Svarte Greiner Kappe

Earlier this year, Type records boss man John Twells (as Xela) released what will probably go down as one of the masterpieces of dark ambience, In Bocca Al Lupo. As a label, to follow up that harrowing album with this beast from Norwegian dark sorcerer Svarte Greiner (Erik Skodvin) seems to be borderline cruel. Svarte Greiner's debut album Knive was one of the early harbingers of the recent gloom and doom obsessed Type records that we know today. That album was also particularly notable for the fact that it's recording was largely acoustic, and for it's utilizing some decidedly un-doomy instruments (violin, cello). Skodvin had managed, despite or because of his peculiar choice of recording style and instrumentation, to dive deeper down the rabbit hole even than some of his more traditionally dark peers.

On this new frigid excursion through the deep freeze chambers of Svarte Greiner's particular brand of the underworld many of the same tricks pulled on Knive are repeated. Skodvin rattles chains and various racket-makers like an attention starved ghost, truly mistreated strings groan and whine while they are played with an icicle by various minor demons, foghorn bass drones hover just about the frozen tundra and curl around our ankles. Skodvin, more than most, seems mainly, perhaps obsessively, concerned with digging as deeply into every blackened filthy corner of every alley as possible and scraping endlessly at the ice covering every frozen fjord until his fingers are raw and bloodied. No frozen corpse is left unopened. No bizarre echo is left unhung in the air. No esoteric chant is left unspoken. The album, in large part, is a re-examination of the terrors exposed on Knive, only this time around Skodvin has brought along a much more powerful microscope.

Over the course of this examination, new abominations emerge in a type of perpetually darkening Mandelbrot set of fear. The overall noisiness of these tracks has been ramped up significantly as compared with Knive, particularly the absurdly inappropriately titled opener Tunnel of Love. It's representative of a slight movement away from the sort of suggestive fear found on Knive and many a doom album generally, toward a more primal, nerve flaying terror. This can be largely attributed to the incorporation of electric guitar into the album, as well as to the influence of a few interim releases (particularly the Penpals Forever cassette on Digitalis Limited) that skewed toward the noisy. While this may at first seem to be a total abandonment of the “acoustic doom” aesthetic that Svarte Greiner has gone so out of his way to cultivate (on some level it is) the force of the guitar is bent with surprising ease to fit in with the rest of the album. The guitar tones get locked up in cages of ice and are heard stretching themselves out and contorting in the most painful of imaginable ways trying to force their ways out, to no avail. Other fresh horrors contribute as well. The sublimely manic saxophone bleating of Ultralyd's Kjetil Møster lends itself brilliantly to the album's lumbering high point Candle Light Dinner Actress, precise, tense silences spread out like spots of blood over Where Am I to be interrupted by fits of alien whispers from behind the boulders and stalagmites.

It's an unsettling experience to be sure and Skodvin is at all times in command of what he is doing. It's just that command, though, that prevents this album from attaining the same levels of fear and intensity reached on In Bocca Al Lupo, where we really, truly in our souls felt that something could go awfully wrong at any point. The sense of unease was very real on that album. Here I feel more like I am on a type of amusement park ride, one of the scariest amusement park rides ever devised granted. There is always a steady hand guiding these tracks so that the listener never really feels that sense of alienation, solitude and danger that signifies drone and doom at their greatest. A undoubtedly gelid journey , but one that I believe might have more of an impact if taken without a guide.