Gangleri – music reviews

In an exquisite digipack comes the new album of Von Thronstahl. This controversial band will amplify the opinions about them with this pretty political release. A “musical terrorists network” was founded (with a funny “wanted” leaflet in the middle of the booklet) and the quotes and lyrics that come with each track are clear enough (but can of course still be either fuel or water depending on your own ideas). 19 Tracks seemingly going over most of Von Thronstahl’s musical history with orchestral tracks, marchdrums (fierce of subtle), rocksongs, neofolk and a lot of martial bombast, but also the more sound-collage oriented tracks. Especially the first part of the album is very good with a variety of good tracks and songs with of course a load of samples. The overall length is 70 minutes. For people worrying about the musical direction of the band: the way the songs are created may remind of “Bellum, Sacrum Bellum?!”, but sound does not really. On the other hand, neither is the sound as dark as on the early releases (which I guess will not be topped anymore). “Germanium Metallicum” is a real Von Thronstahl album and like all of the others, it is pretty good too.
Links: Von Thronstahl, Trutzburg Thule, Cold Spring

I heard that the new Ostara would be ‘back to basics’. I heard a few Myspace tracks and was not really convinced. It is the old minimalistic neofolk style. The album as a whole is a bit better than expected. Most songs are the minimalistic neofolk style, some of them are nice, some are just alright. There are a few more poppy songs and some songs have some nice additions in violin (Matt Howden) or other instruments. I guess this cd is for people who long for the days of “Secret Homeland” (not not Strength Through Joy, the ‘wayback machine’ did not go that far). I like those early albums mostly because they were surprising at the time of release, but “The Only Solace” does not bring anything really new and not all songs are great, so… just a nice album I guess.
Links: Ostara, Trisol

In the days before email, the internet, P2P networks, etc. I got my music by sending cash in envelopes to people who sold things that I was interested in. Of course I also did my share of “tape trading”, since I could not afford to buy everything I wanted to hear. Working that way has given me quite a few of (mostly temporary) contacts. One of those was Mortiis. When I grew tired of all that similar sounding black metal, I started to explore the rapidly rising amount of electronic side-projects (usually that is) of black metal people, but when I got to know Mortiis and he got to know Cold Meat Industry, I learned that there was a very different and very interesting other underground music scene. I remember asking Roger Karmanik if he was not afraid that releasing Mortiis’ material would throw his label in the grey area around the metal scene with a whole new audience and that dark underground music would become a hotchpotch instead of a (black) metal scene (in decline) and an industrial scene. He answered:

You can see the date there. In the same year the double “And Even The Wolves” compilation was released, a European and an American version. The European version has Mortiis’ head on the back, the Americans got a different line of tracks alltogether. I guess Roger realised that using Mortiis he could indeed enlarge the customer base of CMI. I guess you all know what happened next. Being an ex-member of Emperor, Mortiis was stigmatisingly filed under “metal” and the same went for other CMI-releases that were also the first industrial records to be sold in Dutch recordstores (because of the popularity of black metal). The metal audience embraced CMI as a label (apparently also looking for something different), CMI got the growing audience it was looking for and the style that the label was mostly famous for “dark ambient” became both a trademark for ‘that other scene’ and the label. Did much change after all this? Yes and no. CMI is still connected to the metal scene in the eyes of many, because of Mortiis, but also because of cooperations with other (ex-)metalheads, especially on the sublabel Cruel Moon International. CMI went from being a purely Swedish, to being a Scandinavian a European (making Cruel Moon obsolete) and in the end a global music label, yet still mainly focussed on Scandinavia, because Scandinavians seem to be best in producing the sound that typifies CMI. The label did not reject its industrial/noise roots, but some sidesteps to (too) popular music were made, mostly only for one or two releases; gothic/medieval, martial industrial, much of it did not really seem to work out and for me personally in due time being a release from CMI did no longer automatically mean that it is good. Every now and then some brilliant finding is made (Pimentola or Vestigial for example), but the label seems to play safe in the last time with their own ancient projects such as ORE, Deutsch Nepal, BDN, Desiderii Marginis.
I have much more of such letters. Of course the authors never wrote them to be made public this way. They could be nice for ‘historical’ talks such as this. What do you think? It would be nice if mr. Karmanik read this so he could let us know and perhaps give his side of the story, but I would be surprised if he actually read Gangleri.nl.