Hierophant Nox

ALBUM REVIEW

All Hail the Transcending Ghost - All Hail the Transcending Ghost
Cold Spring
If I’d known before pressing ‘play’ that this is the music Nordvargr considers his most frightening, I’d have been a whole lot warier, but as it happens, I came across All Hail the Transcending Ghost – his collaboration with fellow Swede Tim Bertilsson – completely unawares, allowing their self-titled debut to terrify me half to death. In some ways, this is unsettling precisely because it’s more accessible than, say, Folkstorm, largely because the electronic elements are shadowy, mean and low rather than brain-searingly harsh, but also because Bertilsson brings his guitar to the torture chamber, meaning that those for whom entirely electronic releases are not common fodder can be ensnared into thinking they’re on familiar ground, right before their minds are pulped.

“All Hail the Transcending Ghost” is an album of the unseen, as an eerily whispered “THERE’S SOMETHING THERE” warns us early into “Intornator”. There are always things moving behind the shadows, from the circling, droning things encircling the ritualistic chanters on “Untitled 2” to the static demons that buzz in and out of existence on “Untitled 4”. Although, as mentioned, this isn’t Nordvargr at his most aurally harmful, his more classic stamp is obviously evident across all of the compositions. The depth of the drone on “Untitled 3”, the searing, pulsing, sliding and clanging of “Untitled 5”, and the mean, lowness, eerie shapes and mechanical but malevolent razor swells of “Untitled 6” are easily recognisable for those who have spent any length of time in the dark Swedish one’s corridors.

The interplay with Bertilsson’s doomy guitar is captivating, be it in the screaming distortion and unsettling sinuousness of “Untitled 2”, which weaves the listener in and out of the shadowy, droning background, or in the brain-searing screech of “Untitled 5”, where human, machine and ‘other’ are precariously balanced. “We Break the Seals of Scattered Hopes” is a majestic conclusion in this regard, bringing the harshness of nature together with something utterly alien and unfriendly in the electronics, which swells over and under itself, revealing just enough to leave you still rather disconcerted even after the track has breathed its last.

As always it’s a little difficult to render in words what makes Nordvargr’s prodigious output so special, but if you’re yet to taste any of his terror, this would make an excellent starting point. Some ambient artists treat your imagination in a prescriptive way – picture a tree, picture some snow, picture a mountain – All Hail the Transcending Ghost locks your imagination in a lightless room, waterboards it for a few hours then, just when your imagination thinks the torment might be over, runs an impossibly icy finger down its spine and whispers something unspeakable in its ear. The images that spring unbidden to your mind will not be yours to control.