Nameless Therein – Hex Haruspex (2018)

by D.A.R.G. on August 27, 2018

One of the greatest challenges of art linked to mystical practices its concern with being able to codify pathways to the inner experience that is intended to be facilated or transmitted. Nameless Therein have taken a reserved yet thematically rich path towards the accomplishment of such a feat by creating sinister musical vignettes. The compositions in question consist in arrangements for three clean-sound electric guitars, and which arrangements focus on enriching textures surrounding a clear thematic line. The character of the music is one that flirts with different sentiments, with its only constant being a vague sensation of weirdness that is accentuated by the quick evaporation of single pieces. The full effect can only be felt as they are played in succession, allowing their similarities, contrasts and particularities to accumulate in the short term memory, the unconscious and the body’s chemistry.

Codification refers to the placing into intelligible patterns a message that will be decoded and transformed by its receiving agent. The efficacy of art as a portal, as a catalyst, is rooted in its artistry, in its effective deepening or altering of the world. Relation to technique and craft is direct, but the evaluation of its efficacy is its totality, since it will be probably found that the most efficacious experiences are based on craft effectively codifying —thus channeling— the intended experience. Nameless Therein is heard here using each and every ounce of technique and craft of instrumentality and composition to this end, and there are no loose strings in this respect.

What at first seems like a limitation is indeed the source of efficacy as a retainer for evocative suggestions in aural form. Very short pieces form pictures in a stream that allows them their own personality while restraining from elaborating excessively, and so avoiding confinement of the listener’s individual experience. Like beautiful entrances to secluded roads in an enchantingly dark, pastoral setting, enticing first and bewitching after as the path grows beyond the composition, yet within the designs of the composer’s manipulative schemes. Sympathetic strings are pulled, and one hovers above, or is shifted out of position, but incompletely. Perception is rent asunder, but in wild streaks, singaling marks seen by a now disturbed awareness. These are doors opened for journeys that can only be taken in solitary, and which no art can complete: art is always a portal, never the experience.

The dense guitar arrangements here make very natural use of the properties of the instrument. Rather than strumming incessantly, or attempting to emulate usages that are more suited to bowed instruments, we hear craftful arpeggiations supporting the passage of melodies that glide over string activity. The last is the proper use of a clear or acoustic guitar-like instruments, whose sonority lends itself to constant vibrations that form a pool over which appears a face: that of the spirit of the melody. That is the germ that infects the mind, and it is a daemon of possession as well, one that invades and lives in the listener.

The underhanded disalignment induced by the music makes portals of such narrow openings into secretive, wide spaces. The effects can be dizzying, even sickening, submerging us in a vaporous twilight that is neither here or there. As the short pieces pass almost unnoticed, a slow but clear altering of one’s biology seems to take place by virtue of the effective completeness of the “circular motion” that they do possess despite their limited length. Each one moves the eye’s mind, the humors in the chest, and the emotions in differing directions, miniscule in individual magnitude, yet hardly negligible as fifty-six spirits create a vortex at the center of which is the bewildered listener.

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Serpent ov Old – Withering Hope (2012)

by D.A.R.G. on August 13, 2018

S E R P E N T  O V  O L D

Withering Hope

2012 Era Horrificus

It is the way of things that genres arise from culture and philosophy, as well as from personal interpretions of that culture and philosophy. In the case of metal, we see its subgenres and styles mingling in different ways to different degrees of acceptance and satisfaction by audience, artists and critics. In the case of Serpent ov Old, this has taken the form of an amalgamation of black metal and power metal, which has surprisingly and graciously bypassed the technicisms of death metal. And while there is word of power metal taking up death metal techniques into its repertoire, the mainstay of power metal has never executed this transition. The truth of the matter is that the melodicity and emphasis on comprehensible chord progressions of power metal has more to gain from the elegant emphasis on melodies-made-flows that the best of black metal has mastered inwardly. At the same time, Serpent ov Old makes music that stands primarily as evocative music elevated above discussions on techniques or style, even if the techniques and ways of expression have been clearly adopted from the sources mentioned above.

Serpent ov Old builds music by stating themes in the fashion of power metal, while balancing —purging— the saccharine effects by the application of black metal underpinnings in percussion, vocalization and guitar strumming. What we can hear is a music dominated by harmonic movement across which significantly active melodic lines move. Tension is built and released and then recaptured by both the melodic-harmonic interplay of lessons learned from black metal here, and those adopted from power metal there. Furthermore, the textural effects of the percussion and how these affect impulse, constriction and relaxation are taken primarily from black metal. The band makes this work by connecting power metal and black metal techniques to their common speed metal foundations, meaning that in many of the cases, the approach of the central riffing and percussion could fall into a nebulous area which both genres share in mature forms of speed metal, although this ambivalence is usually resolved towards black metal. As a whole, power metal is used as a bombastic paintbrush that allows Serpent ov Old to magnify the usually understated dramatism of black metal.

All this has to be accomplished tastefully, and we never find a reliance on trope or techniques: compositions are driven by the central, “invisible” essence of motion and contrast, and fluctuations of power and direction, by and for which the instrumentation exists. The “shredding” abilities of the guitarists in this work are used much in the same way that Trey Azagthoth’s atonal noise solos ripped through old Morbid Angel songs: as hyeroglyphs rather than as pretentious elaborations. These are to be taken as impressionist impressions, and should not be confused as baroque virtuosic displays, for such scale-based quasi noise shreds lack the self-sufficiency of the proper baroque solo instrument that we would hear in a work for viola da gamba by Marin Marais, for instance. And as one listens to the music more and more closely, subsequent spins allow the listener to perceive these relations properly, allowing them to see where the backbone is located, and how the peaks and valleys are formed by the creators of this landscape of poetic rashness.

The music of Serpent ov Old is fierce romantic dramatism akin to powerful forces of nature that destroy yet also create. By adopting and moderating the extroverted expression of power metal and delicately subsuming it under black metal, Serpent ov Old makes the music genres escape the narcissistic trap and makes them serve a transcendent expression of inner experience. Furthermore, this profound experience, if authentic, is one of darkness and anguish; but which darkness and anguish, if contronted and assimilated unto individuation, can presumably lead to the creation of a new type of being. However, the music is still limited by this personal flavor, which still tends to be merely inward looking, but not yet deep enough that a new space is opened up through the self as a gate. We may say that this is ultimately a question of personal experience, reflection and individual meaning. But ultimately, as music, it must be able to develop the ability to somehow come up with an aural language that can communicate a general intimation of what is presenced from beyond.

Note: We might yet see Withering Hope released under the banner of Deathwave Nexion.

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Hvile I Kaos – Agios O Fotiá (2017)

by D.A.R.G. on August 6, 2018

H V I L E   I   K A O S

Agios O Fotiá

2017 Era Horrificus

We are witnessing the rise of a label that, on the one hand, boasts of being led by personel experienced in different spheres of nefarious action on the ground, and that on the other, shows itself selective at both musical and ideological levels. The conjunction of these creates a unique opportunity seldom seen in the history of metal, a genre in which great artistic potential has been squandered by a lack of comprehension of what is being ultimately held in one’s hands. Deathwave Nexion promises to be one of the first loci of mature metal cultivation on North American soil. We see a far-reaching influence and presence stemming from a source that appears more monstruous the more one looks into it. In its train, the opening of mainstream operations by the nexion has brought to our ears the Hvile I Kaos’ first full album —a grand opening indeed.

For precise descriptions, Hvile I Kaos can be considered a chamber music ensemble, the music of which circles around the cello as the main instrument. As per classical tradition, it is indeed the wielder of the central instrument who leads the ensemble. He is as well the composer of these evocative pieces, to which the rest of these talented musicians contribute their own interpretations and idiosyncracies. The music is, to this writer’s amateur ears, modernist acoustic arrangements built on popular and folk melodies, but taken to a singular level of development in composition where they escape their roots and become the means with which the artist carves forth a new path. It is tempting, and perhaps not wholy unjustified to liken this to soundtrack music, although as far as that music goes, the generalizing comment does Agios O Fotiá a great disservice. As one follows the opening ‘populisms’ of the music, a joyous Pagan defiance that summons Life as much as it does Death communicates the unabstracted existence of human beings in a reality that is truly beyond these illusory poles —in reality, states of being distorted by blundering mundane minds.

A hidden, but effective power of manifest action and the bringing about of evil, not in the form of mythology as in the olden days of underground metal when daydreams and blurry visions led the way, but of an accumulated range of experiences that condense into the sonic efluvion that acquires depth by virtue of hindsight into concrete events. While this music is somewhat derivative in terms of expression, and may artistically show an imitative character of pre-established tropes, great acumen is shown in narrative elaboration, attention to detail —not to mention an intense emotional, even psychical, connection to more than simply music: this is art that extols visceral terror. The sensation is not unlike the immediacy and premonition of survival in danger that the neophyte might feel upon repeatedly calling on Shaitan while uttering his name and beholding his sigil. This is the plain, subtle and direct elating sensation of the edge of a cold blade; the living of eternity in moments of unsurpassed focus and clarity through sheer horrific ecstasy.

While one may at the very outset be dismissive of some or all of these works, especially given their surfaces’ blatant resemblance to mainstream cliches and overly-trodden figures of musical speech, the moment one engages the music thoroughly for what it has to say, the soul is carried away. More interestingly, despite any impressions words or claims might make, the character of the music —the marks it leaves on the heart— are of a humble tone. Echoes resound in the sensitive listener that become humbling to them as well, triggering introspection and self-challenge, or at least the heart’s need of it. There is no pretension, but rather just a well of remembrance, of pain from life and individual circumstance. This is true not only of Hvile I Kaos, but also of other projects linked to Deathwave Nexion in one way or another, such as Decieverion and Serpent ov Old , whose music should also be perused delicately to find the grain therein. [1]

Under a thin skin, we see highlighted here as part of the underground brotherhood relations and influences that come to feed the belly of this beast. Revelry and joy, mixed with blood-letting and pain, all in the most vivid possession by unnamed deities given tribute by those who aspire to join their ranks, by those whose minds reminisce of their non-existing past beyond the stars, to which they must strive to return, unto death, beyond death. The present work hints at this evolutionary movement into and across an abyss out of sight —yet beheld just below our quivering senses, resounding at the base of our skulls— in a path the entrance to which bears the mark of Shaitan, and upon which the Initiate fervently wishes to be blessed by the apparition of the Mistress of Blood. [2]

The reader on whose ears these words find a welcome reception, will perhaps take them as a salutary note for those who need no further justification for self-overcoming. As enactment of magick, a sword of death, Hvile I Kaos’ present, and hopefully its future, work has a transformative effect over those capable of raising themselves above themselves. Let its passionate music fill your heart, listener; let its muliebrial spectre haunt your wake and your dream, seeker. I for one never cease to long for its embrace.

Notes

[1] Recommended works: Decieveiron – Decieverion (2012); and Serpent ov Old – Withering Hope (2012). We must also emphatically commend the new single by Serpent ov Old in 2018, a preview of their next album to be published through Deathwave Nexion. The band has ascended through their own style to a new stage of coalesced beauty and virtuousic emotionality tempered by its dignified adoption of black metal.

[2] Baphomet – An Esoteric Signification : https://wyrdsister.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/baphomet-an-esoteric-signification/

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Statement from DEATHWAVE NEXION Record Label and Publishing House [MMXVIII E.H.]

by Staff on August 6, 2018

D.A.R.G. : the statement below came to us from the leadership of Deathwave Nexion, and is published here as part of our continued support of outstanding music by people fostering genuinely dark philosophy through adversarial action.

Statement from DEATHWAVE NEXION Record Label and Publishing House:

Whilst remaining largely driven to the release of Neoclassical, Electronic and Ambient records, as detailed in the past and present efforts, our nexial decision to begin incorporating Heavy Metal bands into our cadre has come with no easy discernment. Purposefully aimed at quality over quantity, we have thus far approached or have been approached by artisans who we can collectively say are ‘masters of their craft,’ and no such lower tier of delivery should be permissible if our full weight of promotion and esoteric pairing are to be present.

We have selected a small group of individuals, each with their own sublets from which they are respective champions, but maintaining a shared lineup throughout. These are: DECIEVERION, a classic Black Metal act from Pennsylvania, and no stranger to the nightspirits of yesteryear; SHADOWS IN THE CRYPT, a ‘Sinister Cult’ from Pennsylvania whose sole purpose is to create the most menacing, hate-driven anthems of Devildom, and SERPENT OV OLD, the masterful effusion of many-years of learning through hardships and grief.

These three bands share one common thing among themselves: the members, whose efforts in the genre of North American Black Metal, and especially that which has thrived within the tri-state area, has existed and proliferated independent of genre-trends, subcultural infiltration or consumer interest. Nay, this Unholy Trinity has been, each respectively the bastions of inspiration, and each collectively, the circle of tradition, from which in the darkest times of the Black Metal genre’s foolery, have held down the fort for all of those whom have stayed pledged in allegiance to the dark.

What then separates the efforts of some small, underground, virtually invisible label, and its venture into the metal genre, from any other plastic theater? It is the fact that these “musicians,” are not just that, they are each individually, archetypes of the new aeon. The personnel surrounding the groups in question are antibodies within the mundane superstructure. Given to paths of sharp-living, recognizing no law, and no authority – foregoing the “normal” life which is emblazoned on the armbands of every reactionary, neo-Neckbeard; these are real criminals. They are dedicated to the dark deeds of the devil. In this, their journey towards restoration of principles once commonplace in Black Metal might yet see a renaissance, and in their seedings, might a new prototype of individual arise to stand before the failing species of man.

A New Sample Track from SERPENT OV OLD (2018 via Deathwave Nexion)

Many thanks to D.A.R.G. for the continued support and camaraderie, to S.R. Prozak and the Hessian stratosphere, and for their journalism, which has intersected with our work in the past, and with any luck will continue to in the future.

Julvarg
Deathwave Nexion
2018 Era Horrificus

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