(written by Islander)
Vampyriia is the solo project of the Italian musician S. N. Nosfer. Even people unfamiliar with the project’s past works, which include a pair of demos, a debut album, and an EP, would take their clues from those names and the night-dwelling and bloodthirsty mythologies they invoke.
But the music of Vampyriia also seems to contemplate other more haunting and tortured sides of undead immortality, as reflected in the name of a new four-song EP — The Melancholic Charm Of The Moon — which will be released on April 24th by Void Wanderer Productions.
What we have for you today is the premiere of one of those songs, and its name is also evocative: “Ghost of Moon and Cosmic Nebula“.
In this new 8-minute song Vampyriia brings together varying musical ingredients, of raw black metal and dark ambient with orchestral hints, to create an atmosphere that is chilling and haunting but also as mesmerizing as a full moon piercing clouds, as melancholy as a cold life without end, and as despairing as endless torture.
The music gently drifts and reaches out with majestically yearning peals of sound above the rhythm of a somber march, but also shocks the senses with cauterizing screams and a greater sense of desperation in the increasingly feverish melody and low-end turbulence.
The riffing writhes and sears in agony as the drums and bass thunder and those shrieks pour out excruciating torment. The melody is still recognizable from the opening moments, but is an order of magnitude more distressing.
Yet the song begins to drift again, and its eerie and sorrowful strains are again disturbed by crackling sounds, maybe like insects, maybe like the chattering of pointed teeth. The melody’s new variation dismally crawls and whines, with no hope left; the vocals shred the senses like flails of barbed wire coated in acid; tumult drives the drums again, paired with deep droning undulations; and the riffing rises and burns in some combination of pain and madness before the music begins to expire.
At the end, mournful horns and other instrumental tones provide an elegantly soft grieving.
It’s a deeply dark and dire piece of music, but also dynamic, and there’s an appreciable refinement in the way Vampyriia establishes the central melody and then varies it as the time passes.
Void Wanderer will release the new EP on cassette tape, and pre-orders begin today.
PRE-ORDER:
https://voidwanderer.com/product/vampyriia-the-melancholic-charm-of-the-moon-mc/
VAMPYRIIYA:
https://vampyriia-band.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.instagram.com/vampyriia_bm