For nearly thirty years, the Norman project Blut aus Nord, led by the musician known only as Vindsval, has explored the most disquieting margins of black metal. Far from the genre’s codes, its music proceeds by dissonance, by distortion of time and space, as if the usual laws of harmony had been abolished. Disharmonium – Nahab, the second part of a series inspired by the writer H. P. Lovecraft, pushes this aesthetic of unease to a rarely attained point. The critics (an 85 average across six reviews) speak of an experience at the edge of music.
For Nahab is not a record one listens to: it is a record that envelops you, disorients you, plunges you into an altered state. The guitars weave reptilian textures, the rhythms slip away, spectral choirs surge from nowhere. One thinks of a nightmare soundtrack, the sonic translation of that cosmic horror dear to Lovecraft — the dread before the unfathomable.
The press underline, rightly, the absolute singularity of this proposition. Blut aus Nord have no equivalent: they have created their own hermetic language, whose grammar each record deepens. This is not a music of immediate pleasure but of immersion and vertigo.
The price of this radicalism is a certain aridity: Nahab yields only to the listener ready to accept its rules. But whoever accepts the journey emerges lastingly marked.
Verdict: 8.5. A demanding, fascinating work that pushes the frontiers of what black metal can evoke. Great art of unease.
