Now it’s called cosmic black metal. The atmospheric section of the genre, that is, dedicated exclusively to the creation of music and words that travel in Space.
Of course, definitions have their time. Maybe something less demanding was enough atmospheric black metal. However, having wanted to delve deeper into a topic that has fascinated scholars and enthusiasts from all over the world for millennia, allowed the Labyrinthus Stellarum to get on their spaceship to travel where no one has ever arrived.
To outline the boundaries of the Ukrainian combo’s proposal, however, it is necessary to start from post-blackin turn a form of declination of the enormous cauldron which contains the shoegaze. Black metal is strongly characterized by an extraordinary use of arrangements, therefore, to create that atmosphere mentioned above.
Just a year after the embryonic cell entitled “Tales of the Void”, the debut album, the two brothers Alex Andronati And Misha Andronati they refined, refined and freely unleashed their ideas thanks to the publication of their second child “Vortex of the Worlds”.
An operation apparently of routinewhich is immediately denied by the opening track ‘Transcendence’endowed with an extraordinary musicality crossed, like electric discharges, by wonderful melodies. Alex gives his voice, harsh, rough; screaming that sings the desperate observation of Gaea’s extermination, perpetrated by the countless horrors of which mankind is capable. He also clogs up the disc, as mentioned above, with a powerful introduction of keyboards, orchestrations, ambient insertions designed to unleash powerful hallucinations beyond the horizon of events, both acoustic and, above all, visual.
The softness of the harmonies of the aforementioned song, but also of the others, induces in the mind, in fact, a significant lysergic, totally visionary state, in which stars, planets, nebulae, galaxies, black holes and all the objects that dot a Universe born thirteen billion years ago.
Still, ‘Interstellar Wandering’ trace the astronomical coordinates where you can wander in the absolute void between one star and another. The sound is full, orderly, and often caresses the hearts of courageous time travelers as a sort of comfort, dilated by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. As the galaxies, moving away from each other due to the Hubble-Lemaître law, whiz past the spaceship showing their indescribable colours, their astonishing elliptical shapes, their brilliance of life, the their poignant song.
Well, “Vortex of the Worlds” follows all these wanderings moving in space-time to show, with the wonder of notes, the incomparable beauty of neutron stars, swarms of comets, white dwarfs, supenovæ who, like ghosts, suddenly emerge from nowhere (‘From the Nothingness’).
The sound of the LP, despite being self-produced, is of a more than good quality level, thus being able to compete without fear with the official manufacturers. This probably comes from excellent drum programming (for which there is help from Dmytro Bokhan), which makes the sound itself professional, distinguishable at all times. But, above all, often, profound to the point of activating the saddest emotions of the human soul, such as a poignant melancholy deriving from the pain of the shattered dream of being able to truly navigate on gravitational waves. In short, there is fervent nostalgia for immeasurable alien landscapes observed with the eye of music, stuck in their timeline traveled from beginning to end without deviating from their destiny (‘The Light of Dying Worlds’).
The closing track, which is none other than the title track ‘Vortex of the Worlds’concludes the galactic epic of Labyrinthus Stellarum slipping into an immense vortex of Worlds in perpetual balance with each other, thus allowing, perhaps, the birth of a wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen Bridge, to explore parts of the Universe billions of light years away.
And, there, at an indefinite point, finally, to die.
Daniele “dani66” D’Adamo
