Author Archives: necromoonyeti

October Music Series: Piorun – Nadbuanski Wit

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Here’s a song that captures bizarre pagan ritual at its most Dionysian. Barely coherent woodwinds teeter on the brink of madness, spurred on by seductive, primitive drumming and the string drone of what I’m guessing is a hurdy-gurdy. Piorun are a folk and ambient band from Poland, which is not a particularly active country in the pagan metal scene, but it should come as no surprise from the brand of folk they play that the band has ties to Nokturnal Mortum.

It’s not particularly easy to dig up information on these guys. What’s available to me had to be plugged through Google Translator from Polish, but I gather Stajemy Jak Ojce, the 2004 release on which Nadbuanski Wit is the opening track, is their only full-length album.

I’m a bit confused as to just how “Polish” Piorun really is. The references I saw to “ties with Nokturnal Mortum” are a bit of an understatement; Knjaz Varggoth, Saturious, and Munruthel are all a part of the line-up, amounting to half of the band and all of the folk elements. Of the band’s three presumably Polish members, two are only credited with vocals. One, and possibly all three, were members of the now defunct Polish black metal band Archandrja. (I’ve not heard them save a few youtube samples just now.)

At any rate, Stajemy Jak Ojce is an absolutely brilliant album when the folk is allowed to shine. When the ambient takes more primacy it leaves a little to be desired. Nadbuanski Wit falls firmly in the former. Whether you choose to hear it as chilling and demented or as ritualistic and reverent, it’s bound to leave a lasting impression.

October Music Series: Skyforger – Zviegtin’ Zviedza Kara Zirgi

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Latvia’s Skyforger have been around for ages. They first formed in 1991 as a folk-leaning death metal band called Grindmaster Dead, but by 1995 they changed their name to Skyforger and turned their attention to black metal. After leaving their mark on both the second generation of black metal and the formative years of pagan metal, they turned their attention to Latvian folk traditions unconditionally. Zobena Dziesma, translated as “Sword Song”, was released in 2003. It left metal at the door, and presented, in coordination with the Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, an outstanding compilation of songs in traditional Latvian style.

Here is the explanation on Skyforger’s official website for how Zobena Dziesma came to be:

“Skyforger is not a professional Folk group, and we are traditionally known for playing Folk/Pagan Metal. We started playing Folk music as amateur enthusiasts, only for ourselves. However, our friends and fans expressed a desire to hear more of these songs, and that led to the creation of this album. Most of the songs you can hear on this recording are taken from the repertoire of well known local Folk groups. Others are reworked versions of material from our previous albums. Our passion is to play olden songs of the war and mythology of our forefathers. In that respect, this album is no different from those we have recorded in the past. It is our tribute to ancient Latvian history, culture and folklore.”

Skyforger translate Zviegtin’ Zviedza Kara Zirgi as “Neighed the Battle Horses”. It’s the track that has always stood out to me most on the album. It is exceptionally visual. It’s one of those songs that transports you to another place and time, and allows you to engage an ancient world trapped somewhere between history and fantasy.

October Music Series: Твердь – Масленица Широкая

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An unrelenting, wild ride through everything that makes Slavic pagan metal amazing, Масленица Широкая (Maslenitsa Shirokaya) is one of the finest songs in the entire genre. Anyone familiar with Russian pagan metal gods Pagan Reign should find the sound entirely familiar. When Pagan Reign broke up in 2006, Твердь (Tverd’) formed from the ashes. Guitarist Vetrodar and drummer Demosthen were the only returning members, but stylistically Tverd’s only album to date, Вслед за Солнцеворотом (Vsled Za Solntsevorotom), is such a direct continuation that it would be hard to understand Tverd’ as anything but a legitimate continuation of Pagan Reign. Even the band’s name is the title to Pagan Reign’s final album. It is also a reference, I would imagine, to their hometown Tver, just north of Moscow.

The quality of this song is just impeccable. It carries all of the epic glory of Pagan Reign’s Новгородские Пляски (Novgorodian Folk Dance), but with a more mature approach to the madness and the addition of a fantastic vocal performance by Svetlana Lebedeva. The song is structured, much like Novgorodian Folk Dance, to eschew standard composition and confront the listener with one bombastic movement after another, thriving in a state of constantly progressing triumphant climax. It lacks all of the frustration and anger that so many Slavic bands reflect in their recognition that the culture they’re preserving exists only in scattered embers. Maslenitsa Shirokaya is a pure celebration with no baggage. Cheers.

October Music Series: Slartibartfass – Tanz der Kobolde

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From the perspective of a guy who doesn’t speak a word of German, this has to be the second greatest band name ever after Helfahrt. But then, “Slartibartfass” apparently refers to a fictional character with an intentionally absurd name. To the best of my knowledge Helfahrt is a legitimate false cognate. HELFAHRT!

This is not Helfahrt. This is Slartibartfass, who paint a delightful vision of super-cute munchkins tying you up in your sleep and harvesting your kidneys. Tanz der Kobolde makes no pretense to anything more than what its name suggests. The death metal vocals are deliciously hokey (the only sort of context in which I actually like death metal vocals), and yes, the drummer is simulating stomping gremlin feet.

Kobolds are little Germanic sprites, typically invisible and inhabiting homes, caves, and ships. They’re fairly ambivalent little fellows. Some will do household chores for a pittance, and they say if you stab one to death it can drop gold. When annoyed by their human cohabitants they tend towards dismemberment. They don’t much care for clothing. The element cobalt is named after them; they often give it, laden with arsenic, to miners as a playful prank.

Slartybutt are from the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany. Tanz der Kobolde appears on their first album, Nordwind, released in 2006. It is definitely…. entertaining.

October Music Series: Odroerir – Präludium

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I said I’d make it weird for the last week leading up to Halloween. Here’s some true kvlt kazoo metal to kick things off.

I have no idea if that’s actually what Odroerir are playing (I mean, Finntroll did it) or if it’s some medieval woodwind similar to what Stary Olsa use in the Drygula song I recently featured, but either way the “wtf” factor was probably not lost on them. Odroerir are a folk metal band with medieval tendencies hailing from the Thuringia region of Germany. They formed in 1998, and Präludium is the opener to their 2001 debut full-length Laßt Euch Sagen Aus Alten Tagen. The band’s name is a German variant of Icelandic Óðrerir, the name of the chalice of mead imbued with the knowledge of wisdom and poetry in Norse mythology. I don’t know that much wisdom went into crafting this song, but you can bet plenty of mead was involved.

October Music Series: Plethyn – Lawr y Lôn

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Plethyn are a Welsh band that formed some time back in the 1970s. Lawr y Lôn is the opening track from their 1995 release, Seidir Ddoe. They’re perhaps the only band I’ve stumbled upon that sing in Welsh, and it’s absolutely beautiful. As is the case for a lot of obscure older folk bands that pre-date popular interest in ethnic music, information on them is pretty slight. Here is a copy of an English translation of the lyrics that I found:

They do need men of fifteen stone, down the road, down the road
Of muscle flexed and good strong bone, down the road, down the road
If you’ve the guts and what it takes
They promise you, you’ll get your stakes
Gold is what the leprechaun makes, down the road

I’ve given all my life and worked, down the road, down the road
I’ve slaved long hours and never shirked, down the road, down the road
I’ve lived in dark and dreary huts
Collected scars like dustroad ruts
And suffered many jibes and butts, down the road

I must go now and give my all, down the road, down the road
There’s more to life than mere dole, down the road, down the road
I have no hope of a job nearby
So I’ll pack my bags and say goodbye
I need the brass, I’m not work-shy, down the road

I’ve always given all I had, down the road, down the road
But hardship tends to make one sad, down the road, down the road
Today the time has come, ’tis true
To think dark thoughts ’bout what to do
I’ve lived my life away from you, down the road

I must go back to my home and wife, up the road, up the road
I know full well there’s a better life, up the road, up the road
From oil-rig or from motorway
I’d give more than my double pay
To see that morning sun and stay, up the road

Alright. Today is the 24th, which means Halloween is a week away. I’m going to get a little more on focus from here on out. Plethyn serves as a pretty little conclusion to my general “if it’s folk it flies” approach. My next seven posts are going to hone in on the really bizarre, haunting, spooky stuff.

October Music Series: Metsatöll – Velekeseq Noorõkõsõq

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Metsatöll are a folk and heavy metal band out of Tallinn, Estonia. There probably aren’t too many bands you can say that about. The band first formed in 1999, and Velekeseq Noorõkõsõq appears on their 2004 debut full-length, Hiiekoda. You won’t hear any metal in this track though. What you get from the beginning just repeats on for three minutes. I chose this song because, however imaginative they may have been in creating it, it certainly feels like a completely authentic drinking song straight out of the Viking age. Metsatöll sing in ancient Estonian, or so I’m told. Their name is an ancient Estonian word for wolf.

It’s really amazing and quite relieving to me that Estonian tradition has sufficiently survived to make a song like this possible. Despite their absorption into the Soviet Union, the Baltic states seem to have clung to their traditions in what feels like impressively unadulterated form. I know the black/pagan metal band Skyforger have done a tremendous job of preserving quite authentic Latvian folk, and though I know significantly less about Metsatöll, songs like Velekeseq Noorõkõsõq lead me to believe they’re doing the same for Estonia.

To give you an idea of the possible antiquity of the song, or at least, the style that you are hearing, here is the intro to the Wikipedia entry on Estonian music: “The earliest mentioning of Estonian singing and dancing dates back to Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum (c. 1179). Saxo speaks of Estonian warriors who sang at night while waiting for an epic battle. The Estonian folk music tradition is broadly divided into 2 periods. The older folksongs are also referred to as runic songs, songs in the poetic metre regivärss the tradition shared by all Baltic-Finnic peoples.”

Did Saxo Grammaticus or his sources experience in the 12th century something quite similar to the 2004 recording you are hearing here? I think it’s a real possibility.

October Music Series: Смута – Ворон

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From the sweeping, epic introduction to the wild guitar solos falling somewhere between power metal and melodic death, Ворон (Voron) is one of those songs that struck me like a brick the very first time I heard it. Смута (Smuta) are yet another band out of Russia, hailing from Rybinsk in Yaroslavl Oblast. I don’t know much about the band, and I’ve been too hopelessly distanced from anything but my (relatively) mainstream folk metal connections to keep up with them lately, but their 2007 debut full-length, Смута Крови (Smuta Krovi), was a surprisingly well-informed album for a band that doesn’t appear to have any connections to the bigger names of the genre.

The death metal vocals are the only consistent factor throughout the album, with musical themes that incorporate Finntroll-esque folk metal, Pagan Reign/Твердь-styled Slavic pagan metal, some power metal and melodic death guitars, and a uniquely tame approach to black metal. It’s got nothing on Falconer’s Armod for perfecting a merger of the myriad metal subgenres, but it’s a worthy effort, and it grants them a unique sound which, with better production and a little more edge, could evolve into something really amazing. They’ve released two albums since Smuta Krovi that I’ve yet to hear, and revisiting the band here has certainly peaked my curiosity.

Voron is definitely the stand-out track of the album, and the intro says it all. It’s the one track in which their lack of an edge can definitely count as a good thing. The brief opening segment is enough to give a solid fantasy essence to a song that really doesn’t fit that bill beyond the thirty second mark, placing it in the odd context of bearing sort of formal, almost royal imagery that you can somehow pull off your best air guitar imitation to.

October Music Series: Alkonost – Sun Shine Our Land

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I first ran into Alkonost back in the days of Audiogalaxy, when I barely had a clue what metal beyond Metallica and Pantera consisted of. They are remarkably early for folk/pagan metal, forming in Naberezhnye Chelny, the second largest city of Tatarstan in Russia, in 1995. Their first demos were released in 1997, and “Sun Shine Our Land” appears on their 2000 debut full-length, Songs of the Eternal Oak.

I wasn’t really aware that anything describable as pagan or folk metal existed (and most of the standards by which the genres are judged had yet to be written), so for me it was something of an anomaly. I’d been listening to a lot of Nokturnal Mortum at the time, and I was beginning to develop this idea of “eastern” metal as something far more ah, I guess I’d say spiritual, than the western angst engines I’d been accustomed to. It stood apart, too, from the fantasy stuff I’d been getting into at the time. It was something quite different from Blind Guardian, Iced Earth, Rhapsody… it felt like fantasy (power) metal turned inside out, where the music wasn’t so much describing as becoming the myth. That’s a lot of what folk and pagan metal is, I suppose.

I find it a bit fascinating that, all inheritance from Bathory aside, the genre did emerge largely out of the former Soviet Union. It has a historical framework that goes beyond musical trends. These are bands that, in the new era of free speech that defined the 1990s, rejected the ideals of modernization and looked to idealize the past as a more authentic human experience than anything under pseudo-socialism. I don’t know how much Alkonost actually influenced the pagan and folk scenes that followed, but the fact that I’d heard of them as early as 2000 is a telling sign. “Sun Shine Our Land” was one of my favorite songs back then, and certainly still merits attention.

October Music Series: 下村陽子 – Beware the Forest’s Mushrooms

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Yoko Shimomura was a rising star when she composed the Super Mario RPG soundtrack in 1996, fresh out of Capcom and ready to embark on a higher profile career with Square. The whole soundtrack was exceptional, but one track in particular was so catchy that it’s been stuck in my head ever since, and it’s most certainly appropriate for a fall theme.

Within the game, the song plays to a forest maze–one of those looping maps that can have you wondering around forever if you don’t pay attention. ‘Forest music’ has always been among the best tracks in RPG scores, but I don’t know that anyone’s pulled one off as effectively as Yoko Shimomura. It’s not quite as dark and haunting as say, Koji Kondo’s “Forest” from A Link to the Past or Yasuaki ‘Bun Bun’ Fujita’s “Deep Forest” from Breath of Fire, nor as calm as Yasunori Mitsuda’s “Secret of the Forest” from Chrono Trigger, to name some contemporaries. It’s far more friendly and inviting, which really makes it all the more dangerous, because at the end of the day you’re still getting lost in a deep forest maze filled with monsters out to kill you. It draws you in, makes you want to keep on wandering, like a good proper evil enchanted forest ought to.

It’s also the theme song to Geno, a doll possessed by the spirit of one of the stars you’re out to rescue, who really creeped me out as a kid because I thought that orange thing on his hat was his nose for some reason.