THKD First Listen: Wylve / The Rain in Endless Fall

Last month, I covered a demo tape from an excellent raw black metal band known as Blut Der Nacht. Not long after, I was contacted by Mike, the owner of BDN’s label, Fallen Empire Records. Mike told me that BDN also had a couple of side projects up their sleeves that he was planning on releasing. Needless to say, I was eager to hear what else these musicians were capable of, so I waited patiently for any scrap of information regarding these projects.

Worship Black Metal Cassettes: Scratching the surface of Crepusculo Negro and Rhinocervs.

In my review of Blut Der Nacht’s excellent Demo MMXI, I talked a little about the rise of cassette culture within the American black metal underground over the last few years.  Some see it as nostalgia, others see it as pure gimmickry.  I see it as a way to bring black metal back to its roots, a return to the DIY ethos, primitivism and shadowy mystique the genre was built upon.

The cassette is a cheap way of reproducing and distributing music.  I haven’t gone to the trouble of actually pricing tape production and duplication (maybe some readers can shed light on that in the comments?), but I can guarantee that it is much more cost-effective than having CDs and especially vinyl pressed.  In this respect, it is the perfect format for bands that have no interest in dealing with Heavy Metal Inc, and although black metal has long since been absorbed into the establishment, there’s no time like the present to take it back underground.  With that said, it should be noted that some cassette-based labels, specifically Crepusulo Negro and Rhinocervs (probably the two most infamous), have begun working with larger, more established labels such as Profound Lore and The Ajna Offensive to get some of their releases (Dolorvotre, Tukaaria, Odz Manouk) on CD, but this is surely due more to outside interest and demand.  These cassette releases are cheap to purchase (typically $5 – $8) and are often extremely limited, selling out in a matter of days or even hours, and therefore not always readily available.  Also, no matter how much metal fans might want to hear this stuff, many are unwilling to embrace the cassette due to its supposed limitations.  This need for wider distribution and other formats is a consequence of releasing great music that people want to hear, and it’s much better than forcing fans to go scouring the internet for often janky downloads of these sold out releases.  Of course, the fact that the music is being released on a format which many find unacceptable only adds to the clandestine nature of these bands and the music they create, and in my mind a little of that mystique dies every time I hear about this stuff coming out on CD or even vinyl.  Nonetheless, what these bands are creating is some of the most compelling modern black metal I’ve heard in years (much more on this later), and deserves to be heard and made widely available.

Blut Der Nacht – Demo MMXI (Fallen Empire, 2011)

The recent resurgence of cassette culture within the US black metal underground (and elsewhere) seems to be foreshadowing a paradigm shift within the scene; perhaps it is the beginning of the death knell of “heavy metal inc” and a return to the DIY ethics that underground metal was built on.  Unfortunately it is impossible to go back to having to put real effort into discovering new music in “the age of blogspot”, but a slew of bands and labels appear genuinely committed to taking the underground back underground, out of the hands of industry slime-balls, self-absorbed mercenary “journalists” and sloganeering try-hards, putting it back in the hands of those that matter, the truly dedicated artists and fans themselves.