Heretique Du Nord – Shadow And Frost cassette

Heretique Du Nord – Shadow And Frost cassette

"Emerging from the chill of the Quebec winter, a cloaked and hooded entity known only as Malgeist has been busy haunting online spaces for dungeon synth, dark ambient, and doom metal with a steady stream of new music that bridges all of these sounds. While Malgeist started to craft his sinister soundscapes back in the mid-2000s, he only recently showed up with his first official recordings, all of which were released digitally. The aptly titled Shadow and Frost is the first physical release from Malgeist's Hérétique du Nord, an hour-long sprawl of eccentric oubliette-doom that's rich in atmosphere and flecked with an unusual stylistic palette. A mixture of solemn dungeon synth and cinematic strings, erratic chunks of subterranean drone-doom and moody samples, are all assembled together in an odd sound-collage style that's heavily drenched in northern gloom and an aura of wintry mystique.

It's definitely an unusual approach to "dungeon synth", unbeholden to any of the tenets of that style of music. All of the hallmarks of that classic dungeon-music feel are there, but the music of Shadow and Frost expands past it, stumbling through a frost-covered fever-dream of dark, droning tones, chilling soundscapes, and amorphous heaviness. These sounds bleed, blur and merge together into a quixotic mixture of classic dungeon synth and medieval melody, raw Earth 2-esque drone-metal crush turned gothic, dark ambient, folk music, noise, and field recordings, sometimes melting into one another, at others appearing via jagged editing and sequencing that accentuates the album's hallucinatory allure. While these strange passages of haunting subterranean crypt-synth, funereal violins, billowing ambient doom-drone, and eerie choral chant wind and weave through these eleven tracks, Hérétique du Nord's further augments its sound with brief fragments of ancient and obscure horror-film dialogue, adding to the overall uncanny vibe that permeates this stuff.

From the cold organ-like drones of opener "La Traversée des Ailes Noires", Malgeist clearly revels in the feel of the iconic faux-orchestral sounds of early "Era 1" Mortiis, Equitant "The Circle of Agurak", and (obviously) Burzum circa Hliðskjálf , but moves further afield into eerie cinematic string sections, luminous keyboard dirges, washes of lo-fi electronic buzz, then plummeting into mesmeric, monstrous doom riffs that hover over cloudscapes of shimmering chthonic drift and deep wells of Lustmordian ambience. Clanking metallic harpsichord and doomed electronics combine on tracks like "Scarlet and Crimson", while tribal rhythms surge over the beginning of "Rituel des Quatre Périls" before opening a muffled cacophony of wintry wind and distant chant-like sounds. There's a couple of organ motifs that keep popping up throughout the album, but each song keeps turning this into unexpected directions, like when the album delves into its awesome passages of cavernous, guttural, crumbling doom riffs in "Ashes of the Final Bastion" and "Shattered Glaive of the Emerald Priestess", or the gorgeous violins and staccato strings of the title track that evoke the spirit of Bernard Herrmann staggering through a total white-out winter storm. Like I said, this is pretty wild.

This stuff ends up feeling sort of like an inadvertent distant cousin to the creepier ends of Nurse With Wound's surrealist sound-fuckery, mingling with an ethereal haze of neoclassical dark wave a la In The Nursery and Arcana alongside elements lifted from the moody early horror film scores and crude, blackened doom metal dirge. Definitely works best as a single unbroken piece, which is why I wanted to put this out on audio cassette, where Hérétique du Nord's singular mixture can properly sit within the saturated sound of magnetized tape. Shadow is a weird trip, constantly maintaining a frigid, freezing atmosphere as it creeps and crawls through its strange chambers of Grand Guignol drama and menacing instrumentation."