Wehrhammer - 2011 - Wir ziehen in den Krieg

 

Nebelklang – none  525.84MB FLAC

The most revealing word in Wir ziehen in den Krieg may be “wir”: we. This is essentially the work of one musician, yet its title speaks as a marching collective. Krieg records the guitars, bass, vocals, and programmed drums alone, constructing an imagined army through overdubbing. That contradiction gives the album much of its force and much of its ideological danger. A private voice multiplies itself until it can issue commands in the first-person plural. Isolation disguises itself as solidarity; one person’s hatred acquires uniforms, ranks, and the apparent momentum of a crowd.

Musically, the original eight-song album is blunt, repetitive, and deliberately unornamented. The drum machine does not attempt to impersonate an expressive human drummer. Its rigid patterns create a mechanical floor beneath riffs that often advance through repetition rather than elaborate development. The guitars are abrasive but surprisingly legible, carrying simple melodic shapes through a dry, narrow atmosphere. Krieg’s vocals arrive as orders barked from within the distortion, less interested in theatrical range than in maintaining pressure. The limitations become the governing aesthetic: few materials, hard outlines, direct motion.

The title track establishes that vocabulary immediately. “Wir ziehen in den Krieg” does not describe war as a distant historical subject; grammatically, it announces present collective movement toward it. The riffing has a corresponding forward pull, but the programmed percussion makes the march feel strangely disembodied. No actual soldiers breathe, tire, hesitate, or fall out of formation. The army is a closed circuit produced by one person and a machine. That absence of ordinary human friction is precisely what makes militarized fantasy seductive. The collective appears unified because every dissenting body has already been removed from the recording process.

“Schatten der Ewigkeit,” “Shadows of Eternity,” shifts from marching language toward black metal’s more familiar metaphysical darkness. Its melodic repetition gives the record a larger horizon, suggesting that the immediate commands belong to some supposedly timeless conflict. This is a common mechanism in ideological art: temporary resentment is elevated into destiny, and present choices are dressed as the inevitable continuation of ancient struggle. The song’s atmosphere is effective because it converts a crude musical figure into something apparently monumental, but that transformation deserves examination rather than passive surrender.

“Satans rechte Hand” and “Vater der Dunkelheit” locate authority in Satanic imagery. On one level, this is traditional black-metal inversion: the rejected spiritual figure becomes father, commander, and source of power. Yet the record’s language repeatedly replaces individual rebellion with obedience to another hierarchy. Satan’s right hand is still a servant’s position. A father of darkness still places the believer beneath paternal authority. The album declares revolt against Christianity while continually searching for stronger commands, darker leaders, and a more severe order to enter.

That tension also appears in “Brennt sie nieder,” “Burn Them Down,” and “Wir werden dich vernichten,” “We Will Annihilate You.” The unnamed object of destruction allows anger to remain portable. “They” and “you” can be filled with whatever enemy the surrounding ideology requires. The music reinforces that reduction by valuing momentum over complexity. There is little room for an adversary to possess a face, history, or inner life. It becomes an obstacle placed before the riff. This is where primitive black metal’s musical economy can meet authoritarian imagination: eliminate ambiguity, repeat the command, and turn destruction into proof of unity.

“Der Hass ist unser Sieg,” “Hatred Is Our Victory,” closes the original album with its most complete statement. Victory is not defined through survival, freedom, understanding, or even conquest. Hatred itself is sufficient. This creates a sealed emotional system in which failure becomes impossible. If hatred remains, the struggle has supposedly succeeded, regardless of what it produces in the world. The extended duration gives that proposition a hypnotic weight, but it also exposes its emptiness. Hatred can sustain identity while consuming every purpose that identity might otherwise serve. The song sounds victorious because it refuses to imagine anything beyond the emotional machinery of conflict.

The 2011 edition changes the album by surrounding the original statement with later material. “Gebt mir ein Messer” and “Arbeit für den Hammer” preserve the project’s preference for objects that convert will into direct physical action: knife and hammer, cutting and striking. Alternate versions of “Satans rechte Hand” and “Der Hass ist unser Sieg” show Krieg returning to the same ideological and musical anchors years later. The repetition now occurs not only within songs but across the project’s chronology. Earlier declarations are not outgrown; they are rebuilt, as though remaining unchanged were itself evidence of authenticity.

The later pieces also make the reissue feel like a one-man army assembled from different periods of the same life. “Wir stehen hier am Kreuz,” “Lange Zeiten ist es her,” “Ein langer Weg in die Hölle,” and “Brüder erhebt eure Stimme” bring religious confrontation, memory, infernal pilgrimage, and brotherhood into the same archive. The word “brothers” again manufactures community from a fundamentally solitary practice. The listener is offered membership through repetition: learn the phrases, accept the enemies, raise the voice, and the isolated “I” may disappear inside “we.”

The sepia cover presents public execution and ruined civic space as historical atmosphere. Hanging bodies, spectators, damaged buildings, and raised weapons are compressed into an antique image whose age can make suffering appear mythic or inevitable. Yet nothing about such a scene is abstract to the people inside it. The picture’s distance is part of its danger. History becomes a texture, while victims risk becoming stage furniture for a fantasy of severity. The music often performs the same conversion, turning war from a condition of terror, hunger, bureaucracy, mutilation, and grief into a purified landscape of command.

Wir ziehen in den Krieg is musically coherent because its method and worldview share the same architecture: repetition, hierarchy, reduction, obedience to a central will, and hostility toward ambiguity. That coherence can make the album compelling without making its politics harmless. The record demonstrates how raw black metal can transform private frustration into the illusion of historical mass, giving one voice the shadow of an advancing column. Listening critically does not require pretending the sound has no power. It requires asking what that power is rehearsing, whose humanity must be removed for the march to remain clean, and why a solitary person might need hatred to speak back as an army.

Wehrhammer - 2015 - Sturmtruppen

 

Breath Of Pestilence – BOP033  656.03MB FLAC

Sturmtruppen is not merely a reissue with bonus material. It places the same ideological and musical construction on two operating tables, thirteen years apart, and asks the listener to examine what repetition preserves, what it tightens, and what it attempts to overwrite. The original Deutsche Sturmtruppen occupies forty-seven minutes; the 2012 rerecording repeats the seven titles in the same order but compresses them into slightly more than thirty-eight. Nothing has been replaced by a newly written argument. The old declaration is rebuilt with less temporal space around it, as though persistence itself were being offered as proof of conviction.

That makes this double CD a study in reenactment. Most artists revisit early work because they believe improved technique can uncover an ideal version hidden inside primitive execution. In Wehrhammer’s case, the process carries additional political weight. The material is not only musical. Its vocabulary of burning crosses, assault troops, blood, death, annihilated divinity, and fallen Christians belongs to a project openly associated with National Socialism and racism. To rerecord it is to reactivate that symbolic machinery rather than leave it confined to a rough underground document from the turn of the millennium.

The original version has the longer shadow. Its riffs advance through repetition rather than intricate development, creating the sensation of commands being reinforced until they no longer require explanation. Krieg’s guitars and bass occupy a narrow, abrasive field while Dunkelheit’s drumming gives the music a bodily instability absent from the more mechanically programmed Wehrhammer recordings. The sound is crude but not entirely shapeless. Melodic figures repeatedly surface from the distortion, offering just enough contour for each song to become recognizable before the surrounding harshness wears its edges down again.

“Reich der brennenden Kreuze,” the realm of burning crosses, opens with an image that can support several kinds of hostility at once. A burning cross may signify anti-Christian destruction, racist terror, or the theatrical consumption of one symbol by another. Given Wehrhammer’s documented ideological framework, that ambiguity cannot be treated as innocent mystery. The music converts the image into territory: not one cross burning at a particular site, but an entire realm organized around the spectacle. Fire becomes architecture.

“Nacht der Schatten” and “In Finsternis der Tag erwacht” give the album its nocturnal cosmology. Night, shadow, and the day awakening inside darkness are familiar black-metal materials, but here they function less as solitary communion with nature than as preparation for collective movement. Darkness hides individual faces and makes the marching body appear unified. The songs’ repeated melodic contours produce atmosphere while also demonstrating how easily atmosphere can become ideological camouflage, giving ordinary hatred the scale of destiny, myth, or natural law.

“Tötet den Gott” and “Am Tag an dem die Christen fallen” position anti-Christian violence as a promised historical transformation. Black metal has long used blasphemy to attack religious authority, hypocrisy, and inherited moral control, but Wehrhammer’s wider politics complicate any simple reading of rebellion. A project attracted to hierarchy, racial ideology, and authoritarian collective identity is not abolishing domination merely because it attacks Christianity. It is disputing which power should rule. The music’s stern repetition embodies this contradiction: revolt is voiced through structures that sound remarkably like obedience.

The title track presents the most direct fusion of sound and militarized identity. “Sturmtruppen” originally referred to assault troops developed for rapid attacks during the First World War, but the word’s later political and popular associations make it impossible to hear as a purely technical military term. Wehrhammer turns it into a collective self-image. The individual listener is invited to imagine entry into a hardened formation whose strength comes from discipline, homogeneity, and an enemy positioned outside the group.

Yet the original recording constantly betrays the fantasy of perfect formation. Its rough production, human drumming, unstable balance, and solitary origins reveal not an army but a very small number of people manufacturing the sound of one. That fracture is musically revealing. The record’s imagined mass is assembled through overdubbing, repetition, and symbols. The “we” must be constructed because the actual recording room contains no advancing column.

The 2012 version attempts to close that fracture. Shorter performances give the songs less empty ground and make the album feel more concentrated. The rerecording does not reconsider the early material so much as discipline it, trimming extended passages and pushing the same sequence toward greater efficiency. Where the first disc sounds like an ideology being formed through primitive black metal, the second sounds like that ideology returning after years of rehearsal, more certain of its chosen gestures and less interested in hesitation.

The shortened title “Sturmtruppen” is especially intriguing. Removing *Deutsche* does not neutralize the piece when every surrounding association remains intact. It may instead broaden the formation, turning a specifically German designation into a more general identity available to anyone willing to enter the march. The absent word becomes conspicuous because the listener has just heard it on disc one. Revision does not erase the earlier declaration; the double-CD format keeps both visible.

The cover reinforces this collapse of chronology. A sepia scene of executions, gallows, armed figures, damaged buildings, and public violence is presented as though historical atrocity were an antique engraving suitable for contemplation. Distance can make suffering look ceremonial. Bodies become compositional details within an attractive ruin, while spectatorship replaces responsibility. The album performs a related operation by transforming war into repetition and atmosphere, removing hunger, fear, bureaucracy, civilian death, and physical mutilation until only command and destructive grandeur remain.

Sturmtruppen is therefore most revealing when heard not as one album twice, but as a record of ideological memory. The first disc shows the original construction; the second demonstrates the desire to inhabit it again. Improved control does not produce moral development. It makes the old enclosure more efficient. The listener is left with two versions of the same march and an important question: when an artist returns to early material, is the past being examined, repaired, or recruited for another advance?

Waffen SS - 2002 - Koncentrations Zentrum CDr

Odal Rune Productions – O.R.004  115.21MB APE

 Koncentrations Zentrum lasts barely fifteen minutes, but it is burdened by imagery vastly larger than anything its primitive recording could contain. The title, SS runes, camp photographs, Totenkopf identity, and “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign attempt to borrow the accumulated terror of industrial imprisonment and genocide before the music has produced a single sound of its own. This is not ordinary darkness or an imaginary battlefield. It is an adolescent black-metal project reaching into documented human catastrophe and using the victims’ environment as a shortcut to extremity. The release therefore demands two forms of listening at once: attention to the small homemade recording actually present, and resistance to the enormous historical authority it tries to conscript.

“Preparing for the Destruction” functions as a brief entrance into that construction. The demo’s narrow sound and rudimentary execution create a sealed private room rather than the massed power implied by its packaging. This contradiction is central to Waffen SS. One young musician uses recording technology to manufacture an army, institution, and historical destiny around himself. Guitar layers, harsh voice, crude percussion, and distortion enlarge a solitary performance into an imagined collective force. Yet the roughness continually reveals the person behind the curtain. The Reich-sized fantasy is being assembled through limited equipment in a domestic recording space.

The title piece is where provocation and musical method become inseparable. Repetition gives the short track a punitive quality, but repetition also exposes how little development the idea possesses. Instead of investigating the machinery of imprisonment, the music remains fascinated with its surface signs: fences, uniforms, commands, death’s-head insignia, and corrupted German vocabulary. Even “Koncentrations Zentrum” is linguistically awkward, resembling invented Nazi-language more than a historically precise term. That distance is revealing. The camp is not approached as a place inhabited by individual prisoners, guards, forced laborers, hunger, disease, bureaucracy, terror, resistance, and death. It is flattened into a stage set for borrowed power.

“Totenkopf” makes this desire for transformation explicit. The death’s head offers the performer a mask that replaces an uncertain young identity with something apparently ancient, disciplined, and feared. Black metal has always understood the imaginative usefulness of masks, aliases, corpse paint, and exaggerated evil. They allow musicians to enter states unavailable within ordinary social life. Here, however, the chosen mask is tied to an actual apparatus of racial persecution and murder. The fantasy cannot be separated from those consequences merely by calling it underground art. The symbol supplies intensity because history has already filled it with terror.

Musically, the demo is more revealing as an artifact of isolation than as a convincing military assault. Its thinness, repetition, and unfinished character create an atmosphere of private obsession. There is no true crowd, formation, or state power behind the sound. The project’s ideological “we” must be constructed from overdubs because the recording itself contains one person. This makes the release a compact demonstration of how extremist identity can answer loneliness. The individual imagines entry into an elite order, acquires ready-made enemies, adopts a supposedly heroic historical lineage, and converts personal uncertainty into the certainty of command.

“My Visions...” is the longest track and therefore the point where a more individual imagination might have emerged. The ellipsis promises something private, unfinished, or difficult to articulate. Yet the surrounding symbolism has already colonized the available space. Once every shadow has been labelled SS, victory, destruction, and concentration camp, vision becomes indistinguishable from ideology. The imagination no longer discovers; it repeats. This may be the release’s most instructive failure. Transgression appears to offer freedom from conventional morality, but the adopted doctrine rapidly narrows what can be imagined, reducing mystery to slogans and human complexity to approved categories.

“Beyond the Victory” closes in just over a minute, leaving the phrase itself as the demo’s final question. What exists beyond victory when a worldview has defined itself through enemies, racial hierarchy, and permanent struggle? Extremist ideology rarely provides a convincing answer because peace would dissolve the identity created by conflict. Victory must therefore lead to another purification, another betrayal, another enemy, or another campaign. The music ends before confronting that emptiness. Its brevity feels less like transcendence than the edge of a fantasy whose promised world has never been meaningfully pictured.

Knowledge that the project’s creator later abandoned these beliefs does not erase the artifact, excuse its imagery, or restore dignity to the history it exploits. It does, however, prevent the release from being frozen into a mythology of eternal ideological conviction. Koncentrations Zentrum was made by a teenager, and teenagers can mistake absolute ugliness for absolute truth, especially when an underground culture rewards the person willing to cross the next forbidden boundary. Leaving such beliefs behind is more significant than maintaining them for the sake of consistency, credibility, or collector mythology.

The demo survives as an uncomfortable document of how quickly artistic rebellion can become obedience to a dead political machine. Its raw black metal attempts to sound lawless, yet the imagery worships uniforms, camps, hierarchy, discipline, and state violence. That contradiction should remain visible. The release is most valuable not as forbidden treasure or proof of uncompromising authenticity, but as evidence of transgression’s trapdoor: a young musician tries to escape ordinary authority and lands inside one of history’s most murderous systems of authority. Fifteen minutes later, the promised empire has vanished, leaving a small homemade recording and the historical suffering it could never legitimately possess.

Vrörsaath - 2020 - Under Vast Dreamskies

Dark Adversary Productions – DA126  2.02GB FLAC

 Under Vast Dreamskies imagines black metal not as a descent into earth, tomb, forest, or historical ruin, but as an ascent into a night sky large enough to contain castles, storms, wandering spirits, and private kingdoms. Vrörsaath’s raw guitars and harsh voice remain tied to the physical urgency of black metal, yet the synthesizers continually pull the music away from the ground. They do not decorate the riffs with a little medieval atmosphere. They enlarge the space around them until the band seems to be performing somewhere between a fortress and a constellation.

The title’s invented compound, “dreamskies,” is important. A night sky is shared physical reality, visible to anyone who looks upward. A dream belongs to one consciousness and obeys private laws. Joining the two creates a world that feels universal and solitary at the same time. The stars appear objectively distant, yet the figures we discover among them come from imagination, memory, fear, and desire. The Seer uses that meeting point to build music that can sound triumphant without becoming cheerful and fantastical without losing its raw underground grain.

The opening title track establishes the album’s dimensions patiently. Keyboard lines rise above abrasive guitar movement, giving the impression that melody is illuminating a structure too large to be seen all at once. The harsh vocals do not dominate the scene like a conventional front person. They appear as one inhabitant calling from somewhere within the architecture. This makes the music feel less like a band performing a song than a realm briefly becoming audible. The instruments describe height, distance, stone, moonlight, and motion without requiring literal sound effects or narrated fantasy.

There is a distinctive relationship between rawness and grandeur here. Cleaner production might make the keyboards more luxurious and the riffs more individually impressive, but it could also reduce the world to a professional soundtrack. Vrörsaath keeps enough roughness for the music to feel discovered rather than manufactured. The edges remain grainy, as though the album were transmitted from a damaged tower or recovered from a cassette found inside a sealed chamber. Grandeur emerges through imagination rather than expense.

“Throne Among the Stars” concentrates the album’s fantasy into an image of impossible sovereignty. A throne normally marks the fixed center of a kingdom, the place from which land, subjects, and borders are surveyed. A throne among stars has no stable floor and no population beneath it. Its ruler possesses a magnificent position but may rule nothing except distance. The song’s combination of martial motion and luminous synth suggests both coronation and isolation. Power becomes inseparable from being removed from ordinary life.

That ambiguity protects the album from becoming uncomplicated escapism. Fantasy can offer liberation from the limitations of daily reality, but it can also expose the loneliness hidden inside dreams of absolute authority. The Seer performs everything alone, constructing drums, guitars, keys, voice, landscape, and imagined court from one source. The project’s solitary method mirrors its celestial king: one figure creating an entire kingdom because no existing kingdom is sufficient.

“Empyrean Storms” gives the album its most dramatic cosmological image. The empyrean traditionally refers to the highest heaven, a region beyond ordinary elements and earthly change. A storm occurring there violates the expectation that transcendence should be peaceful. Even the uppermost realm contains turbulence. Vrörsaath’s melodic brightness and black-metal abrasion become especially meaningful in this context. The synthesizers reach toward divine altitude while distortion keeps introducing weather, conflict, and material resistance.

This is one reason dungeon synth and black metal work so naturally together when neither is treated as an accessory. Dungeon synth imagines spaces, histories, towers, roads, and supernatural distances. Black metal introduces bodies, struggle, danger, and weather into those spaces. Without the synth, this album’s castle might remain a silhouette. Without the metal, it might become an uninhabited illustration. Together they produce architecture under pressure.

“Wanderer’s Dawn” changes the direction of the journey. Dawn usually promises return, clarity, and relief after darkness, but a wanderer has no guaranteed home toward which morning can guide them. Light reveals the distance still to travel. The track carries a feeling of movement through an awakening landscape, but its atmosphere remains too haunted for sunrise to function as a simple victory. Night has not been defeated. It has entered memory and changed the person emerging from it.

The wanderer is also an ideal figure for this kind of music. Unlike the warrior or king, the wanderer is defined by movement rather than possession. Landscapes are encountered but not conquered. Ruins offer temporary shelter. A path may be followed without knowing whether it leads toward revelation or deeper exile. Vrörsaath’s recurring melodic figures create that sense of travel by returning in altered emotional light. Repetition becomes distance covered rather than motionlessness.

“Memories of My Astral Journey” closes the album after the journey has already become past tense. This is not the astral journey itself but its residue, suggesting that the preceding tracks may have been recollections rather than immediate events. Memory does not preserve an experience evenly. It selects a throne, a storm, a dawn, a staircase, a moonlit tower, then allows the connecting hours to vanish. The final piece feels like looking backward at a realm whose entrance can no longer be located with certainty.

Samuel E. Thomas’s monochrome cover makes this uncertainty visible. A castle rises between severe mountains, mist, a huge moon, ruined stone, and a staircase leading toward a doorway concealed by the structure above it. The architecture is simultaneously inviting and forbidding. The stairs promise entry, but the image gives no evidence that the traveller will be welcomed or permitted to return. Fortress and landscape have almost fused, as though the castle were not built upon the mountain but dreamed by it.

Under Vast Dreamskies succeeds because its fantasy is not merely nostalgic medieval pageantry. Its kingdom belongs to interior life: the structures people build from solitude, ambition, memory, and the need for reality to contain more than the visible world seems to offer. Vrörsaath transforms one musician’s private materials into a sky large enough for other listeners to enter. The throne may remain empty, the storm may occur above heaven, and the journey may survive only as memory, but for thirty-nine minutes the stairs are still there.

Upir - 2020 - Frostbitten Communion with the Eidolon of Night

 

Self-released – none  62.83MB FLAC

Frostbitten Communion with the Eidolon of Night describes not an encounter with death, but a sacrament conducted in its presence. Communion implies participation, the voluntary acceptance of something into the body. An eidolon is an image, apparition, phantom, or surviving likeness of what is absent. Upir joins those ideas beneath freezing darkness, creating a ritual in which the listener does not merely observe a nocturnal spirit but receives part of it. The frost is therefore more than weather. It is the condition required for contact, stripping warmth from the ordinary self until another presence can be admitted.

The composition begins with the sense that the ceremony was already underway before the recording became audible. Raw guitar sound forms a broad, wind-beaten surface while the drums drive from somewhere inside it, less like a rhythm section placed neatly beneath the riff than a pulse struggling through accumulated snow. The production is blurred but not vacant. Melody remains embedded in the distortion, appearing and disappearing according to how closely the listener follows it. What first resembles one continuous grey mass gradually reveals ridges, paths, and distant points of light.

This is one of raw black metal’s peculiar strengths. Reduction in clarity can produce an enlargement of imaginative space. A sharply separated guitar, voice, and drum kit would tell us exactly where the musicians are and how the recording was assembled. Upir’s murk weakens those physical measurements. The performance begins to feel geographically impossible, as though it were occurring across a mountainside rather than inside a room. The voice is no longer simply in front of the instruments. It becomes another disturbance passing through the storm.

The cover’s severe black-and-white mountain photograph gives this sensation a monumental body. Snow and exposed rock are forced into such hard contrast that the landscape appears partly real and partly engraved, an immense natural structure converted into occult architecture. The valley remains visible below, but the eye is drawn upward toward peaks that seem capable of crushing every human measure placed against them. Upir’s logo and long ceremonial title occupy the lower portion like an inscription made by a very small cult beneath a very large mountain.

Mountains and vampires may seem to belong to different mythic systems, but they meet through the idea of inaccessible survival. A mountain outlasts generations while remaining indifferent to them. A revenant violates the expected finality of an individual life. One persists through geological time; the other returns after personal time should have ended. The music occupies the narrow darkness between those scales. Its repeated riffing creates the sensation of something ancient continuing to move, while the voice preserves the desperate evidence of one temporary body caught inside it.

The hunter’s moon mentioned in Upir’s description adds another cycle to the ritual. Moonlight does not create the landscape; it reveals selected parts while withholding the rest. Under that light, snow becomes brighter and the forest beneath it becomes more obscure. The composition behaves similarly. Melodic phrases illuminate the distortion for a few moments, but each revelation produces additional darkness around it. The listener learns the shape of the piece through recurrence rather than through a conventional sequence of clearly announced sections.

This recurrence makes communion possible. Ritual depends upon repetition because repetition converts an isolated action into an established passage. A phrase said once may be information; spoken repeatedly, it can become invocation, oath, prayer, or spell. Upir uses riffs in this ceremonial manner. Their return is not merely economical songwriting. Each cycle deepens the sense that the music is maintaining a threshold. Stop repeating and the opening may close.

Yet the track never becomes completely motionless. Drumming gives the ritual a bodily urgency, preventing the atmosphere from dissolving into pure ambient contemplation. The cold landscape is not empty. Something is travelling through it with purpose, or perhaps fleeing across it while believing itself to be the hunter. Black metal often blurs this distinction. The figure howling into the night may imagine command over the darkness while simultaneously revealing terror before it.

The “eidolon of night” is especially effective because it suggests that night itself possesses an image or surviving double. Darkness is normally defined by the removal of visibility, but an eidolon gives that absence a form. The music attempts something similar. Distortion obscures individual detail while producing a larger presence that feels more concrete than any clearly identified instrument. The less precisely the source can be located, the more completely it seems to occupy the space.

There is also an unusual spiritual tension inside the word communion. The term carries Christian associations of shared substance, remembrance, sacrifice, and membership in a body extending beyond the individual. Raw black metal frequently positions itself against Christianity, yet it repeatedly preserves religious structures in transformed form: vestments become corpse paint, hymns become tremolo melodies, prayer becomes invocation, and communion becomes fellowship with darkness. The sacred is not abolished. Its direction is reversed.

Upir’s ritual feels solitary even though the music is made by a group. There is no audible congregation responding in orderly unison. Community exists through shared exposure to the same freezing presence. Musicians and listeners become connected not through comfort or doctrinal explanation, but through remaining inside the sound long enough for its repetition to alter perception. The track does not tell us what the eidolon believes, demands, or promises. Participation comes before knowledge.

Its eleven-minute duration is ideal for this kind of encounter. The piece is long enough for atmosphere to replace ordinary orientation but short enough to retain the concentrated shape of a single visitation. It does not construct an album-sized mythology around the apparition. The figure emerges under the moon, gathers guitar, drums, voice, frost, and mountain into one temporary body, then withdraws.

Frostbitten Communion with the Eidolon of Night ultimately treats cold as a medium of transmission. Warmth softens boundaries, encourages movement, and returns the body to social life. Frost hardens surfaces and makes every breath visible. Upir uses that exposed condition to stage its communion. Nothing comforting is offered, but something is shared: the knowledge that darkness can acquire form when enough attention is given to it, and that a phantom need not become fully visible to leave part of itself inside whoever witnessed its passing.

Celestial Sword & Upir - 2020 - Frozen by Midwinter Snows

 

Self-released – none  174.68MB FLAC

Frozen by Midwinter Snows is written in the passive voice. Nobody commands the season, crosses it victoriously, or summons it as a decorative backdrop. The figures inside this music have been acted upon. Snow has accumulated until movement, identity, and ordinary time are no longer available in their former condition. That distinction gives the collaboration between Celestial Sword and Upir unusual gravity. This is not black metal pretending to conquer winter. It is music made from inside the moment when winter has already won.

The two projects do not divide the nineteen-minute composition into separate territories. Celestial Sword’s vocals and synthesizer enter Upir’s guitar, drums, and voice as additional weather, making authorship difficult to separate once the storm has gathered. This is collaboration as convergence rather than exchange. One musician does not simply provide an atmospheric introduction before the other supplies the metallic body. Synth, distortion, percussion, and voices seem to affect one another continuously, producing a single climate whose individual elements become increasingly hard to isolate.

The guitar establishes movement, but the movement feels obstructed. Riffs advance through a surface that pushes back against them, while the drums retain enough urgency to suggest that something living is still attempting to cross the landscape. This creates the track’s central tension. The music is frozen, but not motionless. Freezing is presented as a process happening to movement, the gradual conversion of struggle into stillness. Every repeated passage resembles another layer falling across tracks that were visible moments earlier.

The synthesizer enlarges that process beyond the immediate bodies producing it. It supplies horizon, sky, distance, and the pale atmospheric pressure surrounding the harsher instruments. Rather than softening the black metal, it makes the guitars appear smaller and more exposed. A riff may carry considerable force, yet the sustained tones around it suggest a landscape capable of absorbing that force without changing. The human sound becomes intense precisely because the environment remains indifferent.

This is where the collaboration’s vampyric identities become more interesting than simple Gothic decoration. Upir’s name reaches toward the revenant, while Celestial Sword is presented as a vampyric entity. Both concern forms that continue after ordinary life should have ended, but Frozen by Midwinter Snows removes them from crypts, castles, and bloodlit chambers. The undead are placed outside beneath an enormous sky, exposed to a force older and less personal than death. Vampirism may overcome the grave, but it does not necessarily overcome climate, distance, or the long arithmetic of winter.

The voices consequently feel less like rulers issuing proclamations than signals struggling across open ground. Harsh vocals are already distorted forms of human communication, but here the surrounding atmosphere makes them seem further displaced. They may be calls between two figures, competing invocations, or the last audible evidence of bodies disappearing beneath weather. Their words matter less than the fact that voices are still being attempted. Expression continues even when reception cannot be guaranteed.

Midwinter itself is a beautifully unstable setting. It marks the deepest region of the season, when darkness has reached its greatest extent, yet it also contains the first almost imperceptible movement back toward light. The cold may intensify after the solstice even as the days begin lengthening. Frozen by Midwinter Snows inhabits that contradiction. The music sounds completely enclosed, but its sustained melodic motion contains a thin suggestion that enclosure is not identical with finality. Something may survive beneath the apparent stillness.

Snow preserves as well as buries. It conceals bodies, roads, ruins, seeds, and animal tracks, but it can also protect what lies below from harsher fluctuations. To be frozen is therefore not necessarily to be destroyed. It can mean being suspended between life and death, held beyond decay while awaiting conditions that may never return. The composition repeatedly approaches this suspended state. Its melodies do not resolve into triumph or collapse. They remain present, trapped inside recurrence.

The official description places the collaboration beneath the Hunter’s Moon and the Cold Moon, joining two different nocturnal conditions. The hunter’s moon implies pursuit, exposed fields, and the gathering of provisions before winter. The cold moon belongs to the season after preparation has ended, when survival depends upon what was carried into darkness. The track seems to move between those conditions. Its rhythmic force still remembers the hunt, while its atmosphere already knows that the world has closed.

The cover transforms a snowy ravine into a ceremonial entrance. Dark rock and trees rise on either side of a white path that disappears toward an overexposed center. Decorative columns frame the landscape as though the mountain pass were also a temple doorway. Yet nothing visible waits beyond it. The destination has been erased by brightness rather than hidden by darkness. Travelling forward means entering an absence so complete that snow, sky, and path become indistinguishable.

That image also captures the collaboration’s musical architecture. Upir provides the rough walls and forward path; Celestial Sword opens the impossible white space toward which everything moves. Neither function remains completely separate, but their meeting creates a threshold larger than either project alone. The track does not tell us whether the white center represents death, transcendence, exhaustion, or another world. It only makes continuing toward it feel inevitable.

When this piece was later paired with Journeying Through Nameless Wilderness, it became the first half of a larger cold invocation. Yet it remains complete on its own because it ends where its title promised: not with escape from the snow, but with identity absorbed into it. The collaboration begins with two entities converging beneath moonlight and concludes with the sense that the landscape has become the only remaining entity.

Frozen by Midwinter Snows finds grandeur not in defeating nature but in allowing human and vampyric drama to become very small inside it. The riffs struggle, the drums continue, the voices call, and the synthesizer keeps widening the sky. Eventually the distinction between traveller, apparition, and storm begins to dissolve. What survives is not victory. It is the faint evidence that something once moved here, preserved beneath a surface already becoming smooth.

Upir - 2020 - Howling of the Ageless Winds: Hymns for the Black Tapestry of Night

 

Self-released – none  250.20MB FLAC

Howling of the Ageless Winds imagines the night sky not as empty space but as an immense woven surface. Stars, clouds, moonlight, darkness, and northern color become threads crossing a black tapestry whose full design cannot be viewed from the ground. Upir’s raw production serves that idea beautifully. The instruments are not separated into clearly illuminated objects. Guitar, drums, and voice pass through one another until the music seems less like three musicians occupying a room than weather moving across an unseen landscape. The human participants remain audible, but they no longer control the scale of what surrounds them.

The word “hymns” matters because these pieces are not merely descriptions of scenery. A hymn addresses something, praises it, or enters into relationship with it. Upir directs that devotional structure toward moonlight, wind, frozen distance, and the animal force surviving beneath civilization. The music retains the repetition and collective intensity of religious song while removing the reassuring architecture of congregation and doctrine. There is no promise that the natural world hears the invocation or cares who offers it. The ritual gains power precisely because it is performed before something incapable of returning human approval.

“Moonlit Gates of the Ashen Sky” begins with a threshold large enough to make ordinary gates seem absurdly small. These gates are not constructed from stone or iron. They appear when moonlight divides darkness, revealing an opening where the sky had seemed completely sealed. The guitars establish broad, repetitive movement while the drums provide a bodily insistence beneath them. The vocals enter less as narrative than as evidence that someone has reached the gate and attempted to call through it.

The track’s thirteen-minute length allows the gate to remain open without immediately explaining what lies beyond. Upir does not hurry toward a dramatic revelation. Repeated guitar figures gradually change the listener’s relationship to time, making recurrence feel less like returning to the same point than passing through successive layers of atmosphere. The riff remains recognizable, but each cycle arrives after more distance has accumulated around it. What first sounded like a musical phrase begins behaving like a path whose destination remains concealed by weather.

“Somber Under the Eventide Firmament” moves beyond the threshold into suspension beneath the evening sky. “Firmament” is an ancient word carrying the image of the heavens as a vast structure stretched above the earth, a dome separating the human world from waters, stars, or divine territory. Upir’s music gives that archaic architecture physical pressure. The sky does not feel empty or infinitely open. It hangs over the landscape like an enormous dark ceiling whose weight can be sensed even though it cannot be touched.

This middle piece is the album’s longest and most inward movement. Instrumental passages are allowed to extend until the listener begins hearing the guitar less as a series of riffs than as a continuous atmospheric substance. The drums do not merely propel the composition forward. They prevent complete dissolution, preserving the sensation of a body still travelling beneath the firmament. Vocals appear like brief ruptures in that movement, reminders that awe and terror may produce the same involuntary cry.

The adjective “somber” avoids the exaggerated vocabulary often used to describe black metal. The condition is not ecstatic despair, cosmic triumph, or total annihilation. It is a grave awareness of scale. Evening reduces detail, alters familiar distances, and exposes how dependent human confidence is upon daylight. Upir does not need to invent a monster within the darkness. The firmament itself is sufficient. Its age, silence, and apparent indifference diminish every temporary concern placed beneath it.

“Blackened Aurora over Boreal Wastes” provides the demo’s strangest image. An aurora is normally imagined through color and luminosity, a celestial display that briefly makes the polar night spectacular. To blacken it is to remove the expected revelation while preserving the movement. Something still crosses the heavens, but its light has become dark enough to deepen rather than defeat the night. Upir converts wonder into uncertainty. The sky is active, perhaps even beautiful, yet its activity offers no guidance.

The boreal wastes below are not truly empty. Forests, snow, animals, rock, frozen water, and unseen movement may all inhabit them. “Waste” is a human judgment applied to land that does not visibly serve human purposes. Upir’s music quietly overturns that judgment. The apparent wasteland becomes the source of the album’s greatest vitality, while civilization remains almost entirely absent. Guitar and drums produce continuous movement across this supposed emptiness, suggesting that what humans call barren may simply be alive according to rhythms we do not own.

Raw recording is crucial to this reversal. Greater studio clarity might display individual performances more impressively, but it would also return the musicians to the foreground. Here the blurred edges reduce personal authority. The guitar becomes wind, percussion becomes distant movement under frozen ground, and the voice becomes another animal signal carried across the open distance. The production does not imitate nature realistically. It redistributes musical importance until environment and performer can no longer be cleanly separated.

The title’s “ageless winds” finally supply the force connecting all three hymns. Wind passes through gates, crosses beneath the firmament, and continues over boreal territory without respecting borders or preserving the identity of anything it touches. It carries weather, scent, seeds, smoke, cries, and evidence of distant events, yet it cannot be held responsible for the messages transported through it. Upir’s extended compositions behave similarly. Riffs carry emotional information without explaining it, voices arrive from unclear distances, and every repeated passage seems older than the people performing it.

The demo follows a coherent nocturnal ascent: first an opening appears in the sky, then the listener stands beneath its vast structure, and finally an impossible dark aurora moves across the northern wastes. No destination or supernatural being is revealed. The journey’s purpose is the gradual removal of human centrality. By the final minutes, the listener has not conquered the night, interpreted its signs, or secured communion with it. The hymns continue because praise does not require possession.

Howling of the Ageless Winds is therefore more than an early collection of long raw-black-metal pieces. It establishes the project’s essential relationship among repetition, landscape, ritual, and bodily vulnerability. Upir does not use nature as scenery behind human drama. Human sound is placed inside nature’s much larger drama, where it may howl fiercely for a moment before the wind takes it apart and carries the fragments elsewhere.

Upir - 2020 - Peasant Revolt Against Tyranny: Vampyric Charity Rehearsal MMXX

 

Self-released – none  50.13MB FLAC

Peasant Revolt Against Tyranny overturns one of black metal’s most persistent fantasies. Medieval imagery is frequently viewed from the castle: solitary rulers, aristocratic vampires, fortified towers, inherited bloodlines, and private realms protected from the common world below. Upir places the imaginative camera among the people outside the walls. The peasants are not anonymous scenery beneath somebody else’s throne. They are moving together, discovering that the fortress’s apparent permanence depends upon their continued obedience. Black metal’s darkness is redirected away from worship of power and toward the moment when power begins losing its spell.

The word “peasant” matters because it identifies people usually excluded from heroic history. Kings receive names, portraits, dynasties, and monuments. The laborers who fed kingdoms, constructed fortifications, carried weapons, buried the dead, and endured taxation often survive as numbers or background figures. A peasant revolt interrupts that arrangement. Those expected to remain beneath history enter it bodily, bringing tools, hunger, rage, memory, and the dangerous realization that authority is not supernatural merely because it has been inherited.

Upir’s raw rehearsal sound fits this uprising better than polished production could. The recording does not resemble a professional army marching in perfected formation. Guitar, drums, and voice gather through friction, their edges blurred by the room and the urgency of the performance. Momentum matters more than separation. The riff does not stand above the other elements like a commander issuing orders; it becomes the route along which the entire piece moves. The roughness makes the music feel organized from below, assembled quickly by participants who cannot postpone action until every condition has become ideal.

Calling it a rehearsal intensifies that idea. Rehearsal normally points toward a later, supposedly complete performance, but revolt is always rehearsed in fragments before it becomes visible. People exchange grievances, test language, recognize one another, measure the strength of authority, and learn which fears are privately shared. The decisive public event may seem sudden only because its long preparation remained unnoticed. Upir’s eleven minutes preserve that preparatory electricity. This is not a polished reenactment of a rebellion safely concluded in the past. It is the sound of collective possibility still deciding what shape it can take.

The subtitle “Vampyric Charity Rehearsal” creates a wonderfully productive contradiction. The traditional vampire is an aristocratic predator, secluded in inherited property and sustained by taking life from others. Charity points in the opposite direction, toward giving resources away and recognizing another person’s need as morally significant. Joining the terms transforms vampirism from a fantasy of elite domination into something stranger. The nocturnal outsider no longer feeds upon the vulnerable. It aligns itself with those confronting the larger predator.

That reversal also reveals that occult or vampyric imagery carries no fixed politics. A castle can symbolize refuge or domination. Darkness can conceal persecution or protect people organizing beyond surveillance. The outsider may despise humanity, or may recognize injustice more clearly because established society has already rejected them. Upir refuses the lazy assumption that black metal’s anti-social appearance must lead automatically toward contempt for oppressed people. Here the genre’s hostility is directed upward, toward tyranny, while its sense of underground fellowship becomes practical solidarity.

The music gains additional force from this alignment. Raw black metal often speaks of war, cleansing, conquest, and merciless strength without identifying the social relationships hidden inside those words. Peasant Revolt Against Tyranny names the direction of conflict. The violence imagined by the title is not power descending upon disposable bodies; it is pressure returning from bodies that have absorbed too much of it. The distinction does not romanticize revolt as clean or painless. It changes who is granted agency and whose fear is treated as historically important.

The single Roman numeral title removes any detailed narrative that might narrow the piece into a sequence of imaginary battle scenes. “I” can designate the first chapter, but it can also be read as the individual self. That creates a tension inside a work devoted to collective revolt. Every horde is composed of singular people, each carrying private reasons for joining. Collective action does not require the erasure of individuality; it can begin when isolated individuals discover that their suffering is not merely personal failure. The solitary “I” becomes politically dangerous when it recognizes itself in countless others.

Cole Hadley’s cover turns that recognition into landscape. The viewer appears enclosed within a cavernous opening, looking toward a distant castle under lightning. A fence or ruined barrier occupies the lower ground, while a small boat rests on dark water. The castle is visually central but physically remote, illuminated enough to become a target, destination, or symbol rather than a secure home. The foreground belongs to roots, rock, water, broken structures, and whatever lives outside the protected heights. Lightning draws white fractures across the composition, making the sky itself appear to participate in the breach.

The boat is particularly suggestive. It is tiny compared with the castle, but it offers movement through terrain that walls cannot completely govern. Revolt does not always approach power along its official roads. It travels through concealed routes, whispered knowledge, improvised networks, and forms of mutual assistance too small to resemble institutions until they have already connected large numbers of people. The visual scale may favor the fortress, yet mobility belongs to what appears insignificant beneath it.

Upir’s later recordings would expand into moonlit gates, frozen wastelands, apparitions, and vast nocturnal skies. This first document contains those atmospheric instincts in compressed form, but its center is unusually earthly. Hunger, hierarchy, rebellion, and charity occupy the same vampyric world. The supernatural vocabulary does not remove the music from material life. It provides a mask through which material solidarity can speak with greater imaginative force.

Peasant Revolt Against Tyranny is therefore more than an embryonic rehearsal preceding Upir’s fuller atmospheric work. It establishes a moral orientation that makes the project’s darkness more interesting. The castle is magnificent, but magnificence does not make its ruler just. The night is frightening, but it also gives cover to people gathering beyond authority’s sight. The vampire can remain a predator, or can turn against the machinery that taught predation as privilege. For eleven raw minutes, Upir chooses the revolt and allows black metal’s supposedly antisocial darkness to become the meeting place where an isolated “I” discovers a liberating “we.”

Upir - 2021 - A Frigid Calling

 

Self-released – none  43.33MB FLAC

A calling differs from a command because it leaves room for refusal. Something makes itself heard across a distance, and the person receiving it must decide whether to answer, approach, hide, or pretend that no sound occurred. A Frigid Calling places that invitation inside Upir’s frozen nocturnal world, but the cold is no longer merely an atmosphere surrounding the musicians. It becomes an active intelligence capable of summoning them. The title suggests that this music begins before the first audible note, somewhere beyond the recording, where winter has already spoken and the band is responding.

The indefinite article is important. This is not “the” frigid calling, a singular prophecy that explains the project’s entire mythology. It is one call among others, perhaps one of many signals moving through darkness without reaching a witness. Upir’s earlier recordings often presented enormous landscapes in which human sound became small beneath moon, snow, wind, and distance. Here the relationship feels more immediate. The landscape has noticed something standing within it. Cold ceases to be passive weather and becomes communication.

The fuller guitar sound gives that response greater bodily substance. Rawness remains essential, but rawness does not have to mean that every instrument disappears inside one blurred surface. The guitar can retain abrasion while carrying more weight, allowing its melodic movement to become both path and obstacle. It advances through the atmosphere rather than dissolving entirely into it. The result suggests a figure pushing against severe weather, each repeated motion asserting that life remains present even while the environment attempts to reduce it to another dark mark against the snow.

More audible drums alter the scale of the music just as significantly. Upir’s earlier murk could make percussion feel like distant motion beneath a storm, but bringing the drums forward restores the vulnerable machinery of the body. A landscape does not need rhythm to continue existing. A living creature does. Pulse implies effort, circulation, pursuit, and the limited time available before exhaustion. The cold may appear eternal, but the drummer must keep striking in the present. That contrast places mortality inside every moment of forward motion.

This change in production does not make the recording less atmospheric. It changes where the atmosphere resides. Instead of being created primarily through obscurity, atmosphere emerges from the friction between audible physical action and the enormous space around it. Guitar and drums become clearer precisely so their struggle can be felt more sharply. The music is not escaping the storm through improved definition. It is revealing what the storm has been acting upon.

The voice occupies the most unstable position in this arrangement. A harsh black-metal vocal can be proclamation, invocation, warning, pain, or an attempt to communicate after ordinary speech has failed. Within the idea of a calling, it may be either the answer or the original summons. Perhaps the landscape speaks through the vocalist. Perhaps the human figure is calling back toward something that will never reply in recognizable language. The inability to decide who initiated the exchange gives the track its supernatural charge.

Its brevity is also revealing. Upir’s longer works allow repetition to alter consciousness gradually, constructing immense night skies and frozen territories through sustained exposure. A Frigid Calling behaves more like a flare fired into darkness. It does not remain long enough to establish a complete mythology or guide the listener through several ritual stages. It identifies a direction, releases concentrated force, and ends while the signal is still echoing. What follows must occur outside the track.

That compressed shape suits its original place within a compilation. Surrounded by other projects, Upir cannot rely upon an album-length environment to prepare the listener. The track must open its own gate immediately, establish the temperature on the other side, and leave the opening behind for whoever arrives next. Compilation listening creates abrupt borders between private worlds. One artist’s final sound vanishes, another appears, and an entirely different cosmology must become credible within seconds. A Frigid Calling uses that abruptness as part of its meaning. The listener is taken without preparation from wherever the previous track ended and placed within hearing distance of the tundra.

The compilation title, The Seeds of Ruin, gives the piece another possible frame. Seeds normally promise growth, while ruins announce the ending of whatever once grew or was built. Joined together, they suggest that destruction is never entirely empty. Abandoned structures gather moss, roots split stone, animals enter broken rooms, and later generations transform debris into stories. A frigid calling could be the first signal rising from such ground, announcing that the apparent end of one form has created conditions for another.

The cover works through a similar collage of survival and erasure. Botanical fragments frame a broad landscape in which a tiny dark figure stands beneath a sky almost stripped of detail. Torn paper remains visible around the images, refusing the illusion that these pieces ever belonged to one seamless photograph. The logo occupies another pale scrap above them like tangled roots, dead branches, or a signal too dense to be translated. The assembled picture looks recovered rather than designed, as though several incomplete views were joined in an attempt to reconstruct the location from which the call emerged.

The small figure is crucial because it prevents the landscape from becoming pure abstraction. Someone is present to receive the signal, but the image withholds identity, direction, and response. The person may be approaching, listening, or already frozen in place. Their scale makes heroism impossible. They do not dominate the land by standing within it. They provide a measure of how little human certainty matters beneath that enormous sky.

A Frigid Calling announces a new phase for Upir without abandoning the project’s original terrain. Greater instrumental presence does not dissolve the mystery; it gives mystery something firmer to press against. The drums become the body’s answer, the guitar becomes the route along which the answer travels, and the voice remains suspended between summoner and summoned. The cold calls once, fiercely and briefly. Whether the figure follows is left for the music that comes afterward.

Upir - 2021 - Effigy for the Fiercest Frost - Shadows Dance in the Fires of Yule

Self-released – none  197.32MB FLAC

  
 An effigy is a body constructed for something that cannot appear in its own body. It may represent a ruler, enemy, deity, absent person, or the dead, giving visible form to a presence that memory can feel but ordinary sight cannot recover. Effigy for the Fiercest Frost performs this operation upon winter. Upir cannot place cold, darkness, wind, and seasonal extinction directly inside a recording, so the group builds them another body from guitar, drums, voices, drone, repetition, and acoustic distance. The music becomes a figure raised in honor of a force too large and impersonal to recognize the tribute being offered.

The subtitle, Shadows Dance in the Fires of Yule, prevents winter from becoming a monochrome kingdom of ice. Fire occupies the center of the image. Yule marks the deepest darkness but also the point from which daylight begins its nearly imperceptible return. The flames provide heat, fellowship, and temporary protection, yet they also create the shadows named in the title. Light does not simply defeat darkness. It gives darkness moving bodies. Upir builds the album inside this contradiction, allowing harsh black metal and suspended atmosphere to behave as fire and shadow, each making the other more visible.

“Apparitions Beyond the Treeline I” places the listener before one of nature’s simplest and most psychologically powerful borders. An open field can be surveyed, but the forest begins where sight loses authority. The treeline is therefore both geographical fact and imaginative threshold. Something moving beyond it may be animal, traveller, branch, mist, memory, or the eye manufacturing life from incomplete information. The long first movement does not hurry across that border. It remains near enough for the unseen interior to accumulate power.

The fuller guitar and more audible physical pulse introduced on A Frigid Calling now have room to support a much larger structure. Rawness remains, but the music does not disappear completely into atmospheric blur. The drums preserve bodily urgency beneath the accumulating sound, while the guitars repeatedly open routes toward the forest and then cover them again. Movement remains possible, but certainty does not. Every recurring passage feels like another attempt to approach the same boundary under slightly altered weather.

The title’s plural “apparitions” is equally important. This is not one ghost waiting to be identified and understood. Several presences occupy the mist, which means the listener cannot convert the experience into a tidy encounter with a single supernatural character. Additional vocals from Lachrymose deepen this sense of inhabited distance. Another human voice does not make the landscape warmer or more social in an ordinary way. It multiplies the possible locations from which a cry, warning, invocation, or answer might emerge.

Upir describes the recording as an act of fraternity among brothers and a recognition of other specters haunting the mist. That fraternity does not resemble a heroic band of warriors advancing in formation. It is closer to the knowledge that other solitary figures are listening beneath the same winter sky. They may never gather in one physical place, but recognition passes through recordings, shared influences, exchanged symbols, and the discovery that somebody else has seen movement beyond the same treeline. The community exists precisely because its members remain partly obscured.

“Apparitions Beyond the Treeline II” feels like the point at which watching becomes participation. After the extended first movement has trained the ear to search the fog, the shorter second half no longer needs to establish the landscape. The listener has already accepted its uncertain laws. Apparition and observer begin losing their stable separation. What appears beyond the trees may be approaching, but it is equally possible that the person watching has projected part of themselves into the darkness and is now receiving it back in altered form.

This is where Upir’s tribute to Paysage d’Hiver becomes meaningful without reducing the album to imitation. *Winterkälte* helped establish cold not merely as black-metal subject matter but as a recording condition, a way of allowing distortion, repetition, buried melody, and distance to transform music into environment. Upir recognizes that lineage while giving it a different social and emotional emphasis. The winter here contains fraternity, fire, Yule, memorial, and the possibility of voices answering one another through the storm.

The current dedication to Holly adds a later layer the original December 2021 release could not yet have fully contained. A work already concerned with effigy and apparition became capable of serving as memorial. This does not mean every sound must be interpreted biographically or that the album’s original winter mythology disappears beneath grief. It demonstrates how recordings continue acquiring meaning after release. A title written before a loss can suddenly reveal a chamber large enough to hold it. The effigy remains the same object, but the absence represented inside it has changed.

The cover makes no attempt to show a sculpted figure, funeral monument, supernatural creature, or Yule fire. It offers a blurred field, dark treeline, and grey-white atmosphere in which sky, fog, and ground begin merging. That refusal is perfect. The viewer searches the image for an apparition and may begin finding figures that are not objectively there. The album’s true effigy is therefore created partly by whoever approaches it. Sound and picture provide insufficient evidence, and imagination completes the body.

Effigy for the Fiercest Frost ultimately presents winter as both destroyer and keeper. Frost kills growth, restricts movement, and empties the visible landscape, but it also preserves what warmer conditions would allow to decay. Memory behaves similarly. It can immobilize a lost presence inside one image while protecting that presence from complete disappearance. Across these two long movements, Upir raises a temporary form from distortion, firelight, brotherhood, fog, and grief. The apparitions never step fully beyond the trees. They remain where remembrance is strongest: near enough to alter the living world, but distant enough that attention must keep returning to the border.

Celestial Sword & Upir - 2021 - Journeying Through Nameless Wilderness - A Pilgrimage Through Abyssal Frost

Crown & Throne Ltd. – CT050  207.82MB FLAC

 A pilgrimage normally moves toward a place whose name gives the journey meaning: a shrine, grave, mountain, relic, or city already made sacred by belief. Journeying Through Nameless Wilderness removes that assurance. Its travellers enter territory without an agreed name and therefore without a map of inherited significance. Nothing promises that the route leads anywhere, that the landscape recognizes human devotion, or that the pilgrims will return with knowledge capable of being translated for others. Celestial Sword and Upir make black metal from this uncertainty. The journey is sacred not because the destination has been certified, but because continuing through the unknown requires its own form of faith.

The subtitle, A Pilgrimage Through Abyssal Frost, deepens the contradiction. Frost ordinarily forms across surfaces, coating branches, stones, windows, and exposed ground. An abyss suggests immeasurable depth. Joining them creates a cold that is both skin and chasm, something encountered on the outer edge of the world but extending downward without visible limit. The music answers with guitars that establish rough forward motion while synthesizer tones open distances beneath and around them. What appears to be a path across snow gradually feels like travel above a buried depth whose bottom cannot be imagined.

This second collaboration does not repeat the immobilization of Frozen by Midwinter Snows. That earlier piece imagined winter acting upon bodies until movement was nearly absorbed into the landscape. Here movement has become the central obligation. The travellers may be cold, obscured, and uncertain, but they continue. C.S.’s drumming supplies the physical fact of that continuation, each strike preserving a pulse beneath the atmospheric accumulation. G.G.’s guitar carries the route forward through abrasive repetition, while Narkisa’s synthesizer makes the surrounding territory seem much larger than the people crossing it.

The voices of Narkisa and B.L. complicate the idea of companionship. They do not sound like two hikers discussing direction or reassuring one another beside a fire. Their cries emerge from different regions of the storm, sometimes appearing to answer, summon, warn, or remember one another. The collaboration creates fellowship without comfort. To know another presence is travelling through the same wilderness does not make the wilderness less severe, but it changes solitude into shared endurance. Each voice becomes evidence that someone else has reached another point within the same impossible landscape.

The word “nameless” also protects the wilderness from possession. Naming can be an act of affection and recognition, but it can also be the first stage of ownership: identify the mountain, draw its border, enter it into a ledger, and make it administratively available. This landscape remains beyond that machinery. It cannot be turned into property, destination branding, or a heroic achievement recorded beneath the conqueror’s name. The pilgrims do not plant a flag. They pass through a place whose identity remains independent of their passage.

That humility distinguishes the piece from metal built around fantasies of mastery over nature. Celestial Sword and Upir do not present winter as a hostile kingdom waiting to be defeated by exceptional strength. The music continually places the human participants inside forces that exceed them. Distortion becomes wind and limited visibility; synthesizer becomes horizon, snowfall, and the deceptive light reflected from frozen surfaces; drums become bodily labor measured against distances that do not care whether the body succeeds. Grandeur belongs to the wilderness rather than the traveller.

The original cassette transforms this idea into an especially elegant physical ritual by placing the same composition on both sides. When Side A ends, flipping the tape does not reveal a sequel, alternate perspective, or safe return journey. The wilderness begins again. The listener discovers that turning the object over has not escaped the territory but only entered it from another edge. A pilgrimage traditionally changes the person who completes it, and therefore the repeated piece cannot be heard identically. The recorded sound returns unchanged, but whoever hears it carries the memory of the first passage.

This duplication also gives the cassette the structure of an impossible map. Side A may be the outward journey and Side B the return, yet both routes sound the same because the travellers can no longer determine which direction leads home. The forest, snow, and darkness have erased the distinction between advance and retreat. Alternatively, the two sides may represent separate pilgrims moving through the same landscape at different times, leaving no trace visible to one another. The tape keeps these possibilities open by refusing to designate one performance as primary and the other as repetition.

The cover offers a landscape whose apparent calm conceals this disorientation. Dark conifers gather beyond still water beneath a sky almost erased by whiteness. An ornamental black border frames the central scene like a devotional illustration, suggesting that the wilderness has already become an icon. Yet the image contains no shrine, road, figure, or supernatural apparition. The frame declares significance while the landscape refuses to explain what should be worshipped. The sacred object may be nothing more than the continued existence of a place beyond human interpretation.

Later, this journey was joined with Frozen by Midwinter Snows as Cold Invocation of Scarlet Night, allowing the collaborations to form a larger movement from entrapment toward pilgrimage. Heard alone, however, Journeying Through Nameless Wilderness remains more ambiguous. It offers no proof that the travellers were previously frozen, no explanation for why they began moving, and no indication that they reached shelter. The bloodpact dedicated to night and northern cold sounds less like a promise of victory than an agreement to remain faithful to the journey even when its purpose cannot be demonstrated.

The piece ultimately treats pilgrimage as devotion without possession. Celestial Sword and Upir enter the wilderness, give it twenty-two minutes of voice and motion, then leave its true name untouched. Flip the cassette and the passage opens again, as though no traveller had ever completed it. The snow preserves no monument, the water reflects no destination, and the forest keeps whatever knowledge may exist beyond its edge. What survives is the act of going onward together when the map, the shrine, and the assurance of return have all disappeared.

Upir / Forbidden Tomb - 2021 - Split

 

JEMS – #127  182.89MB FLAC  182.89MB FLAC

This split connects Calgary and South Tangerang without pretending that geography has disappeared. Upir and Forbidden Tomb inhabit different climates, scenes, and physical distances, yet both use raw black metal to construct places where ordinary location becomes difficult to determine. The cover offers no recognizable national landmark, only trees reduced to black congestion against a white sky. Forest becomes interference. Branches cross until depth collapses, and the two names appear together on a torn strip beneath them. The image does not illustrate either project separately. It creates neutral nocturnal territory where both can enter, leave damage, and withdraw without meeting in daylight.

Upir begins by refusing to name its contribution beyond “Untitled I.” After the project’s elaborate moons, apparitions, frozen communions, and vast dreamlike geographies, this absence of language feels deliberate. A title normally gives the listener a small lantern, suggesting what should be imagined and which emotional path might lead through the recording. Here the lantern is withheld. The Roman numeral implies sequence, but no second movement follows. “I” stands alone, either as the beginning of an unrealized series or as the isolated self trying to remain intact inside fifteen minutes of atmospheric collapse.

The piece develops less like a journey across recognizable terrain than a black weather system gathering over the listener. Guitar distortion forms a wide abrasive body, but occasional melodic fragments remain suspended inside it, visible for a moment before the surrounding pressure consumes them. The drums produce a strange internal throbbing rather than a clean forward march. They suggest circulation within something enormous, as though the storm itself possesses organs. B.L.’s vocals arrive from uncertain distances, sometimes nearly buried, preserving the evidence of human distress without allowing the human figure to become the composition’s center.

This is Upir at its most abstract. Earlier recordings often used titles and artwork to establish moonlit gates, boreal wastes, peasant revolts, or winter rituals before the sound began. “Untitled I” lets sound produce its own unstable meanings. A listener may hear snowfall, smoke, machinery, cloud, psychic injury, or a vast creature digesting whatever has entered its atmosphere. None of these images gains official authority. The absence of a title keeps the track open while making it less hospitable. Without coordinates, immersion becomes indistinguishable from being lost.

Forbidden Tomb answers that namelessness with one of the split’s most vivid titles: “Night of the Pale Blood Sky.” The phrase binds darkness, drained color, and bodily violence into a single impossible sky. Blood should be vivid, but here it is pale, suggesting loss, sickness, moonlight, or something already emptied of life. The two numbered sections do not patiently establish the scene. They enter as a fast, abrasive rush of tremolo, percussion, and distant screaming, making the sky feel less like scenery than an event falling upon everything beneath it.

The difference from Upir is immediate. Upir’s side expands outward until individual gestures become difficult to locate. Forbidden Tomb compresses its elements into relentless horizontal movement. The guitars scrape forward in repeated formations while vocals remain caught behind them, less like a commanding figure than something pursued within the noise. The production does not separate the players into a polished hierarchy. Everything arrives as one rough surface, but recurring riffs keep the violence from becoming formless. They are crude landmarks glimpsed repeatedly while the storm drives the listener past them.

Dividing “Night of the Pale Blood Sky” into two parts gives the performance a ritual hinge without truly interrupting its attack. Part I establishes the nocturnal flood; Part II feels like the same weather reaching a more anguished region. Another vocal presence seems to rise against the primary shriek, producing the sense of suffering answering suffering rather than singer answering singer. The sky has not changed, but something underneath it has become more visible. Repetition turns from aggression into enclosure. The riff returns because there is nowhere outside it to stand.

Forbidden Tomb’s name becomes especially meaningful here. A tomb is ordinarily a marked place, constructed so the dead can be located, remembered, protected, or contained. A forbidden tomb denies access and therefore intensifies curiosity about whatever has been sealed inside. The music reverses that relationship. Rather than entering the tomb, the listener hears pressure escaping from it. The frantic guitars and layered cries suggest that burial has failed, not because a single corpse rises theatrically, but because the entire sealed atmosphere has begun leaking through sound.

Then the short “Outro” removes the metallic attack and leaves cold ambient residue. This is not a peaceful release after the violence. It resembles the temperature of the chamber after whatever occupied it has withdrawn from immediate perception. The split’s final minutes widen the space again, quietly reconnecting Forbidden Tomb’s compressed assault with Upir’s atmospheric immensity. What appeared to be two separate methods reveals a shared destination: sound becoming environment, environment becoming presence, and presence surviving after identifiable musical action has ended.

The sequencing creates a compact movement from the unnamed toward the overnamed and finally beyond naming again. Upir begins with “Untitled I,” a vast condition without narrative. Forbidden Tomb introduces blood, sky, night, and numbered stages, giving the darkness a violent mythic identity. The outro then strips those names away, leaving only the room, frost, or psychic residue in which they briefly existed. The split does not conclude by deciding which project’s method is stronger. It demonstrates that abstraction and imagery can enter the same darkness from opposite directions.

There is also something quietly powerful in the physical distance bridged by the object. Canadian and Indonesian musicians do not need to imitate one regional tradition or occupy the same rehearsal room to build a coherent release. Files, small labels, cassette editions, compact discs, mail, and listener networks create another kind of underground geography. The collaboration exists because people separated by continents recognized related intentions in one another’s sound. Raw production becomes not evidence of cultural isolation but a language capable of travelling while retaining local strangeness.

Upir and Forbidden Tomb ultimately use the split to erase the clean border printed between them. One side becomes a hovering mass filled with half-submerged voices; the other becomes a blood-pale rush ending in frozen ambience. By the final drone, it is difficult to determine whether we have crossed from Canadian night into an Indonesian tomb or discovered that both openings led into the same unlit interior. The trees on the cover remain tangled, the sky remains blank, and the names pasted beneath them identify the entrance without explaining what passed between the branches.