La nature est un temple

Elements filter in as mist blanketing your eyes some frigid, late autumn morn before, blasting out of the grey canopy, a storm, rhythmic, blinds; at two minutes you silent step into a cold tributary, a Burzum/Nightside-era Emperor mesmerism. Two further minutes on, the first arctic blast freezes that Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, forever locked in those once-mutable waters, ever changing, ever the same, the cycle of ages, a careful tread through treachery, revisited to catalog the details. Then, a warning, a snare hit, another, an avalanche drumroll bids you run, quickening, a cataract of tremolo riffs, the blackened sheen of ancient, mossy earth. Run, still you run. Exhausted, your knees sink in the analog snow, to fade out.

To fade in, only to fade away, never permanent, but on the the blackened astral strings of an Ahrimanic Trance. Think of a walk in winter; whether battered by thick, white polygons or an empty, wind-sodden sky, the trees on either side remain both a shield and a gateway, protection and wounding. Transpose that sense of raw nature into the humidity of late summer; the illusion of refreshing, transparent shade, that flimsiest of respites, the unyielding repetition of extremity, a shiver, a drop of sweat, let the seasons absorb, a solitary community. Determined, relaxed percussion illuminates the hidden corners of the monolith; cold, no, heat. You cannot tell, heaven and hell dissolves, feel only the doom-saturated breeze, hear only its sound spiraling through the branches and leaves, let yourself melt away. Melt away.

Drop by drop, a trickle off a hanging leaf, Ex Cathedra.

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Unlike M. Baudelaire, these Pacific Northwesterners prefer the natural to the artificial, yet the disdain for so much of the modern realm from that decadent ancestor exists in the seed of such a post-Romanticism, our confused speech, our inability to decipher anything beyond the quotidian, looked upon with a skeptical eye whose voice, reflected in a pool of greasy earth, bubbles forth a vicious anger to the interloper, a joy to me of branch and grass and flesh, each in a state of constant decay. Yet, a ghost of renewal at 4:44, hearing only the air and the wash of ambient sound, the raspy, pantheistic lamentation, soon venomous, a primordial plea.

Rapid fire eruptions of Crystal Ammunition shatter weakened bodies, but never the spirit, the recoil echoed in askew cymbal crashes before being enveloped in swaddling, blackened hypnosis. Cloudbursts circle above, searching for prey, the ephemeral glare of single-note acoustic darts lure you out into the open, amid the weeping grasses for a triptych of Opethian clarity at 9:19, 9:34, 10:17. Let the rain fall. Let the voiceless choir come ex cathedra. O, be joyful unto nature. Blessed are those that wander in her sea of brown and green, this tide of ancient, pungent keys, this Black Cascade. As forward-looking as the Malevolent Grain EP? No. A deep root, a comforting, necessary, catharsis.