In the Valley of the Shadow of Death CD - Veil of Darkness (Finsternis Productions 006)
($10 - C/o Finsternis Productions, P.O. Box 202, North Hobart, Tasmania, 7002, Australia) Out before Marilyn Manson had a chance to steel the name. Seven tracks of spooky, and I mean SPOOKY, ambience from the shores of Tasmania. Noisy, beautiful, powerful (the epic quality of 'Pure Black Energy') and ever so god damn dark.
The average track consists of slow and effortlessly moving and emerging, well, I guess you'd call them melodies, on a dark and brooding base of rumbling depression. As someone tries to get a broken lighter to work in your ear, while ghouls wander about in the background
Kathaaria-Through The Forest To Spiritual Enlightenment
(Finsternis Productions)
A bleak, savage musical journey from the rational daylight world into the gloomy eaves of primordial woods, where instinct and solitude reign supreme. This is the rawest of Sin-Nanna's music that I have heard-entirely stripped down to the most basic and brutal elements. The sound and music are ugly and tortured, but at the same time grand, spiritual even. Vocals are reduced to little more than throatripping trollish chants. Like Striborg, the guitars form a veil of creeping fog, through which the well-articulated drums emerge, sometimes calm, sometimes utterly crushing. There is a definite resigned and deterministic quality behind this entire recording, perhaps lying somewhere between the barely-tonal chord-progressions and rhythms that sound like the beat of a thousand hooves through the ancient forest. At one moment it seems that this black metal is summoning the solitary to secret, sacred glades; at the next, a triumphant riff and storm of bells/kettle drums summon the heathenhearts to pure abandon and bloody combat. Through The Forest To Spiritual Enlightenment comes highly recommended.
(Finsternis Productions)
The second Striborg tape, Misanthropic Isolation, was reviewed comprehensively in Orthanc (and is currently being remixed for CD-release and possible label-signing). Cold Winter Moon is the first... product... of this one-man Tasmanian conspiracy against life, light and sanity, back in the days when there was 'obsession with creating darker music' than the older Kathaaria stuff. An obsession that was fully realised in this approximately 45-minute piece of pure negativity. The 'black metal' tracks-of which there are three (plus "I love to see blood spill", the demented 'death metal' album closer)-are essentially comprised of total endurance-jackhammer-wargasm drumming that pounds through sheets of cold, thick, misty guitar. (The first track, "Misanthropic Isolation", must be heard to be believed.) Sin-Nanna's strange, disturbing chants/shrieks ring out through this depraved audio-forest. Lyrics thus delivered do not bear contemplation. Yes indeed, the first Striborg tape definitely blurs the line between 'black metal' and sheer distorted nihilist noise. Cold Winter Moon is not without contrast, however: the metal songs are broken up by a series of spine chilling ambient pieces, the highlight of these being the tape's title-track. Listening to the entire tape at high volumes, and particularly on headphones, can be something of a transcendental experience. I have never had the guts to put it on in total darkness.
In all, an utterly destructive effort from Australia's finest black metal outfit. To quote Primitive Future (for the umpteenth time), "The fact that all you trendy fuckers will hate this makes me like it even more!"