Full Album Stream: Blut Aus Nord: What Once Was = Liber III – new EP

In Mondeville, Lower Normandy, France, a place deserving of just three lines-description in the mighty Wikipedia, catamarans are reportedly being build, its residents are heavy on recycling (they know what to do with the candle, the chicken foot plus a couple of moths, for example) and from there, supposedly, operates the only person I know of who can make French language sound majestic and who is mysterious enough for me to want to find out more about him. But luckily for my conscience (being an extremely private person myself), there is nothing to find out about neither BLUT AUS NORD or their enigmatic leader, Vindsval, except their music: BLUT AUS NORD have a new EP out since October the 18th, 2013 on Debemur Morti Productions. Visit the label's store here in order to buy ‘What Once Was = Liber III’ in its physical format or acquire it via BandCamp:

BLUT AUS NORD is the brainchild of singer and guitarist Vindsval, who started his music project under the name of “Vlad” – as in Vlad the Impaler (Dracula) - in Mondeville, France, in 1994. He released two demos before changing the project's name to BLUT AUS NORD and when record labels started showing interest, Vindsval turned his project into an actual band. First full-length, “hypnotic and terrifying” ‘Ultima Thulée’, was released in 1995 on Impure Creation Records and was re-released in 2005 on Candlelight Records.The only BLUT AUS NORD album with released lyrics to date, ‘Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age’, followed a year later via that same small French label. After their third full-length, 2001's ‘The Mystical Beast Of Rebellion’, came one of the band's most critically revered releases, 2003's ‘The Work Which Transforms God’. Candlelight Records fortified this already impeccable recording with the ‘Thematic Emanation Of Archetypal Mutiplicity’ EP in 2005:

“Sonically, these guys love dissonance; they love thick heavy atmospheres and feedback and they love to mess with tempos stretching out time and sending it into a void… BLUT AUS NORD claim their music as being truly frightening. It’s not. [The album] is a compelling and knotty listen; it squeals, plods, cracks, screeches, whirs and wails in differing shades of black,” [commented AllMusic's Thom Jurek - more here]

‘MoRT’, an album which some hailed as a masterpiece and others dismissed it as a pointless exercise in weirdness for weirdness' sake, came out via Candlelight in 2006. BLUT AUS NORD's sixth studio album, ‘Odinist: The Destruction Of Reason By Illumination’, followed in 2007 “maintaining a dark, moody, somber atmosphere rather than beating and pummeling the listener into submission” according to Alex Henderson, AllMusic (more here). Candlelight Records stuck with the band until their next offering, 2009's ‘Memoria Vetusta II - Dialogue With The Stars’.The until recently vinyl-only release, 2010's ‘What Once Was… Liber I’ EP was BLUNT AUS NORD's first issued through the band's current label, Debemur Morti Productions. The eloquent label described it as “an epitaph for the past; a headstone for the present; and a funeral of the future”, “a turbulent excursion along some crumbling, loathsome highway, where every pale, trembling breath is accompanied by the painful reality of existence: a living daymare”.The crushing first installment of ‘777’ trilogy (a conceptual trilogy furthering the concept of the number 777), ‘777 Sect(s)’ was released in April 2011, and its sister, ‘777 – The Desanctification’ followed in November 2011, finally mesmerizing yours truly, being “a work of terrible, depressive, mournful, and yes, aggressive beauty” as put by Thom Jurek, AllMusic (more here), while the best was yet to come in form of 2012's ‘777 – Cosmosophy’:

“Rhythm, space, texture, dynamic, timbre, color, and tonal subtleties are intricately detailed in both performance and production. They all serve to underscore the fact that this trilogy is a holistic experience in listening. This final volume is its summit and lyrically it paints a night sky of ecstatic anguish, where mortal man confronts the void in the center of the universe and discovers that in true emptiness, everything is inextricably linked, full to the point of bursting at the seams. … Ultimately, ‘Cosmosophy’ is pure vision,” [wrote Thom Jurek, AllMusic:]

BLUT AUS NORD features: Vindsval – vocals and guitar, W.D. Feld - drums, electronics and keyboards and GhÖst – bass