Nightmares, visions, and old fears.
These are the things Italian maniacs Mephisto and Occultus Rex from Blackstream have deliberately evoked throughout this year, with no less than three releases of raw, obscure, and unsettling music.
The latest of them is ‘Psychedelic Grimoire: A Retrospective in Terror’. Released on CD by the Finnish label Bestial Burst, this is an album built around the sounds that have become characteristic of the band’s Synthetic Occult Black Metal: industrial, dark, ritualistic, and, above all, evil.
However, this work, recorded on tape, goes far beyond what you have probably experienced before. It features truly sinister vocals accompanied by trance-like, hypnotic synthesizers, samples from occult cinema of the 1970s, and hallucinatory sounds.
As is already common in their discography, this is not an album that seeks to be technically perfect, but rather to create an atmosphere and a feeling born from the passion and dedication of its members, from their obsessions, which are transformed into sounds that turn ‘Psychedelic Grimoire: A Retrospective in Terror’ into a personal offering to the dark imagery that has shaped their visions.
In a brief conversation with Mephisto, he says that the album was conceived as “a journey through a dark and distorted psychedelic atmosphere, mixing the occult and ritualistic side of Black Metal with a more hypnotic and psychedelic approach”.
Thus, this full-length joins the band’s series of releases this year, alongside ‘House of Sacrilege’, a split with the Finnish band Witchcraft, and an untitled split with the Canadians Blaspheme Mageia.
While listening to the album and paying attention to the samples from these occult movies, the description in the booklet, which has a great collage, by the way, seems very accurate, because you can feel that these films might have actually infected Mephisto and Occultus Rex with “visions of blasphemy, cursed villages, diseased folklore and ancestral horrors crawling beneath the skin of reality.”
So beware.
And listen at your own risk.
The elements of occultism, horror and altered states of consciousness throughout the album might, indeed, “seep into your soul… like a venomous rite”.
