Morgonglöd
Out 27th March on Vidfare/NoEvDia
Mortuus, aka Daniel Rostén, continues his habit of saving his best for well outside the Marduk roadshow. This is the third album released under the DomJord moniker, his own contribution to the long tradition of black metal artists dabbling in various ambient side projects. Being a relatively late comer to this game gives Rostén a certain creative freedom. Mortiis, Burzum, Beherit, Lord Wind, and Neptune Towers all quietly established links between black metal and a wider electronic and folk ecosystem. Not only that, but the more recent and near reckless eclecticism of contemporary music has given artists not only license to range between genres and techniques but almost an obligation.
DomJord are effective at feeding off this legacy whilst still coming out with a coherent, refreshingly original statement as opposed to merely transplanting a preexisting black metal template into an ambient setting. Here we see ambient and neofolk behave like organic compounds fed into the basic, mechanistic rhythms of martial industrial. The resulting juxtaposition is entirely deliberate, in the words of Rostén himself: “If the final collapse is to be man-made, the Industrial Revolution may be deemed its cradle. This is my attempt at its soundtrack”.
Whilst a minimalist industrial album inspired by the industrial revolution is hardly a groundbreaking idea, there is a more subtle project at play beneath the surface. DomJord are more faithful to the origins of neofolk when compared to the explosion of cosplaying Nordic folk bands in recent years who are (incorrectly in my book) saddled with the label. Those more authentic origins being a quite literal blend of tradition and futurism. The intimacy, organicism, and fragility of folk music recontextualised into the cold, urban sprawl of regions subjected to the industrial metamorphosis required to feed mass markets and international trade in the 19th Century. Here it takes the form of gentle folk licks, simple melodic refrains, and more explicit references such as the tortured wheezing that opens the track ‘Masugn’ (blast furnace), unambiguously conjuring images of the degrading effects industrial acceleration had on our organic bodies.
The album is frontloaded with bombast and majesty articulated through powerful synth lines, ostentatious melodicism, and driving, heavy rhythms, as if we are at once overwhelmed by the scale and extent of humanity’s ability to transform nature through mechanisation. But as the album progresses it evolves into a work of minimalist, martial ambient. Rhythms degrade into mere suggestive pulses, distant echoes of machinery, melodies dissolve into single synth lines consisting of little more than two or three notes pulped down into droning sequences. The price of mass production made apparent, a scorched earth policy leaving nothing but a wilderness of obsolete, distorted concrete and metal in its wake.
‘Morgonglöd’ succeeds both as a concept album and as a worthy addition to the annuls of metal adjacent dark ambient. Its most notable quality is in delivering its conceptual payload with enough ambiguity to allow the listener to interject with their own suggestions. My account above is one of many possible interpretations. But at the more immediate technical and stylistic level, the topography of this album is lively and curious. Despite the clear teleology of its structure, DomJord take many detours along the way, exploring textures both heavy and abrasive alongside the fragile and meditative. It retains a thematic unity whilst allowing the music to unfurl in multiple directions at once. Even if one chooses to set aside the thematic framework of the album, there is no shortage of latent curiosities to sink one’s teeth into.
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