Wold - Screech Owl

Year: 2007
Genre: Ambient/Black/Noise

Man has long since lost the connection to the primeval world. Ephemeral desires replace the hunt, the ritual. Wold erect a Winter Lodge out of this behavior, banished by convenience, left like tusk-less boar to bleed out in the field. From pounding, overdriven guitar to vocals as hot-wired power tools, these songs work to betray their source material, ultimately serving as manipulated field recordings. When device fails to shake its mask, there’s only imagination. The mind turns percussive strings into evergreen branches torn from their trunks, others hum and buzz and throb like waning insects, their wings and antennae slowed by sap. Keys bleat and thump, a buck’s heart cut from his chest and bright with deep red gore. The title track opens with yawning guitar, cold breath in tight clouds that melt away. Fortress Crookedjaw’s voice is the river and the sky; below and above, in motion and static by nature, it creeps free of river rock, rushes over tonal stones, breaks over banks and falls into great white din. As much indebted to early Sightings as it is Cree Indian Conservationist proverb, Wold distorts the Black Metal paradigm into a perversely plastic idiom. Their disregard for fundamentals has empowered their sound, and like the seasons that conditioned its release, this is a work in flux. The unfinished quality that pervades the sound, the music, is not for lack of polish or resource. Intentionally left undone, the listener’s only recourse is to configure the loose matter into something figurative.

Anubi - Mirties Metafora

Year: 1995
Genre: Avant-Garde Black Metal

An avantgarde black metal band with strong psychedelic and ancestral folk infusions from Lithuania. Anubi is a name taken from an Egyptian mythology, it is a name of an ancient Egyptian god. The band emerged in summer 1992, when a guitarist Skro and a drummer Renofer started rehearsing and experimenting at home and recorded some psychedelic music. Vocalist Ptah (later renamed to Lord Ominous) joined in 1993 and the band recorded their first demo in March 1993 during full moon (which was very important for them), which they called God's Pantheon. Anubi said that these compositions were intended to affect listener's psyche and create a darker world. Later, during 1994-1995, they recorded two more demos and released an EP, Sutemus Skambės, in 1996. The only full-length album, Kai Pilnaties Akis Užmerks Mirtis, was released in 1997 by Danza Ipnotica Records; after that an EP was recorded, titled Sielų Pirklys, but it was not released. The band got a four-album deal - the biggest deal in Lithuanian underground history - with Code 666, an Italian record label, but it was canceled due to a tragic split up of the band: the main person in the band, Lord Ominous (Martynas Meškauskas), lost his life in a boating accident on Lake Michigan in USA on March 30th of 2002.

Sopor Aeternus & the Ensemble of Shadows - Songs From the Inverted Womb

Year: 2000

Genre: Darkwave/Neo-Classical

Songs From the inverted Womb is dedicated to the "memory and resurrection" of Little Seven, a boy who died when he was six years old. This album was recorded in an attempt to resurrect at least the memory of the boy, producing some rather grim tales, especially the climactic opus "There Was a Country By the Sea". The music, now featuring a group of around ten guest musicians, contains many more cohesive and flowing arrangements reminiscent of progressive rock. "May I Kiss Your Wound?", from "The Inexperienced Spiral Traveler", makes a fresh appearance; "Résumé..." is in fact an extensive re-interpretation of "Time Stands Still... [...But Stops for No-One]" from Sopor Aeternus' first album, ...Ich Töte Mich Jedesmal aufs Neue, doch Ich bin Unsterblich, und Ich Erstehe Wieder auf; in einer Vision des Untergangs...

Inward Escape - Sacred Nothing

Year: 2004
Genre: Dark Ambient/Post-Black Metal

Presented in two volumes over the course of as many disks, the first comprising of Atremores’ unique direction and approach of what could possibly be labeled under the ambiguous title of ‘avant-garde black metal’, with great emphasis upon the former half of this title. These works further substantiated by the prose and lamentations of its author, and in some respects in stark contrast to its second volume, distinguished by its subtle, atmospheric compositions based this time more upon the absence on human voice and delving its listeners into the disturbed waters of ones own consciousness. Despite the difference in musical exploration throughout its total playing time, Sacred Nothing is kept in harmony and continually bound by its introspection; a realization of the overwhelming worthlessness of human concepts and a defiant detachment from societal convention. Here ideas and manifestations of nihil are wielded and bought into new form. Sacred Nothing is an original, mature work wedding perfectly together celebrated musicianship and audial exploration with staunch individualism, and is a heralded beginning and beacon for art to come.

“To sever from life is to fly within dreams… Here, society’s nightmare is my goddess: Nothingness”

Aluk Todolo - Descension

Year: 2007
Genre: Psychedelic Black Metal/Ambient

This first full-length album shows the band developing the esoteric theorems established on it's debut 7-inch EP, and going far deeper in the methodical exploration of the occult powers of musical trance. With the goal to create a timeless, organic mixing of krautrock's strangeness and grim black metal's coldness, Aluk Todolo conjures rabid obsessive rhythms and abyssal disharmonic guitars, subliminal spiritualist vibrations and bizarre, magick summonings. By reducing psychedelic improvisation to a bare, telluric instrumentation, and basking in the archaic rawness of lo-fi production, the trio elaborates on an audio ritual meant to be monolithic and stabbing, hypnotic but unpredictable, minimalist yet teeming.