1997 was another important year for me when it came to discovering new bands. By then I was digging much deeper into the underground and starting to realise just how many different bands were operating outside the names that were already becoming familiar. Tower Records in Singapore became one of those places where I could suddenly stumble across releases I had never heard of before, but a lot of the discovery was also simply me digging around on my own, looking through records and CDs, remembering names and trying to work out where these bands fitted into the bigger picture.
That was the period when I started coming across records such as Decameron’s ‘My Shadow…’, Midvinter’s ‘At the Sight of the Apocalypse Dragon’ and Diabolical Masquerade’s ‘Ravendusk in My Heart’. I was also discovering Norwegian bands like Dimmu Borgir, whose ‘Enthrone Darkness Triumphant’ was another important release from that period. Looking back now, those records almost feel like pieces of a much bigger puzzle, because I was still learning about the different underground scenes and gradually understanding the connections between musicians, labels and bands from Sweden, Norway and elsewhere.
What made it especially interesting was that not many people in Singapore were into some of these bands at the time. There were certainly people heavily involved in Extreme Metal and there was already a strong underground community, but a lot of these lesser-known Swedish releases were not something you would see everyone talking about. There was no social media constantly feeding you new bands, and you couldn’t simply search for an album and immediately find every bit of information about it. If you found something interesting in a shop like Tower Records, you had to take a chance on it, remember the name and start digging. Sometimes you would mention it to another metalhead and discover that they had heard of the band too, and that was how the whole network of information slowly grew.
Midvinter came from Karlskrona, Sweden and formed in 1993, growing out of the same wider Swedish underground environment that produced so many interesting Extreme Metal bands during that decade. The core lineup for ‘At the Sight of the Apocalypse Dragon’ was Damien on guitars, bass, keyboards and backing vocals, Kheeroth on lead vocals and Zathanel on drums, with Jörgen Fahlberg appearing as a guest vocalist. Damien was particularly important to the band’s sound because he handled so much of the instrumentation and also wrote the lyrics. The album was recorded and mixed at L.21 Studios between February 3 and February 15, 1997, with Andy La Rocque handling production and engineering.
The album itself is a long journey through melodic and atmospheric Swedish Black Metal, with eight songs running for more than an hour. Midvinter were not interested in keeping everything confined to short bursts of aggression. The compositions have room to develop, with guitars moving between colder melodic passages and heavier sections while keyboards add another dimension to the arrangements. Kheeroth’s vocals give the music its harsh Black Metal character, while the instrumentation often reaches into something more epic and expansive.
‘Dödfödd’ sets the tone immediately, while ‘All Things to End Are Made’ and ‘Moonbound’ show the band’s ability to stretch their ideas into longer compositions without losing their melodic identity. ‘Hope Rides on Devil Wings’ has that same combination of aggression and atmosphere, while ‘Dreamslave’ brings another side of the band’s songwriting into focus. The long ‘Nocticula in Aeternum / Of Night Primeval’ is particularly representative of how Midvinter used space and changes in arrangement, while ‘Ett liv förnekat’ and ‘De vises hymn’ round out the album with the same distinctly Swedish character.
What I enjoy most about returning to Midvinter now is the memory of discovering records like this when they were still relatively obscure in Singapore. Around that same period, I was finding more and more releases that were opening up the underground for me. Decameron, Diabolical Masquerade, Midvinter and Dimmu Borgir were all different bands with their own identities, but together they helped me understand just how broad Extreme Metal had become by the mid to late 1990s. The Swedish bands were taking things in their own directions, while Norwegian bands such as Dimmu Borgir were developing another distinct approach, and there were countless other groups waiting to be discovered.
That is what makes 1997 such an important period in my own journey with this music. One records stayed with me immediately, others took more time, but every discovery added another piece to the picture. Midvinter’s ‘At the Sight of the Apocalypse Dragon’ is one of those records that takes me straight back to that period, when the Swedish underground still seemed endless and every new name could lead you somewhere else.
