Ghostwoodlands

Striborg’s first digital recording, committed to platter in the spring of 2006 “Ghostwoodlands” is almost the artist’s latest work (I feel that I am eternally playing catch-up with Striborg’s output). The first thing about this that struck me was how much more professional the sound is. This is what “Trepidation” would have maybe sounded like if it didn’t sound like shit. The performance is very tight – a very well-rehearsed album as promised.

Whilst he seems to continue with the formula of 3-4 long songs + ambient filler established a few albums earlier, Ghostwoodlands is different, or at least it seems to be, because for once you can hear every note. There is a very pleasing moaning undertone created by the layered foamy guitars and the drums are carefully arranged to mark out the songs’ progression, as if guarded steps taken through the tangles of the forest. I have read reviews where this work is billed as some sort of a turn in a more atmospheric direction. I disagree, because I feel that Striborg was always very atmospheric, but with technological limitations, this atmosphere was lost in a whirlwind of noisy frequencies. Here, he approached vastness and a depth of atmosphere driven by his usual weird dissonance and those cackling vocals, bouncing like a nocturnal light among the tree-trunks. There is a bit of mournful piano in the first track, that adds a great feeling to it. The song “Ghostwoodlands” features a calm acoustic interlude (the guitar is in tune for once).

Even the ambient tracks are better with my favourite being “The Sinister Scraping of the Spectres” evokes a certain creepy feeling, even though it’s just a bunch of slide guitar and string scratching.

Overall - a fascinating album with a unique atmosphere. Nothing new as far as Striborg goes, just better than ever before. Don’t hesitate to pick this up when hedging bets between contemporary depressive releases.

Originally Published in Procession of Black Doom zine #1

For once in a long time Striborg has released an album that comes in at considerably less than an hour in length which will please those people who were curious about this act but couldn't face sitting through some of the more marathon 70-minute full-length efforts. Another thing I noticed about "Ghostwoodlands" is how much better the sound has become: it's still not as sparkly clear as most people would probably like it but a lot of the hissing acid sheen over the rain-shower guitars has gone and the bass guitar and singing seem a lot more upfront in the mix. A third thing I find too is that there is more droning ambient music in relation to the black metal than on previous albums to the point where the proportion of ambient to BM is nearly 50/50 with four tracks completely instrumental ambient and the BM tracks also having generous servings of keyboard-based droning ambient music.

No, Sin-Nanna hasn't gone off in a post-BM direction: his singing is still drowning in too much echo and hasn't improved a jot; the music still has raining guitars in the background; and the guy's drumming skills and time-keeping sense are as erratic and all over the place as ever. One thing though: if only the CD covers could keep printing the lyrics to the songs - the cover for "Ghostwoodlands" doesn't have any printed lyrics at all! Well yes, stalwart Striborg followers know Sin-Nanna's favoured themes (the Tasmanian forest landscapes, misanthropy, despair, darkness) but we'd like to know if there are any new variations or developments within those themes, especially as there is one very long song here, "Wandering the Wilderness of Eternal Misery", a very sprawling track with long passages of guitar showers, irregular drumming and long trancey keyboard effects which might be expected to cover some new ground in Striborg's themes. (I personally doubt that the song does but I'm not sure anyone can prove or disprove my doubts, apart from Sin-Nanna himself.)

Of the BM-oriented tracks - these are the even-numbered tracks and there are only three of them - "Wandering the Wilderness ..." has already been mentioned; "With Animosity I Bequeath Thee" seems a bit more defined than the other two if only because it's mostly fast and angry; and then there is the title track, played in a key which renders the music very deranged - the pygmy duck vocals are really psychotic in their drowning tremble and the bass guitar and drums are drilling constantly in a way that goes all over the song. A really hallucinatory and nightmarish experience!

As for the instrumental ambient tracks (the four odd-numbered ones), the ones I prefer are "Light Anomalies in the Phantom Woods" and "Sinister Scraping of the Spectres": these are middle tracks in-between the BM ones and show Sin-Nanna at his most experimental. "Light Anomalies ..." is very bell-like and almost Christmassy in sound and mood but it's very cold and creepy, and "Sinister Scraping ..." is virtually a space-ambient piece that could be mistaken for a field recording or soundtrack of some kind, it's completely unstructured. (Not that Sin-Nanna cares for that sort of thing.) The other two ambient tracks are intro and outro tracks and have the quality of bringing you into Striborg's secret hellish world and back out (with a twist) respectively: the outro track especially is a really droning piece that isn't really outstanding, considering that on other Striborg albums there are other instrumental droning tracks that go on and on and on as well.

Once again Sin-Nanna has done something different within his highly eccentric and distinctive take on BM and on "Ghostwoodlands" he has managed to reach into a more experimental zone and gone more deeply into a demented kind of depressed psychedelic trance rock. This album is looking more and more like one of his better efforts the more I listen to it.

Surely a collaboration between Striborg and New Zealand drone / experimental-going-Metal act Birchville Cat Motel (whose main man Campbell Kneale has a more obviously doom drone metal project called Black Boned Angel) is on the cards!

Striborg's Trepidation was a very strange beast. Was it pleasurable? No. Was it good? Well, even that's up for debate. But it was the best kind of outsider art- an album written entirely for the artist, with a total disregard for the listener. Still, there were some pretty interesting bits of dark ambient in that album, and while listening to that album was a painful, bewildering experience, there were still moments of genius hidden with the maelstrom of fuzz and clatter.

So this Striborg guy has released a few albums since then, and there's definitely been some sort of evolution. One thing I'm amazed at is, well, how damn accessible this is. Well. I should say 'relatively' accessible, because it's still totally demented and damaged black metal with plenty of super fast riffing. However, the guitars are a lot more audible, the drumming has been recorded better (and there's a lot more variety), there's less blast beats and what not, and damn, there's even some pretty melodies- buried way in the mix, but still there, like the glistening droplets of synth around the beginning of 'Wandering the Wilderness...'., and the quite lovely but also devastatingly morose melody in the title track that Xasthur would kill for. Damn, with some big production 'With Animosity..'s riffs could be freaking huge. There's moments here that might have some BM fans calling 'sellout'- which can only be a good thing in my book.

Yeah, perhaps it's the fact that I've adjusted my EQ on my comp a bit so I can hear everything a bit easier, but there's definitely some totally fantastic moments here. Previous Striborg albums seemed to be weird and opaque for the purpose of being weird and opaque, but there's some moments here where there's some clarity, and you see that, well, this guy actually knows what he's doing. There's fast double kick in Wandering the Wilderness which has a somewhat unique slant- basically, as the kicks hit, the rest of the mix goes way down in volume- sure, it's probably accidental, but it's a totally killer effect regardless. The ambient tracks are totally killer- 'Sinister Scraping of the Spectres' has some kooky alliteration but nonetheless it's a totally apt title, and 'Bete Noires' is also a great piece of ambience.

Still, despite the general awesomeness surrounding most this release, there's a few problems. Main one: The vocals. Striborg's vocals in Trepidation were incredible. Not necessarily good, but completely insane and just totally bonkers, a strange, non-human high pitched howl that would be amusing if it wasn't so damn freaky. Unfortunately, those totally strange vocals aren't present on this release, and instead we have some crappy, low pitched bm vocals (A bit similar to Vlad Tepes maybe) with heaps of delay. These vocals are totally interchangeable and really aren't that good for the songs. It's kind of like "Nyaahhhhh yaaahhhhhhh ahhhhhh ehhhhhhhhhh aaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" over and over again. It's the delay effects that mostly kill it, really, and just the fact that they're mixed so freaking high. Oh well. Another problem? Well, I guess it's the production. Yeah yeah, it's Striborg, what should I expect? But even though it's an improvement on previous efforts, it's still terrible. There's no reason for production this bad- if you're confident about your art, why not make sound at least somewhat audible? I very much doubt that Striborg himself finds this stuff all that listenable.

Still, questionable vocals and production aside, this is an absolute beast of an album. Striborg's been able to write perplexing noise-y...stuff for some time, but now he's shown that he also write things that (very vaguely) resemble a song. This is a pretty good album, and if you're into weird, demented and possibly brain damaged metal then you owe it to yourself to give this record a listen.