Monday, October 9, 2023

Entry 568 - Blut Aus Nord - Disharmonium - Nahab

Style: Experimental black metal, avant-garde black metal, dark ambient

Primary Emotions/Themes: Chaos, unspeakable horrors, incomprehensible beings, alien soundscapes

Thoughts: There is no band that sounds like this on the planet. Blut Aus Nord is a completely unique entity in the field of music. They have created several sounds that reflect both the beauty of nature and the absolute un-namable horrors, all within the same project. Somehow its all recognizable as Blut Aus Nord, despite how diverse the sounds are.

Nahab pulls Blut Aus Nord definitively into the world of H.P. Lovecraft's lore. The titular character being a witch associated with the elder god Nyarlathotep. This particular god has been described as taking great joy in spreading madness. I can't think of a singular better description within the musical journey that Blut Aus Nord has put out with their latest album than that.

As experimental and as alien sounding as Undreamable Abysses was, Nahab takes things a step further... in every direction, all at once. It is more extreme, it is more chaotic, it is more dynamic, it is more varied, it is stranger, it is calmer, it is full of madness... it is all things, yet is it is nothing at the same time. 

The music contained within Nahab is alien, it is not of this world. There are certainly elements that tie the music to the human plane of existence. Sometimes there will be a riff that has a legitimate melody to it, other times there will be a particularly blistering blast beat driven section. But these moments of clarity are rare and hardly resonate the true structure of the album. 

Most of Nahab sounds like it is decaying in front of us. The riffs will start with a singular note or chord and then seemingly rot from existence as if phasing in and out of reality. The vocals sound like an inhuman purr rather than anything a homo sapien would normally vomit fourth from their mouth. The drums take on almost a free jazz approach, with odd accents to the music and beats that seem out of phase with the rest of the instruments. 

Blut Aus Nord has created strange albums like this in the past. Both The Work Which Transforms God and MORT have entered this strange world of decaying riffs and mutated rhythms. With Nahab the band revisits these sounds in a different time in their career. This is somehow a bit more uncomfortable than those earlier albums. Maybe that's the entirety of this side of Blut Aus Nord's music, a contradiction, a paradox - alien music written by denizens of Terra. Music that should not exist yet somehow it does. Nahab is a clear highlight of their extensive discography at this point.

Written October 3rd 2023

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