Grymyrk breathes and exists through the emptiness in this void, which, in the listener’s mind, translates to ambiguity with no obvious rationale behind its moribund essence. Yet, there is a logic to it that cannot possibly go ignored by the listener, with patterns emerging, diffusing into related ideas, and reemerging from their cycle of life and death, of violence and contemplation, of foreboding and serenity, which both oppose each other in function yet complete each other through contrast, with each paired cycle making up a part of a larger meta-cycle on which the song is based in a manner similar to the fractal of a tree, with the song’s overarching architecture organized in the same manner that the elements with in the smaller structures are ordered.

The riffing on this album, in a reflection of both its desire to sound unlistenable to the average potential listener, and its desire to explore reality outside of safe anthrocentricism, almost entirely eschews all consonance, however avoids relying purely on phrases of rhythm, or of implied rhythm in the timing between chord changes, and instead builds majestic yet terrifying sequences of tritones and chromatic notes for use as the smallest component parts of these hymns to the unknown darkness. The bass could possibly be described as a stringed drum machine with a sense of tone, slowly throbbing and cycling through a few notes, and keeping an even cadence, to provide a minimal sense of rhythm that’s otherwise nearly completely ignored on this recording.

Though the technique will not win accolades in mainstream guitar magazines, those willing to look beyond surface qualities will find awe-inspiring composition in this tribute to the evil that man does not comprehend. Perhaps best known to most metalheads as the source of some material used in a more conventional context on “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas”, or for the original appearance of “Home”, which later became “Aerie Descent”, one of the band’s better known songs, the material on offer here is of interest to the hessian both as an evolutionary view of black metal as it grew from the more extreme speed metal into realms of greater abstraction and also as one of the genre’s premier works in its own right, with an enigmatic yet lucid take on the beauty and potential stemming from the ambiguous void.