Nargaroth

A5 Digi
A6 Digi
Nargaroth
Spectral Visions of Mental Warfare
No Colours Records 2011
(A5 Digi limited to 1000 copies, A6 Digi unlimited, Gatefold DLP)
CD Tracklist:
Odin’s weeping for Jördh
An indifferent Cold in the Womb of Eve
Diving among the Daughters of the Sea
Odin’s weeping for Jördh ~ Part II
Journey through my Cosmic Cells (The Negation of God)
A Whisper underneath the Bark of old Trees
Spectral Visions of Mental Warfare
March of the Tyrants
Vinyltracklist ~ Gatefold LP:
Side A
Odin’s weeping for Jördh
An indifferent Cold in the Womb of Eve
Diving among the Daughters of the Sea
Odin’s weeping for Jördh ~ Part II
Side B
Journey through my Cosmic Cells (The Negation of God)
A Whisper underneath the Bark of old Trees
Side C
Spectral Visions of Mental Warfare
March of the Tyrants
Roaming through the Realm of Hel
Side D
The Daemons of Happiness
Through nebular Dimensions of fallen Eden
Forgotten Memory of a dying Dream
Passed Away
This album deals with the hard and sometimes bloody emotional fights, the Faustian
struggles and mental antagonism of contradictory strivings of the human nature at the
crossroads of madness, when, like rusty cancer, the insight of eternal circles of
repeatedly failing to achieve better fates, which we believed we had to pursue during
hard times, is eating through our souls’ labyrinths. The particular songs deal with the
desperate attempts to close oneself to ones own truths and contradictions and with
mental meanders veiling the self-reflexive quest for the causes of our genesis. Those
take shape as perpetual ponderings, life-draining resignation, depression, and selfmutilating deeds, and their disdainful laughter sneaks into our dreams even in tranquil
times, and as ancient phantoms they haunt us through the labyrinths of our souls,
where some of us remain missing forever.
I have created this album and all the songs included in fidelity to the ideals and values
of Black Metal as well as in honouring its traditions, to which I feel committed since
15 years! To honour its legacy, to commemorate it and to remind others is my musical
purpose. All the synthesizer pieces were traditionally played by hand and not, as it is
common nowadays, generated by computer software programs, which create all those
soulless sonic worlds today. Synthetic sound spheres like the ones on this album have
from its early beginnings been elements of Black Metal in service of the sacral and
transcendent. As the antipodes of the rather mundanely oriented guitars they – not only
in the spiritually-mystical sense of an absolute reality – complete the sound picture
which makes Black Metal unique among the musical genres.
Thus, I commit the single songs to the willing but also the unwilling listeners and to
their own inner fights (with them), and, recurring to the album’s subject, I conclude
with the words of Peter Lorres:
“Can I help it? Have I not this curse inside me? The fire. The voice. The agony.”
Ash, December 2010
Ash: Vocals, Instruments
This album, a collaboration with NYCHTS, has been recorded in Eastern Germany
and in Switzerland (Valais, Warp-Music-Studio, Composing 2,6,7, 12 & 13, Mix &
Mastering) during the years 2009 ~ 2010.
Layout Concept: Ash; Cover Artwork: M.W.; Booklet: M. Roch
Photography Ash: Wildhorn, Canton Valais, Switzerland
Odins weeping for Jördh ~ Part I & Part II
Grief, mental pain, melancholy are inevitably a part of our being human and enrich our
existence by the dimension of sorrow but also by the reality of our vulnerability, our
sometimes seemingly childlike indigence as well as our deeply hated loneliness. Often,
our inner sorrow is in conflict with our ideals and aspired characteristics by which we
define our identity. Virility, inflicted rigour and discipline, the obsessive keeping of
countenance, pride, gender-specific honour, or the image of the lone wolf independent
from anybody as well as countless other self-perceptions – all these can be reasons to
isolate the emotional qualities of grief and their expression through weeping from
one’s own experience.
No matter how hard we try to hide behind our (painted) masks and invoke our inner
tyrant, demon or warrior on the stages. In the solitary hours of the night, many are
nakedly weeping for their destiny and their sorrow. May it happen clandestinely,
hidden from the eyes of the world. So does a God, too, who grieves the death of his
beloved.
"The grief that does not speak, whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break"
from Macbeth, W. Shakespeare 1606
An indifferent Cold in the Womb of Eve
I watched a snail… crawl along the edge of a straight razor… That’s my dream…
That’s my Nightmare…Crawling…Slipping… along the edge of a straight razor…and
surviving…
There was no Life
in your Tears
as you wept your Grief
There was a Beauty
in your Death
as you lay broken in the Soil
There was an indifferent Cold
in my Soul
as I dreamed eternally in the Womb of Eve
Diving among the Daughters of the Sea
This piece is the third and last part of a musical sound series, whose subject matter
plays an important role in my imaginations about meditative self-reflection in total,
deserted seclusion with an uterus-like concentration, and which has found an
expression in NARGAROTH since the beginning ~ resting, pondering, floating
through the womb of the sea.
The first piece with this subject was “Auf dem Grunde des Sees ruhend” (Resting on
the bottom of the sea), and it described the state between death and new birth, between
deadly slumber and awakening. The second sound work “Thinking below the Ocean”
encompassed the reflexive becoming and the interpretation of existence by means of
narratives. The now available final part symbolizes salvation by a nirvana-like
principle, the scattering of sorrowful existence and its insatiable greed, emblematised
by the plunging into the cyclic dance of the daughters, gliding through the infinite
luminaries, fading into the vastness of the sea.
Journey through my Cosmic Cells
(~ The Negation of God ~)
Psychosis is a form of psychic existence, in which logic doesn’t hold validity and
where – as in dreaming – primary processes prevail. There, a proposition can be just as
valid as its exact opposite. There cannot be such a thing as contradictory (thought)
contents because a logic of cause and effect or an ordering concept of time do not exist
– Coincidentia Oppositorum. Every one bears such a psychotic core within,
subordinated to these primary processes. As a consequence of outer or inner pressures,
the human psyche can regress to this stadium, as its last chance to survive, even to the
price of a severe loss of reality. An intensive self (psycho) analysis, too, can provoke
this state when one, through advancing regressions, penetrates into deeper and deeper
layers of the personality as far as the abysses of our most inner, intolerable and archaic
ambitions. This journey through one’s own “cosmic cells” of existence, which to me
implicates a negation of God, is expressed musically by the piece at hand.
Some of those who did not remain lost within these mental labyrinths after a psychosis
and who found the way back into our familiar world describe either a state of total
chaos or a state of deep, redemptive tranquillity, where all the motives formerly
conflicting with each other do exist without contradiction or pain. This moment of the
breakthrough and gliding across to the psychotic chaos core, which in my imagination
corresponds to a libidinal hell of whatever kind, is reached in the present piece at the
time unit 8:12. So I constantly travel through my mental cosmos and am yet just a
satellite of this core promising either redemption or eternal agony.
A Whisper underneath the Bark of old Trees
The Reflection
I found no solution
in the truth
that my madness can be cured
I found no wisdom
in the songs
the elders sung to me
I stared through diamonds
oh so cold
saw young beauty grow old
Bleeding promises renewed with old lies
in the glare of
burning skies
The Confession
Can I, alas, can I but thus? Have I not this cursed within me? The fire, the voice, the
agony.
Always, always I must walk through streets. And always I sense someone going after
me – it is myself. It follows me. Silently. But yet I’m hearing it. Yes, sometimes I feel
like going after myself. I want away, walk away from myself. But I cannot. Cannot
escape myself. Must, must walk the way it is chasing me. Must run, run – endless
streets. I want away, I want away! And together with me there are running phantoms
of mothers, of children. Those are not going away ever again. They are always there!
Always! Always! Always! Except when I am doing it.
Then, then I am facing a poster and can read what I have done and read and read…
That I have done? But I don’t know about anything. Yet who is going to believe me?
Who knows what it looks like inside of me? How it screams and yells in there. Just
how I must do it! Don’t want to – must! Don’t want – must! And then a voice is
screaming and I cannot listen any longer. Help! I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…
The Salvation ~ The Forgiveness
I raged through the jungle
and died in the trees
to dwell in the rivers
which flow to the seas
What if this madness
seems to be
nothing else but my real me
Spectral Visions of Mental Warfare
In the old Man’s Dream
I was woven into spectral Silk
In the old Man’s Dream
a Serpent fed my Hunger
with the Tears of Babylon
In the old Man’s Dream
he saw an Emptiness in my Eyes
Insatiable
In the old Man’s Dream
I threw my Heart
into the Cosmic Core
In the old Man’s Dream
I left as Son
and I returned as (harbinger of) Chaos
March of the Tyrants
During a fever of black silky star milk I fantasized an army of thousands of soulless
tyrants traversing the valleys and summits of this world. And the red glow of their eyes
was like a harbinger of the fires of hell following them. The mercy of demise is the
renewal following it.
Additional Songs of the Vinyl Version
Roaming through the Realm of Hel
A man who lies to himself is not worth to be honoured. The one who spends his life
without sense, obsessed by the greed for vanity and self-content, is roaming as an
empty shadow on earthly paths even during his lifetime. Many a restless spirit who
remained without honour is wailing and roaming the realm of the dead under the
vigilant eyes of Garm until Nidhöggr bereaves him of his existence. And no
nightingale will ever sing his requiem.
The Daemons of Happiness
Every laughter has got a second face. And every time of light is threatened by old and
new shadows. Many a laughter rises above the pain of someone else. The daemons of
happiness are those tongues who once, lovely whispering, laid the sacrilegious fruit
into the sinful creature’s lap but were then already weaving the demise of that creature.
Through nebular Dimensions of fallen Eden
All is now mine. I have searched for Eden and could only win it by fighting. Burnt is
the earth, withered the trees, and all living is carrion for scavengers. Alone the tree of
sin, from which I hung Judas, and where lustful snakes are snuggling, is blossoming in
the black blood of the Sadduzeans and the Sikarians. I broke the grail at the foot of
Sinai and weaved myself new garments from the bones of the Baptist. And in the
creational breeze I sowed wailing and gnashing of teeth. I raped innocence and
harvested eternal damnation. Yes, all is mine now. I am waiting for madness, in
eternity. Amen.
Forgotten Memory of a dying Dream
You have been there, in that night, when I was screaming. You stood at the far end of
the room and gazed at me. Motionless. Loveless. You wanted to heal my wounds, you
said, and weave my dreams. But what for? Your hand kisses bitterly and your lips
remain soundless. I cannot remember you any more and both our dreams are long
since dead.
Passed Away
……