#i voidhanger

Exactly how to classify the record’s form is a bit of an issue. In keeping with his long-standing practice with Spectral Lore, musician and sole member of the project Ayloss is calling 11 Days an EP. The record doesn’t crack the 60-minute mark, which Ayloss determines as the necessary length for a Spectral Lore LP. Seems a bit of a hair-splitting measure — almost nowhere else does a release of over 44 minutes count as an EP. And there is an additional layer of complexity to the terminological constraint Ayloss applies, given the record’s keen interest in the issue of temporality. The title 11 Days refers to the most significant, nightmarish experience at stake in the record’s narrative — the long time a fictive boatload of migrants spends afloat in the sea, under baking sun, short supplied, exhausted, full of dread but even more terrified at the prospect of a return to home shores that bristle with danger and moan in misery.

That’s unusually political for Spectral Lore, a project that tends toward abstruse philosophical abstraction and astronomical scale (hence those long, long LPs). It’s also the case that Ayloss is stretching and inhabiting the “atmospheric” in atmospheric black metal with real emphasis. The EP alternates more straightforward black metal with dark ambient compositions, charged with mournful, tense synth tones. The combination is effectively volatile, even though the shortest track on 11 Days cracks the nine-minute mark. You get long washes of sound, and even longer barrages of blasts and ear-scorching riffage.

That’s not a new aesthetic strategy or combination in atmospheric black metal, but Ayloss’s use of it has an urgency, and a purpose. His anger and disgust are palpable; check out the snarls and howls of “Adro Onzi,” and its truculent, percussive force. You ride its waves of sound for longer than seems possible, or sustainable. Eventually that ebbs. “Tremor/Kalunga Line” envelopes you in its dimensional hum. It’s hard to say how the record imagines the conclusion to its narrative, and that closing ambient song’s glittering synths provide ambiguous signals. That may be the intent, for certain it’s effective. Rarely have noises that seem superficially pretty opened to more ominous possibilities.

See the title of the record’s excellent opening track, “Eternal Nuclear Dawn,” which seems to posit an imaginary landscape in which the blinding conflagration of an H-bomb’s detonation greets the coming of each new day. Happy thoughts, those ain’t. Additional verbal play in some of the LP’s song titles elaborates on the agonistic sensibility: “Boreal Phrenological Despair,” “Yielding Quivers of Revolution.” The artists in SkyThala have not released lyrics to the songs (an unusual move for a record released on I, Voidhanger), so it’s hard to know what themes dominate, beyond those suggestive phrases. The music is certainly full of gnarled, involuted and then explosively expansive gesturing — warping bundles of tension that suddenly unfold toward catharsis. Whether that’s freighted with apocalyptic affect is an open question. 

The innovative dissonance in SkyThala’s music is clearly informed by Stravinsky’s neoclassical grandness, especially the long, woodwind-driven middle sections of “Variegated Stances of Self Mockery” and the aforementioned “Yielding Quivers…” It’s strange and exciting terrain for a black metal band to explore. Stravinsky’s equally strange politics raise more loaded questions. The Russian composer’s famous antipathy to Bolshevism is fairly easy to understand; his enthusiasm for Mussolini’s fascism is a thinkable (if repugnant) reactionary complement to that aversion to revolutionary politics. But it’s queasy stuff, at minimum, when a black metal band signals interest in another artist who has fucked with fascists. 

The band and the label have both been tight-lipped about the folks who made this music; I, Voidhanger has made some cryptic references to Moonlight Cypress Archetypes, and that label’s Bandcamp lists one “R” among SkyThala’s personnel. That strongly suggests that Ryan Clackner is in the band; the guitar playing is certainly dexterous and searching enough. But this band’s governing aesthetic is far removed from the Southern Appalachian and Delta blues orientations of Clackner’s Vile Haint or Crestfallen Dusk. The impulse to combine black metal’s tones and rhythms with a far-flung set of musical concepts and sounds, on the other hand, is well within Clackner’s bailiwick. SkyThala’s work is ambitious and enormously affecting, twisting black metal into new shapes.