmosphere. At roughly thirty-three minutes, it never remains in one chamber long enough for enchantment to become wallpaper. The succession of short pieces and longer compositions creates a sense of continual discovery. Every few minutes another door opens, but the rooms remain connected by Fåroutan’s melodic personality. Her writing favors clear, memorable phrases whose apparent simplicity hides their emotional precision. The tunes often sound ancient despite being produced through modern electronics, as though they were remembered rather than composed.

Mordenheim ultimately succeeds because it understands that an imaginary world does not require exhaustive detail. A grave, a court festival, a midnight ball, rolling fog, a carnival, a dream, and the end of time are enough. From those fragments, the listener constructs streets, inhabitants, histories, and private meanings. Grabesmond supplies the lanterns and doorways but leaves much of the city unlit.

The record remains a distinctive artifact because it does not behave like a genre exercise or a lesser appendix to better-known Austrian bands. It is Lucia-Mariam Fåroutan’s own territory, created through modest instruments and an unusually vivid internal sense of place. Mordenheim is small enough to enter in one sitting but spacious enough to continue growing afterward. The gates close after “Endzeit,” yet the melodies leave behind the suspicion that the town remains active somewhere beyond hearing, its midnight ball turning endlessly beneath synthetic stars.

Ezio Piermattei - 2021 - From Afar It Looks Like an Oriflamme

 

more mars team – mm30  196.15MB FLAC

From Afar It Looks Like an Oriflamme begins in the unstable territory between recognition and uncertainty. Voices appear close enough to suggest ordinary human presence, but their circumstances remain unclear. A room can be heard without being pictured. Objects scrape, resonate, or shift their weight. Tapes introduce sounds whose original moment has already passed, while field recordings open onto spaces that may be public, domestic, rural, mechanical, or entirely reconstructed. Ezio Piermattei does not arrange these materials into a conventional documentary, nor does he dissolve them into an anonymous electroacoustic texture. He allows each fragment to retain some of its former life while placing it inside a new and deliberately unreliable narrative. The result resembles a travel diary written after the journey has become confused with dreams, jokes, overheard remarks, physical discomfort, and memories belonging to someone else.

The title provides a clue to this method. An oriflamme was a sacred royal banner associated with medieval France, carried into battle as a sign of authority and total commitment. From a distance, however, almost anything vertical, bright, torn, or moving in the wind might resemble one. Piermattei’s phrase emphasizes the problem of perception before the object itself. Something appears meaningful because it is far away. Distance creates grandeur, pattern, and symbolic order. Approach closely and the banner may become laundry, plastic, smoke, vegetation, reflected light, or a damaged object trembling on a wire. The album repeatedly stages this collapse between impressive appearance and inconvenient material reality. From afar, its sounds suggest ceremonies, journeys, landscapes, and elaborate dramatic scenes. Up close, they reveal breath, tape hiss, small impacts, ordinary speech, malfunctioning equipment, and the unruly friction of bodies occupying space.

The release consists of two long compositions, “Something Tawny Above the Plaster” and “A Little Rigor,” each lasting around sixteen and a half minutes. Their cassette-side proportions matter. Rather than presenting a collection of discrete miniatures, Piermattei gives each piece enough time to accumulate an internal geography. Sounds arrive, disappear, and return after their context has shifted. A voice heard early in a piece may later seem connected to an object or environment that was initially unrelated. The listener begins drawing lines among fragments, producing narrative through proximity even when no explicit story has been supplied. This is one of the album’s quiet pleasures: it turns interpretation into an involuntary form of composition.

“Something Tawny Above the Plaster” has the title of a remembered visual detail whose importance cannot be established. Tawny may describe fur, stain, fabric, old paint, animal coloration, dried vegetation, or light falling across a damaged wall. “Above the plaster” suggests architecture, repair, concealment, or something discovered where the surface has failed. The phrase feels extracted from a larger conversation whose surrounding sentences have been lost. Piermattei’s sound world behaves similarly. It contains evidence without a complete incident, clues without a crime, and descriptive precision attached to an absent object.

The opening movement establishes a close, inhabited acoustic space. Speech and environmental noise coexist without one being reduced to background for the other. Piermattei has an unusual ear for the social life of apparently insignificant sound. A voice is not valuable only for the information contained in its words. It also reveals distance from the microphone, posture, hesitation, attention, the acoustics of the room, and the speaker’s relation to whoever else may be present. A pause can expose embarrassment or uncertainty. A laugh can open a temporary community and then disappear. Even unintelligible language carries rhythm, regional character, and bodily pressure.

This sensitivity separates the album from field recording that treats the world primarily as a source of beautiful textures. Piermattei is not collecting immaculate ambiences. His recordings contain interference, awkward proximity, interruption, and human mess. The microphone does not hover invisibly above the scene. Its presence can be felt in the way certain sounds become too close, too warm, or too detailed. The recording apparatus participates in the event, creating its own social pressure. People may speak differently because a device is present, while ordinary activities become performances simply because they have been preserved.

Piermattei assembles these traces through montage, but his edits rarely behave like dramatic cinema cuts. They are less concerned with advancing a plot than with changing the meaning of what has already been heard. A domestic sound may suddenly acquire menace after being placed beside a low mechanical vibration. A burst of outdoor activity can make a preceding interior seem claustrophobic. A fragile instrumental phrase may briefly sentimentalize a voice before another object sound breaks the spell. The composition continually produces interpretations and then withdraws the evidence supporting them.

Humor is crucial to this instability. Experimental sound collage can easily become oppressively serious, as though every tape hiss and metallic scrape must announce a crisis in perception. Piermattei allows the absurdity of recorded life to remain present. Speech fragments can sound pompous, confused, practical, or unexpectedly theatrical. Small noises arrive with comic timing. A transition may resemble a solemn revelation before revealing itself to be built from something embarrassingly ordinary. The humor is not placed above the materials as commentary. It arises from the mismatch between the scale of our interpretations and the humble sources being interpreted.

That mismatch returns to the image of the oriflamme. Human beings continually convert distance into meaning. A faraway shape becomes a banner, an overheard phrase becomes a confession, an accidental rhythm becomes intention, and an old recording becomes evidence of a coherent past. Piermattei neither mocks nor fully trusts this impulse. His work depends upon it. Without the listener’s desire to connect fragments, the album would remain a sequence of sounds. Yet every connection is made provisional by the next interruption.

The use of tape deepens this uncertainty because tape is never only a neutral storage medium. It carries time physically. Hiss, compression, distortion, speed variation, and uneven frequency response remind us that the recorded event has travelled through material before reaching the present. The sound may have been copied, replayed into a room, recorded again, or altered through handling. What we hear is not simply “what happened” but what survived a chain of machines and decisions. Tape becomes a kind of weather passing across memory.

Piermattei appears drawn to the way recording can make the mundane mysterious without requiring supernatural subject matter. A poorly preserved voice resembles a message from another world because its source has become unreachable. An ordinary room tone acquires emotional force when removed from the room that produced it. A minor physical action, isolated and amplified, can sound ceremonial. The album repeatedly asks how little alteration is needed before everyday reality begins behaving like fiction.

“A Little Rigor” introduces its own ambiguity through the word “rigor.” It may mean strictness, accuracy, stiffness, severity, or the physical condition of a body after death. The diminutive phrase makes the word stranger. A little rigor might describe modest discipline applied to unruly material, a temporary hardening, a touch of formality, or the first sign that something living has ceased to move freely. The composition balances all of these possibilities. It is carefully structured without becoming rigid, while several passages seem fascinated by objects and voices caught between animation and stillness.

The second side feels less like a continuation of the first than another attempt to organize the same unstable universe. Its fragments often appear more compressed, with shifts in texture producing an increased sense of psychological enclosure. Yet Piermattei continues to resist sustained darkness. Moments of delicacy appear inside the congestion, and comic or conversational elements prevent the work from becoming a sealed nightmare. The atmosphere continually changes because human presence refuses to remain symbolic. People cough, speak, misunderstand, occupy rooms, and make practical noise.

Objects possess an equally unstable status. An object can be heard as itself, as an instrument, or as a character within the narrative. Bells, surfaces, containers, mechanisms, and resonant materials do not simply decorate the field recordings. Their sounds often redirect attention away from speech and toward the physical world surrounding it. A human voice may suggest interior thought, but an object insists upon friction, gravity, and contact. It reminds us that every narrative is taking place among things that do not care how they are interpreted.

This produces a productive conflict between story and matter. The listener wants to know who is speaking, where the recording occurred, and what relation one fragment has to another. Meanwhile the objects continue striking, humming, rattling, or occupying acoustic space without answering. Piermattei’s work does not eliminate narrative. It places narrative beside materials that resist becoming subordinate to it.

The instrumental sounds operate in a similar way. They rarely develop into stable melodies or announce themselves as performances separated from the surrounding environment. Instead, musical gestures drift into the collage and become difficult to distinguish from found sound. A tone may have been played intentionally, produced accidentally by an object, or recovered from another recording. That uncertainty erodes the usual border between composition and documentation. Piermattei composes with recordings, but the recorded world already contains countless unclaimed compositions.

This is where the album’s cinematic quality becomes most apparent. It does not sound like the soundtrack to an existing film. It behaves like cinema after the images have been removed, leaving only location sound, dialogue, Foley effects, musical fragments, cuts, and changes in acoustic perspective. The listener supplies the missing screen. Yet because the sounds do not belong to one visible world, the resulting film continually mutates. A room becomes a road, a voice becomes memory, and a small object becomes an enormous machine simply because no image remains to correct the scale.

The absence of images also changes how intimacy operates. Close-miked sound can feel invasive because there is no visual context explaining why the listener has been permitted so near. Breath, mouth sounds, handling noise, and room resonance create what might be called over-closeness: a proximity that does not necessarily produce understanding. We may hear the surface of an event with extraordinary detail while remaining completely ignorant of its purpose. The album understands that access and knowledge are not the same thing.

This principle has larger implications for the way recorded life is consumed. Modern listeners are surrounded by voices, videos, messages, surveillance, archives, and fragments of other people’s private environments. Distance has collapsed technologically, yet understanding has not increased at the same rate. Piermattei’s work stages that contradiction without converting it into a lecture. His recordings place us almost inside other spaces while denying the contextual information that would allow confident interpretation.

The limited cassette edition is especially appropriate because the medium turns the two compositions into physical sides that must be traversed in order. Cassette listening contains a small but meaningful delay between sides, an interruption requiring the listener to handle the object and reverse its direction. That action fits an album concerned with perspective, surfaces, and the physical transmission of memory. The tape is not merely a container. It introduces its own duration, noise, and vulnerability.

More mars team’s edition also belongs to an international network of small experimental labels through which intensely personal work can travel without becoming standardized. Piermattei’s recordings emerge from Italian environments and sensibilities, but the cassette was issued by a Greek label and mastered by Moras Marios. The object crossed borders while carrying voices and spaces whose exact locations may remain hidden from the listener. This circulation adds another layer of distance to the title. By the time the sounds arrive, they already resemble a banner glimpsed from another territory.

Piermattei’s earlier aliases and his Tutore Burlato label reveal a broader practice concerned with unstable authorship, collage, curation, and the comic potential of experimental culture. Releasing under his own name does not make From Afar It Looks Like an Oriflamme straightforward autobiography. The “self” present here is distributed across field recordings, other voices, machines, found materials, and editorial decisions. Piermattei is less the central character than the person arranging traffic among characters who may not know they have entered the same work.

That role demands an unusual form of restraint. A less attentive composer might overload the pieces with dramatic processing, making sure every fragment announced its importance. Piermattei often lets sounds remain small. Their relationships create force. A modest noise heard after a voice can become emotionally charged without being enlarged. A pause can perform more work than an added drone. The compositions feel dense because many forms of attention are operating simultaneously, not because every moment is filled with maximum volume.

The album therefore rewards repeated listening without presenting itself as a puzzle with one correct solution. Familiarity does not reveal a hidden linear narrative. It changes which details rise to the foreground. On one pass, a listener may follow the speech and experience the object sounds as interruption. On another, the objects become the central characters and the voices seem incidental. A later listen may concentrate on transitions, tape texture, spatial depth, or the strange emotional effect of fragments whose meanings remain unavailable.

From Afar It Looks Like an Oriflamme ultimately treats listening as an act of uncertain recognition. We hear patterns because we need patterns, but reality keeps leaking around their edges. A sound resembles music until a voice makes it environmental. A conversation resembles documentary evidence until an edit turns it into fiction. An object resembles a symbol until it falls, scrapes, or reveals its ordinary weight.

The title’s distant banner never fully resolves. Perhaps it really is an oriflamme. Perhaps the grandeur is accurate, and the humble materials truly do assemble into a signal worth following. Piermattei leaves that possibility alive. His humor does not cancel wonder, and his attention to physical detail does not reduce imagination to error. Instead, the album suggests that mistaken perception may be one of imagination’s essential tools. We see a banner where there may only be cloth, but the vision changes how we cross the landscape.

These two compositions are built from exactly that change. Voice, tape, objects, rooms, instruments, and environmental debris remain stubbornly themselves while also becoming entrances into a larger and unstable world. From nearby they are scraps, surfaces, heat, and noise. From afar they gather, lift in the wind, and briefly resemble a sign.

Enshroud - 2021 - Darkness Grips Us All

 

Self Released – None  336.45MB FLAC

Darkness Grips Us All is built from weight, but its heaviness is rarely allowed to remain stationary. Guitars gallop, stop, widen into atmospheric chords, and suddenly lean into melodic harmonies. Drums move between double-bass propulsion, groove-oriented impact, and more spacious patterns that let the music breathe. Vocals cross from deep physical aggression into cleaner, more exposed phrases, while bass frequently rises above the rhythm guitar rather than disappearing beneath it. Enshroud’s debut full-length belongs broadly to modern death and groove metal, but its real identity emerges from the way the band keeps pushing against the borders of those styles. Songs rarely proceed through a predictable verse, chorus, verse structure. They expand, contract, change emotional direction, and often end somewhere far removed from the place where they began.

The anonymity surrounding Enshroud is therefore more than a promotional device. The group formed in County Antrim in 2018 and initially chose to remain faceless, allowing the recording to arrive without personalities, photographs, costumes, or individual biographies explaining it in advance. That decision places unusual pressure upon the songs. There is no singer’s public persona to interpret, no established guitarist’s reputation to follow, and no visible hierarchy telling the listener who should command attention. The music has to generate its own presence. On Darkness Grips Us All, it does so through collective force. Individual performances are technically impressive, but the album rarely feels organized around one musician’s display. Every instrument contributes to a larger mechanism whose identity belongs to the sound rather than the people operating it.

“Death Ritual” opens with no extended invitation. The guitars immediately establish a dense, churning pattern while the drums drive underneath with considerable precision. The title may suggest ceremonial doom or occult atmosphere, but the music behaves more like a machine entering operation. Riffs arrive in heavy cycles, and the vocals possess a broad, almost architectural weight. The ritual is not presented through bells, chants, or theatrical darkness. It is created by repetition, bodily endurance, and the sense of several musicians locking into the same violent motion. The song’s guitar harmonies and brief melodic openings prevent the density from becoming featureless, but its central purpose is impact. Enshroud announce themselves by placing the listener inside the machinery before there is time to inspect it from outside.

“I Walk It Alone” is more revealing because it introduces atmosphere before force. Clean or lightly distorted guitar figures create distance, and the opening carries an air of uncertainty absent from the first track’s direct attack. When the full band enters, that atmosphere is not erased. It remains inside the heavier riffing, giving the song a strong emotional double structure. The narrator walks alone, but solitude is not presented as peaceful independence. It carries foreboding, necessity, and the possibility that isolation has become both protection and punishment. The cleaner vocal tones intensify this vulnerability because they briefly remove the armor created by the harsher delivery.

This movement between aggression and exposure becomes one of the album’s most important qualities. Enshroud understand that heaviness gains power when it surrounds something capable of being injured. A record composed entirely of crushing riffs may demonstrate force, but it can eventually feel invulnerable and therefore emotionally remote. Darkness Grips Us All repeatedly introduces quieter guitar passages, cleaner voices, melodic choruses, and suspended rhythmic spaces in which fragility becomes audible. The heavy sections then return not as abstract displays of strength but as reactions against that fragility.

“Circus of the Vulnerable” turns exposure into spectacle. A circus promises display, entertainment, skill, and controlled danger, while vulnerability implies the possibility that control may fail. The title suggests a society in which weakness is not cared for privately but exhibited, consumed, and judged. Musically, the song is one of the album’s more rhythmically immediate pieces. Thick riffs and forceful drumming give it the momentum of a procession, while vocal contrasts create the feeling of several emotional positions occupying the same arena. The vulnerable may be the performers, the audience, or everyone involved in a system that converts pain into public entertainment.

The title also feels particularly suited to the social climate surrounding the album’s creation. Without reducing the record to a simple pandemic document, Darkness Grips Us All appeared after a period in which vulnerability had become impossible to ignore. Isolation, illness, uncertainty, social fracture, and the constant circulation of fear entered daily life on a global scale. Yet exposure to shared danger did not automatically produce shared understanding. Vulnerability itself became argued over, measured, performed, denied, politicized, and broadcast. “Circus of the Vulnerable” catches something of that unstable condition without needing to name a specific event.

“Tear Me Down” condenses the band’s approach into a shorter and more immediate song. Its riffs strike with blunt force, but melodic and cleaner vocal elements prevent the title from becoming merely confrontational. “Tear me down” can be a challenge, an accusation, or an exhausted invitation to complete a destruction already underway. The ambiguity matters. Enshroud’s lyrics and titles repeatedly occupy the space between resistance and collapse. The speaker may be fighting against outside pressure, but the music also suggests an internal voice capable of participating in the damage.

That inward conflict becomes central on “Who Are We,” the album’s most atmospheric and emotionally complete composition. The opening abandons the record’s usual density for reverberant guitar, faint synth-like texture, distant percussion, and fragile vocals. The question in the title is collective rather than individual. It does not ask “Who am I?” from inside private isolation, but “Who are we?” after shared identity has become unstable. When the heavier vocals arrive, they do not simply replace the quieter voice. Both remain psychologically present, creating a conversation between vulnerability and force.

The song’s slower development allows the band’s post-metal influence to become especially clear. Rather than treating atmosphere as a decorative introduction before the “real” metal begins, Enshroud let it govern the emotional meaning of the entire piece. The heavy passages feel like an eruption from within the earlier stillness. Even when the guitars become enormous, the background lament remains audible in memory. This makes “Who Are We” more than a contrast exercise. It presents aggression as one possible answer to uncertainty, while allowing the listener to hear that the answer has not resolved the question.

“Stare Back at Me” returns to a tighter and more muscular form. The title converts observation into confrontation. To be stared at is to become an object under another consciousness, but staring back refuses passive submission. The song’s rhythmic changes capture that shift. Riffs move forward, pause, and reassert themselves as though testing whether the opposing presence will retreat. Guitar leads rise above the heavier structure without becoming detached solo displays. They behave like another voice entering the confrontation.

“My Deliverance” complicates the album’s spiritual language. Deliverance traditionally promises release from danger, sin, possession, or suffering, but Enshroud do not make liberation sound gentle. The song’s length and density suggest that escape itself may require violence. Vocals move between harsh and cleaner registers, while the instrumental arrangement alternates propulsion with more open melodic passages. Deliverance is not imagined as an external hand arriving to lift the subject away. It sounds self-forged, uncertain, and physically costly.

This is where the album’s groove-metal foundation becomes especially useful. Groove is often associated with confidence, bodily momentum, and the satisfaction of a riff landing exactly where expected. Enshroud use that physical certainty beneath lyrics and atmospheres concerned with psychological instability. The body knows where the beat falls even when the mind does not know who it is, whether it can be saved, or what darkness surrounds it. Rhythm becomes temporary order. It cannot solve the crisis, but it can give the listener something firm enough to stand upon while the crisis continues.

The title track places bass in an unusually prominent role. Its notes do more than reinforce the guitars; they move visibly through the arrangement, giving the song a muscular internal spine. “Darkness Grips Us All” expands the private struggles of earlier tracks into a universal claim. The darkness does not select only the weak, guilty, isolated, or spiritually lost. It grips everyone. This can sound fatalistic, but the collective pronoun also removes some of the shame normally attached to suffering. Darkness is no longer evidence of personal failure. It is part of a shared human condition.

The word “grips” is crucial. Darkness is not simply around us or ahead of us. It possesses hands, pressure, and contact. It becomes something bodily, capable of holding the chest, throat, limbs, or mind. The music reinforces that physicality through dense guitars and forceful percussion, yet melodic passages continue moving within the grasp. The song does not portray light defeating darkness. It shows life continuing inside the pressure.

“The Runaway” closes the record at more than eight minutes and gives Enshroud enough space to reveal the full range of their writing. Its opening is patient, slow, and doom-laden. The vocals carry greater gravity, while the guitars move with a leaden step very different from the galloping force of “Death Ritual.” The runaway of the title may have escaped a person, institution, belief, identity, or version of the self, but flight has not produced immediate freedom. The song sounds exhausted by distance. Every step away carries the knowledge that the thing left behind may still exist internally.

As the composition develops, acoustic or cleaner guitar textures introduce an enclosed, cavernous atmosphere. Vocals and strings seem to travel through damp stone rather than an open studio. The shift gives the song the feeling of arriving at temporary shelter after prolonged movement. Yet the final repeated section restores sharper pulse and force, denying the listener a completely peaceful conclusion. Running away has changed the landscape, but not eliminated danger. The album ends with motion continuing.

The length of “The Runaway” also clarifies Enshroud’s refusal of traditional songwriting limits. The band’s Bandcamp description emphasizes their preference for unusual structures, and the closing track justifies that approach. Its movements are not arranged simply to provide technical variety. Each change alters the psychological position of the narrator. Weight becomes fatigue, stillness becomes hiding, acoustic space becomes self-examination, and the returning pulse becomes survival. Structure itself tells the story.

The production throughout Darkness Grips Us All is modern and clear, but not clinically empty. Drums possess enough definition for complex rhythmic changes to register, guitars remain thick without swallowing the cleaner passages, and bass is given genuine presence. The clarity naturally invites comparison with groups such as Gojira, especially when the riffs combine technical precision, groove, and large-scale emotional weight. Yet Enshroud do not depend solely upon that influence. Their frequent use of clean vocal contrast, post-metal atmosphere, doom pacing, melodic harmonies, and unusually patient transitions gives the album a broader vocabulary.

The record’s greatest strength lies in how naturally those vocabularies coexist. Many modern metal albums advertise variety by placing clearly labeled styles beside one another: a groove-metal verse, a melodic chorus, a post-rock introduction, and a doom breakdown. Enshroud are more convincing when the boundaries begin dissolving. On “Who Are We” and “The Runaway,” atmosphere does not stop when heaviness begins. On “I Walk It Alone,” melody is not a break from aggression but one of its emotional causes. On the title track, bass and vocals generate as much drama as the guitars. The album feels assembled from several styles, but increasingly speaks with one voice.

Anonymity strengthens that unity. With no individual members foregrounded, listeners are encouraged to experience Enshroud as a collective body. The decision also mirrors the album’s recurring use of “we,” “us,” and direct second-person confrontation. Personal identity remains present, but it is unstable and partially concealed. The music asks who we are while the musicians withhold who they are. That does not feel like a trick. It aligns the project’s presentation with its themes.

There is also something distinctly appropriate about this music emerging from Northern Ireland. The album does not announce itself as political or local, but it comes from a region where history, identity, community, division, memory, and inherited pressure have rarely been abstract concerns. County Antrim is not merely a location attached to the band’s biography. It is a place where landscape and social history coexist heavily, where the past can remain active beneath ordinary contemporary life. Enshroud’s music similarly combines physical landscape, internal conflict, and forces inherited before the individual fully understands them.

Darkness Grips Us All is not flawless. Its production occasionally makes the heaviest passages feel familiar within modern technical groove metal, and some vocal or melodic turns approach conventions listeners will recognize immediately. Yet the album’s willingness to slow down, expose vulnerability, and let songs develop beyond standard structures repeatedly pulls it away from formula. The longer pieces are especially important because they reveal that the band’s ambition extends beyond assembling efficient riffs.

As a debut full-length, it captures musicians already capable of technical power but still interested in discovery. That combination is valuable. Technique can easily become a closed system, proving competence without risking emotional uncertainty. Enshroud use competence to enter uncertain spaces. Their precision supports songs about isolation, identity, weakness, deliverance, flight, and darkness that no individual escapes.

The title may initially sound absolute, but the album itself provides a more complicated message. Darkness grips everyone, yet people continue walking, staring back, asking questions, seeking deliverance, running, and making sound together. The grip is universal, but so is resistance. Enshroud do not offer a clean victory or a beam of light breaking through the final track. They offer motion under pressure, the shared physical labor of remaining alive while the darkness keeps its hands around us.

Anyone familiar with the Northern Irish underground, the group’s still-anonymous early lineup, or the transition from the Walking in the Shadows EP into this record could add useful details to a story that the band deliberately left partly concealed. The album stands firmly without that information, but its shadows still contain doors.

Der Stürmer / Totenburg - 2007 - Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum

Death Squad Rex – DSR 003  317.39MB FLAC

 Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum is built around a familiar Latin warning: if you want peace, prepare for war. On this 2007 split, however, war is not treated merely as historical subject matter or atmospheric decoration. It becomes the organizing principle through which Der Stürmer and Totenburg understand identity, history, culture, and musical form. Both bands belong openly to the National Socialist black metal underground, and neither uses extremist ideology as distant theatrical imagery. Racism, antisemitism, ethnic nationalism, militarism, and fantasies of cultural purification are central to the project. That fact cannot be separated from the music, yet the two sides express their politics through noticeably different sonic methods. Der Stürmer compresses its worldview into five short, sharply defined assaults, while Totenburg stretches two compositions into long, repetitive structures whose martial force develops more gradually.

Der Stürmer’s “Keras Polemou,” meaning “war horn,” opens the split instrumentally. The piece functions exactly as its title suggests, announcing the arrival of conflict before words begin defining its purpose. The guitars are raw but sufficiently clear to carry a simple heroic contour, while the drums create a measured advance rather than immediate chaos. It resembles a signal transmitted across distance, gathering attention and preparing the listener for the shorter attacks that follow. The track also reveals something essential about Der Stürmer’s approach. Even at its most primitive, the band rarely seeks shapeless noise. Its music depends upon recognizable riffs, repeated slogans, and structures designed to communicate directly.

“Smyntheus (He Who Beheads the Serpent)” introduces the Greek group’s fascination with converting classical mythology into racial and political allegory. The title invokes an epithet associated with Apollo while adding the image of the serpent’s decapitation, turning myth into a drama of purification and conquest. Musically, the track is compact and aggressive, driven by tightly repeated guitar figures and a vocal performance that sounds more proclaimed than narrated. The riffing carries traces of traditional heavy metal beneath the black metal abrasion, giving the song a martial uplift that separates it from more depressive or chaotic underground styles.

“The Prophet of Hellenism” continues this fusion of ancient Greece with modern ideological fantasy. Hellenism is presented not as a complicated historical field full of conflicting cities, philosophies, peoples, religions, and cultural exchanges, but as a purified ancestral essence awaiting revival. This simplification is central to extremist mythmaking. History becomes most useful when its contradictions are removed and its symbols can be organized into a single line of inheritance. Der Stürmer’s music performs the same reduction. Riffs are stripped to declarative shapes, rhythms support forward motion, and the short running time prevents ambiguity from developing. The song does not investigate the past. It recruits it.

“The Aeonic Cycle of Time” offers the most expansive Der Stürmer composition on the split. Its nearly five minutes allow the guitars to develop a stronger sense of movement, with recurring melodic figures suggesting history imagined as a cycle of rise, decline, destruction, and return. This cyclical vision is common to reactionary political thought because it transforms present frustration into evidence of an approaching rebirth. Defeat becomes temporary, and violence can be presented as the necessary turning of a cosmic wheel. The music supports that fantasy through repetition. Each return of the central riff sounds less like recollection than confirmation.

“Age of Barbarism” closes the Greek side with a title that can be read both as warning and aspiration. Barbarism traditionally names what civilization excludes, yet black metal often claims the barbarian as a figure of strength uncontaminated by modern softness. Der Stürmer uses this reversal aggressively. The barbarian becomes a desired identity, while civilization is portrayed as decay. The song is one of the side’s strongest because its melodic line carries genuine momentum beneath the ideological bluntness. The guitars repeatedly rise through the rhythm, creating a feeling of advance even when the arrangement remains structurally simple.

The Der Stürmer half lasts only around eighteen minutes, but its brevity is part of its function. Each track resembles a separate emblem: horn, serpent-killer, prophet, historical cycle, barbarian age. The sequence behaves less like an unfolding narrative than a row of banners. The compositions are short enough to preserve urgency and direct enough to be remembered after one listen. Their effectiveness lies in economy, but that economy is also ideological. Complexity would disturb the certainty the songs are built to project.

Totenburg enters from a different direction. “Eiserne Spitze der Revolution,” or “Iron Spearhead of the Revolution,” lasts more than eleven minutes and immediately widens the split’s scale. The German band’s production is rawer and more subterranean, with guitars forming a continuous abrasive surface while the drums drive beneath them. Rather than constructing several short declarations, Totenburg develops one extended state. The riffs repeat until they become environmental, and the vocals appear as another hostile texture inside the mass.

The title transforms revolution into military penetration. A spearhead is the force that breaks through resistance first, opening a route for everything behind it. Totenburg’s composition follows that idea through accumulated pressure. The song does not depend upon numerous dramatic changes. Its power comes from persistence, with repeated figures gradually eroding the listener’s sense of time. Where Der Stürmer’s side raises banners, Totenburg builds a trench and keeps firing from it.

“Du, die unbezwingbare Kraft,” or “You, the Unconquerable Force,” continues for another eleven minutes and gives the split its most hypnotic section. The addressee remains abstract enough to function as race, nation, will, blood, revolution, or some mythologized collective power. This vagueness is useful because it allows the listener already sympathetic to the ideology to place their preferred object inside the song. The music likewise avoids a sharply individualized identity. Guitar, bass, drums, and voice merge into a single advancing body.

Totenburg’s repetition creates an impression of endurance rather than speed. Riffs are not simply played several times because the composition lacks ideas. They are used as tests of persistence, demanding that the listener remain inside the same hostile pattern until it acquires the force of inevitability. This is one of black metal’s most effective techniques, but here it also mirrors authoritarian political logic. Repetition turns assertion into apparent truth. A phrase heard often enough begins to feel ancient, natural, or unquestionable even when it is historically fabricated.

The contrast between the two bands gives the split more musical shape than its ideological unity might suggest. Der Stürmer is sharper, more melodic, and more openly connected to heroic heavy metal language. Totenburg is denser, longer, and more attritional. The Greek side imagines war through symbols, proclamations, and classical reference. The German side imagines it as sustained physical environment. One prepares the speech before battle; the other concentrates upon the machinery that continues after speeches have ended.

The production differences reinforce this division. Der Stürmer’s instruments occupy relatively distinct positions, allowing riffs to carry the songs. Totenburg’s sound is more engulfing, with individual parts partially disappearing into the overall pressure. Neither side is polished, but the rawness serves separate purposes. For Der Stürmer, it preserves urgency and underground directness. For Totenburg, it creates enclosure.

The extremist politics remain impossible to treat as incidental packaging. Der Stürmer took its name from Julius Streicher’s virulently antisemitic Nazi newspaper, while both bands were explicit participants in the NSBM scene. The music’s language of ancestry, war, renewal, revolution, force, and historical destiny is directed toward a worldview that dehumanizes real people and converts cultural difference into imagined biological struggle. These are not harmless fantasy kingdoms detached from history. Their symbols draw power from twentieth-century mass violence and from political movements that continue to threaten living communities.

At the same time, serious criticism cannot end with identifying the ideology and refusing to hear the construction of the songs. Understanding how such music works is part of understanding why extremist art can attract listeners. Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum offers certainty, collective identity, inherited purpose, heroic struggle, and release from ambiguity. Its riffs simplify the world into advance and resistance, friend and enemy, strength and decay. For someone alienated or searching for belonging, that reduction can feel powerful precisely because ordinary life is complicated and unresolved.

The title promises peace through preparation for war, but the record never imagines peace as a positive condition. There are no songs about the society supposedly protected by all this conflict, no tenderness toward actual community, and no detailed vision of human flourishing. War becomes self-justifying. Preparation leads not toward peace but toward further preparation, because an ideology built upon enemies requires enemies to survive. The music is strongest when expressing motion, opposition, and endurance because those are the only states its worldview can sustain.

As a split, Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum succeeds musically through contrast. Der Stürmer’s side is concise, anthem-minded, and symbolically crowded; Totenburg’s is extended, monotonous in the deliberate sense, and physically oppressive. Together they form a forty-minute arc from announcement to entrenchment. The war horn sounds, the banners rise, the historical mythology is declared, and then the listener is left inside the repetitive machinery those declarations have activated.

The record remains a revealing artifact of the mid-2000s European NSBM network, when small labels, mail order, limited vinyl, copied discs, and international collaborations allowed extremist bands from different countries to construct a shared underground culture. Its significance does not require admiration. It lies in how clearly the split demonstrates music’s ability to turn political fantasy into atmosphere, rhythm, memory, and bodily excitement. The riffs can be effective while the worldview remains morally bankrupt. Holding those facts together is more honest than pretending either one cancels the other.