October Music Series: Natural Spirit – Внукам Даждь-Бога

Posted on October 11, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Here’s a song I thought fit the season rather nicely. Natural Spirit is a folk/pagan metal band from Ukraine, and Внукам Даждь-Бога (To The Grandchildren of Dazhd-God, at least as Encyclopaedia Metallum translates it) appears on their original 1999 demo Star Throne. The band have released three albums since, most recently in 2011, but this is the only one I’ve heard, so I can’t speak for what they sound like these days.

I’m always a sucker for that cheap, almost SNES-sounding keyboard you find especially on Ukrainian pagan metal albums (Nokturnal Mortum’s cover of “Sorrow of the Moon” by Celtic Frost could be straight out of Secret of Mana or Soul Blazer at times). Of course there’s nothing authentic about it, but its primitive sound in comparison to other synth puts it in a unique position to sound both ancient and entirely unnatural. It’s both reverently pagan and haunting in a dark, fantasy-themed way, uniting visions of Tolkienic landscapes with conjurations of long forgotten gods.

The name in the title, Dazhd-God, refers to the Slavic sun god Dažbog, son of the fire god Svarog. The frequent references to Slavic mythology in Eastern European folk and folk metal are always revealing, if only for the lack of attention this pantheon receives. Translations of the Prose and Poetic Eddas are a dime a dozen, and most people who have the slightest passing interest in mythology have probably read at least some segments of them. History and Germanic Studies departments around the world specialize in them. As diligent as metal bands have been in preserving tales of the Norse gods, the historical texts are there to be had with or without them. With no Slavic Snorri Sturluson to fall back on, Eastern European bands interested in preserving and resurrecting the past share less company. They are far more uniquely responsible for my having ever even heard these names. It is perhaps a consequence of this that lends Slavic pagan metal a stronger affinity with mysticism, often coupled with an almost violent, desperate sense of pride. Внукам Даждь-Бога avoids the latter, but it definitely presents Dažbog in an otherwordly, supernatural light that you won’t find much of in Norse-centric metal beyond Burzum.

October Music Series: Стары Ольса – Танцы

Posted on October 10, 2012 by necromoonyeti

I want to say Стары Ольса (Stary Olsa) are my favorite non-metal folk band, but to be honest I have only heard two of their albums. That just might suffice. Stary Olsa formed in Belarus in 1999. Келіх кола (Loving Cup) is their first album, and they have released eight more since (of which I have only heard their first live album, Шлях (Šlach). It contains much of the same material.) So I can’t really speak for the band as a whole, but Loving Cup is easily one of the best albums in my entire musical collection. Their self-described style is “medieval”, though I don’t know if the Belarusian word they use, сярэднявечнай, carries precisely the same context (it is not a cognate). Their music lacks (to its advantage) a lot of the formalism I associate with western early music. (The average Drolls song will give you an idea of what I mean.) There’s something a lot more free-spirited about Stary Olsa’s sound, which lends it closer continuity with modern folk.

Part of that is an inevitable consequence of the most awesome instrument in the world: the bagpipe. (Did I say the whistle was my favorite just a few days ago? Ah well, close enough.) Stary Olsa do a wonderful job of going into thorough detail about the instruments and styles they employ on their official website. Unfortunately the English translations they provide are not very fluent. Stary Olsa employ three different variants of the Belarusian bagpipe, known as a duda. In the case of this song they also use some more contemporary instrumentation. I gather from what their site says that the flute is in fact a standard modern flute, or something close to it. They make no mention of the tambourine, but I have to wonder just how common an instrument that required metal could have been. The drum they use is likely an authentic medieval instrument, though I’m no good at guessing which. The hurdy gurdy has been known in Belarus since the late 16th or early 17th century, called there the колавая ліра, or “wheel lira”.

Танцы (Dances) is not my favorite Stary Olsa song though. There’ll be plenty more by them to come. In the meantime, you can check out a live recording of this song.

October Music Series: Finsterforst – Urquell

Posted on October 9, 2012 by necromoonyeti

…zum Tode hin was the most pleasant surprise of 2009. Like Turisas in 2007 and Nekrogoblikon in 2011, Finsterforst managed to rise from the depths of mediocrity to greatness in a single album. I’d spun Weltenkraft often enough to know them when I heard them, but there was absolutely nothing special about it. I only grabbed …zum Tode hin in the first place because I was very actively keeping up with metal in general at the time, and it ended up on my top 10 list come the end of the year.

…zum Tode hin adopts a folk-black sound which should immediately appeal to fans of Moonsorrow, while maintaining the strong emphasis on accordion that characterized Weltenkraft. But unlike Moonsorrow (at least for me), Finsterforst’s melodies are extraordinarily memorable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve got Urquell stuck in my head, and this never proves a nuisance. Looking over my 2009 list again, …zum Tode hin is fairly unique in having stood the test of time. I still have yet to grow tired of listening to it.

Finsterforst are a German band that formed in 2004. Their name means “dark forest”. The album title translates to “Towards Death”, and this particular track to “Original Source”. They haven’t released an album since …zum Tode hin, and singer Marco Schomas has since left the band. That’s a bit disconcerting, because his vocals fit their style perfectly, but the good news is a new record’s finally on its way. “Rastlos” should be available by November 27th. Cheers.

October Music Series: Nokturnal Mortum – Cheremosh

Posted on October 8, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Nokturnal Mortum is a name one should only ever drop with caution. They are unfortunately the flagship band of the Ukrainian white supremacist nsbm scene. One might expect idiotic ideas to lead to pretty dim-witted music, but Nokturnal Mortum broke the mold. In fact, they’re one of the most talented bands I have ever heard. Knjaz Varggoth has a seemingly unshakable knack for infusing his music with the all of the pride and hatred that his ideology implies. From 1996 up to the present they have remained on the cutting edge of the folk/pagan metal scene, like it or not.

Cheremosh is conveniently a track with no ideological strings attached. Appearing initially on the 1997 Marble Moon ep and then in slightly more refined form on To the Gates of Blasphemous Fire in 1998, Cheremosh is an instrumental song. The name refers to the Cheremosh river in western Ukraine. With a distinct build-up and climax characteristic of many of their finest songs, Cheremosh transitions from a secluded scene of the river rolling along to some convincing and bizarre pagan ritual. The folk is mostly keyboards–Nokturnal Mortum did not begin to employ traditional instrumentation extensively until the following year on NeChrist. (NeChrist, I recently discovered, is a pun. “Nechist” are evil spirits in Russian folklore.) Nokturnal Mortum did a pretty impressive job of inventing their own folk sound through synth though, and their first three albums gain a lot from it. If you can stomach their ideology, Nokturnal Mortum present some of the most compelling pagan metal on the market, and this isn’t the last time I’ll be featuring them this month.

October Music Series: Тарас Компаніченко – Танець

Posted on October 7, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Here’s an obscure one for you. I don’t have much time to write today, so I’ll keep it short. Тарас Компаніченко (Taras Kompanichenko) is a Ukrainian early music and folk musician born in 1969. Wikipedia describes him as “an influential kobzar, bandurist, lutenist, lira player”, and I’ll leave those terms for you to investigate. The world of Ukrainian folk is vast, both unique in its own right and a major participant in the greater sphere of Eastern European music. It seems like over the last twenty years especially the former Soviet-dominated nations have exploded in a renaissance of music and tradition. If you like what you’re hearing here, dig around a bit for more. It might be hard to find at first, but when you learn where to look there’s a wealth of it out there.

October Music Series: Muzsikás – Dunántúli Friss Csárdások

Posted on October 6, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Hungarian folk group Muzsikás have been around since 1973, but this song is much older. Dunántúli Friss Csárdások translates as “Transdanubian Fast Csárdás”, and “Csárdás” in turn refers to a Hungarian folk dance. It derives from an old Hungarian word for “tavern”.

It’s not always clear to me where exactly folk music comes from. Bands preserve it as best they can, but there aren’t exactly that many options for research. It’s not like we have a written record. What’s gone is gone. When the last village musician dies, hundreds, maybe thousands of years of musical tradition dies with him. With the aid of easy recording and generous grants, it is easy enough for what still remains today to be preserved (and more often than not exploited into that crime against culture we call ‘world music’), but at this point just how much is left? I don’t mean that to be rhetorical; I’d really like to know how modern folk and folk metal bands acquire their sources.

Dunántúli Friss Csárdások and the rest of the songs on this album are an exceptionally clear case. They result from the efforts of Béla Bartók (1881-1945), one of the earliest musicians to consciously recognize folk music’s peril and attempt to preserve it. Trained as a classical musician, from 1904 on he set his focus on Eastern European folk, not only transcribing it and incorporating it into his classical compositions, but also making over 1000 actual recordings, mostly between 1906 and the start of the war. A random example will more likely than not yield a bland 10 seconds of someone talking or humming, but after listening to twenty or so I found one that really impressed me:

Does Dunántúli Friss Csárdások and the rest of the Muzsikás album derive from one of Bartók’s field recordings, or from one of his original compositions based upon them? That I’m not sure about, but one could always just ask the band. Frankly I think it might be a bit more fun to dig through the full collection of Bartók recordings looking for them.

October Music Series: Utuk Xul – The Ancient God of the Light

Posted on October 5, 2012 by necromoonyeti

What I especially love about this song is the sustained, poor production quality noise. Utuk Xul, hailing from Cali, Colombia, are not a band to write home about, and The Goat of the Black Possession is not a particularly special album. One especially degrading review on Encyclopaedia Metallum gives it a lowly 25%, and I’m afraid there’s not much in the review that I can argue with. But what may well be entirely generic songs are masked by a really menacing and constant wall of sinister noise. The quality of the recording is spot on, whatever one might say about the song writing. On one hand “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” really captures the aural spirit of black metal. On the other hand it captures everything that’s especially cheesy about the genre it represents.

Kicking off with a liturgical ode to Satan, the album goes on to mimic every stereotype of the genre in fairly generic form. It’s impossible to tell whether the band is trying really, really hard to be evil or whether the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek a la Carpathian Forest, but unlike Carpathian Forest they lack the relative fame to make that distinction relevant. This song’s title refers to Lucifer–the band present themselves as devout Satanists of the literal Christian sort, not LaVey’s variety–and the lyrics are everything one could hope for in especially cheesy black metal: “Call the moon, Lucifer, the morbid star! The ancient god of the light, my force! Lucifer prince of the abyss! Morbid star, light of the abyss! The hell light of the storms!”, etc.

The one thing the 25% review got definitively wrong, I think, is in chastising them for buying into the Swedish scene he dubs “norsecore”. The term is an entirely appropriate insult for one of black metal’s weakest subgenres, but part of what makes most bands in the Swedish scene pretty bad is their refined recording quality; the blast beat ad nauseam routine isn’t an innately bad thing. On “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” (What became of “part I” is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t appear on this album.) I think Utuk Xul really nailed it. The atmospheric noise just screams evil here, and, moreso than other tracks on the album, this song is sufficiently devoid of attempts at song construction to function as one continuous, sustained explosion. I love it.

I actually find The Goat of the Black Possession as a whole fairly enjoyable for the same reason I like this song, but there might be a bit of nostalgia playing into that too. It was the product of one of my earliest completely arbitrary purchasing sprees in search of unknown black metal bands, and in 2003 I had a lot less to compare it to. “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” is the only track I’ll flaunt without reservations, but if you really enjoy its effects as a background piece then you probably won’t be disappointed by the rest.

Whether Utuk Xul really take themselves seriously is anyone’s guess, but intentionally or not they succeeded in producing one of the lamest photo shoots I have ever seen. Enjoy:

October Music Series: Myllärit – Tunteellinen Valssi

Posted on October 4, 2012 by necromoonyeti

I’m going to keep it fairly friendly for these first few entries before I delve into the darker side of the scene. Today’s feature song is Tunteellinen Valssi by Karelian folk band Myllärit, appearing on their 1999 release In the Light of the White Night. Though this is the only album I have by them, the band have been around for quite some time. They first formed in 1992, and they have since released seven albums.

I am not particularly good at tracing older musical styles, and I don’t know if there’s any sort of precedent for waltzes in Finnish/Karelian tradition, but Tunteellinen Valssi and the album as a whole keep the instrumentation fairly local. In the Light of the White Night consists of a wide range of styles which nevertheless all fall within the broader category I’ve come to associate with Karelian folk. Unlike Poropetra, Myllärit have no ties to the metal scene to the best of my knowledge. I can only speak for one album, but from what I’ve read I gather they stick pretty consistently to traditional folk forms.

I think the majority of their songs are sung in Finnish, but their Finnish Wikipedia entry (yay Google Translate) claims that they also sing in Ingrian, a Finnic language only spoken by about 500 people in the Ingria region just south of Karelia. It always excites me to see modern folk and metal bands doing their part to preserve fading linguistic and cultural traditions.

October Music Series: Tuatha de Danann – The Dance of the Little Ones

Posted on October 3, 2012 by necromoonyeti

“Tuatha Dé Danann” refers to mythological pre-Christian inhabitants of Ireland, and contestedly translates as “peoples of the goddess Danu”. If an entirely appropriate name for an Irish folk metal band, what makes Tuatha de Danann especially odd is that they hail from Varginha, Brazil. The band can, moreover, claim to be one of the earliest-formed acts to perform folk metal, dating back to 1995 (though they quite recently broke up.)

Tuatha de Danann are fundamentally power metal–the definitive metal genre of Central and Southern America (I was in Costa Rica when Iron Maiden played there in 2009 and you’d have thought it was a national holiday). I’ve never been a big power metal enthusiast, so I never had much of a desire to explore Tuatha de Danann’s albums further, but the opening track to Tingaralatingadun, released in 2001, does a delightful (and historically, exceptionally early) job of flawlessly merging power and folk metal in a manner somewhat similar to Elvenking during their finer years. It is a bit more earthy than Elvenking, much to its advantage, and the effect of the constant guitar solo doodling, whistle, and generally airy production creates a lighthearted, mischievous vibe that I would describe as more fantasy than folk–or at least, it invokes a more fairytale superstition of early morning magic. Follow these guys into a cave and you might find a few hundred years have passed on your way back out.

The biggest selling point for me in this song is the tone of the whistle. I cannot sufficiently emphasize my love for whistles. There is no instrument I enjoy more, either to listen to or to play (banjos get a close second, though I’d be kidding myself if I claimed I could play one). “The Dance of the Little Ones” is especially successful in generating a sort of ‘through the fog’ whistle tone which I’ve heard employed by such diverse musicians as Belarusian folk band Stary Olsa (Стары Ольса) and Japanese video game composer Miki Higashino, and which I desperately wish I knew how to reproduce.

October Music Series: Poropetra – Tunturikukka

Posted on October 2, 2012 by necromoonyeti

October is a fine month for music. Everything from the cheesiest of black metal to the most ethereal of folk finds its home in a season which glorifies gore and the old gods together in a grand renunciation of conventional Christian values. I make an effort every year to present a sort of soundtrack to the season. Last year this amounted to a meager one post, but this go around I aim to do a song a day every day from now until the 31st.

The criteria will be two-fold: the song must be either dark, pagan, fantasy-oriented, or at least authentically folk; and I cannot have ever featured it on Shattered Lens before. It’s going to be an interesting ride. I feel at the moment completely out of touch with my music collection, and too hopelessly bereft of time to do anything about it. Musically, I spent the grand bulk of this year focusing on vgm. I must say the venture was eye-opening, and I have a much broader appreciation of video game music to show for it, but it’s a subject quite far from my typical focus. I will be putting my vgm series on hold for the month (it is incomplete anyway, and such a break will hopefully give me time to extend it), and focusing on music a bit more relevant to the season.

Today’s feature song is Tunturikukka by Finnish folk act Poropetra, taken from their self-titled 2004 demo release. While their full-length album features substantial rock influence, their demo is an outstanding example of uncompromised contemporary folk of the Finnish/Karelian variety. The band’s name is, according to Encyclopaedia Metallum, “the name of a mythological blue moose which travels through the sky”. Their founder, Juha Jyrkäs, has supposedly collaborated with folk metal legends Korpiklaani.

Tunturikukka is a track I’ve been keeping around for years now. I don’t recall when exactly I discovered the band, but I may have had it in my collection since the year of its release, and it still never fails to make an impression on me. I’ve always extracted a warm, sort of wintery vibe from the tune, and there’s something a bit reverent about it. From what I’ve read, I gather the lyrics pay ample homage to Finnish mythology, and on Tunturikukka most among the demo tracks I get a real sense of connection with the past.