Ivan Tibos.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust… Hail to purification, death to the inferior spawn of terrorist prophets!

Not that long ago, I came in touch with Raffaele Pezzella, a Naples-born artist who is even older than I am (two years and a handful of days more of age). In his late twenties, Raffaele started experimenting more actively as sound artist, and especially electronic research, as well as some guitar-based improvisation, became his main topics. His first steps into sonic areas also concerned mastering and mixing duties for other artists all over the globe.

Even though this album was released two years ago, I still want to write down my thoughts on it. There are several reasons. First of all, the quality of the Aural Art. I will come back to this immediately. Also of importance is the fact that Frozen Light recently released the successor of this album. In preparation for my review on that new album, which is called моменты (‘momenty’, meaning ‘moments’), I prefer to come back on this former release first.

A largely underestimated band from Poland, to my opinion, was Iugulatus. At the beginning of this decade, this horde release a limited number of intriguing albums, and shortly after the finishing of Satanic Pride, singer Balrog and drummer Wojtass decided to quit in order to focus on Slain. The remaining members, however, wanted to go on, so they continued, be it as Architect Of Disease. We’re talking about the year 2012.

When Black Metal was born almost four decades ago (!), Greece was one of the protagonists, yet largely underestimated. Throughout the years, the Hellenic scene remained of high importance, but they never reached the same fame as, let’s say, the Scandinavian countries. Of course, there are some exceptions, but I am not going to come up with a list of ‘known’ (read: popular) band from out there. You know who they are…

Ah, what a great surprise. Okay, when a label celebrates its 100th release, it is like party time, but when they come up with a fabulous soundtrack to enrich that festivity…

Hailing from the beautiful city of Barcelona, you know, the capital city within the independent new country of Catalonia (no further comment…), Survival Is Suicide are a duo that started playing together under this name more than a decade ago. In 2011 Epojè (drums) and Zaratozom (vocals, bass, keyboards) released their debut album, …Just Like Spiders Eat Flies, which was mixed and mastered, by the way, by no one else but Javi Félez.

Cadaveris are a band from the centre of the Russian Federation, and it is one that seems to exist for quite some time. Despite being formed in 2010, there were no official releases – until now.

Severomorsk is a city in the far North of the European part of the Russian Federation, on the Kola peninsula, and quite close to the not-that-unknown city of Murmansk. It’s also home to Nordlumo, a joyful outfit of a guy called Nordmad, who started this project quite recently. Evgenyi (real name of Nordmad) wrote, recorded and released six lengthy tracks (the total running time clocks about seventy-seven minutes) in very early 2016 via his own digital channels.

I have always adored that imaginative, winterly Ambient stuff à la Moloch, Symbiosis, Sieghetnar, Vinterriket, Nebula VII and the likes, and another act within this non-limitative list is Italian one-man project Winterblood.