Where the Sun Is Silent...

By the time I heard of this band and others that are part of the Black Twilight Circle, Ashdautas had already disbanded. The musicians did leave a small legacy of releases including one full-length album and the EP "Where the Sun is Silent". The EP has been released in both vinyl and cassette formats. Due to its length (25 minutes), the EP can and should be heard in one sitting.

On first hearing, the EP is a loud, noisy, fast and screechy affair and a couple of repeat listenings might be needed before listeners fully appreciate all that's going on. Track 1 "Purity of Disease" plunges us straight into a Hell filled with the screams of the damned and an insistent soundtrack of suffocating lead and rhythm guitars charging full-steam ahead; the lead guitar in particular alternates between vibrato melodies and screechy tone and feedback effects. The track segues straight into the second song with not much pause (you might miss it altogether if you sneeze) and goes from a fast, busy extreme to a slow polar end where there's more space than sound in parts. The title track gets off to a more sedate start though the atmosphere is still hot and stiflingly hellish; it switches from slow to fast with pummelling drums. Going from the third to the fourth track, the screeching gets ever more panicky and hysterical as the drums start loping and limping and guitars still needle about. About halfway through the final song, there's the most heart-rending yelp of horror and hopeless resignation and the music almost collapses; but there's a quick recovery and we carry all the way to the end.

Only if you listen really closely can you pick out individual songs but if you can't, that's no big deal as the EP's merits lie in the atmosphere and sense of despair, hopelessness and desperation the music and vocals engender. The singer howls as though trapped in a steel-lined box deep underground, knowing there's no way human know-how and technology can reach him. Lead guitar melodies are so fast that the notes are like blobs of liquid mercury pouring over the ground, burying the vocalist ever deeper in the maelstrom of noise and his depression.

This is a very dark recording (the EP title itself indicates that the music is a journey into inner blackness, as much spiritual as it is literal) where one must face the ultimate question of existence, whether one's life has any meaning and if after death we all just end up in Hell regardless of what we've done in our lives. The music represents the chaos and cacophony of a world that has its own logic which can't be understood by humans. The vocalist in his isolation and terror might be representative of what we all eventually have to face as individuals and as the human species together.

When one thinks of what black metal should be, many key ingredients come to mind. You need darkness in the music, violent intent in the execution, and some type of tragic feeling evoked by the rise and fall of the song. But overall, black metal must be "Black". Without an attempt to embody the greater void, you might as well use another prefix.

Black is, what we as humans, look to as our opposite. A negative mirror that reflects all of the unknowns we encounter, which in turn instill us with terror, violence, and wonder. To think of a band that embodies this principal, and who attempt to manifest this musically, it's difficult to find another band as steeped in "blackness" as Ashdautas.

"Where the Sun is Silent" turns out to be a master opus medley of sorts that followed up their equally great, but much more brief, "Shadowplays". It is an album that is a constant 25 minute long stream of nightmarish shades. There is nothing easy about it, there is nothing pleasant about it, every section is as equally dark and stygian as the previous. It is a procession of motifs that all embody black metal style perfectly at its most "black".

Out of the four slogans that are black metal's mantra, "NO FUN" is what Ashdautas live and die by. This motive might also be the most effective. The music here rolls and tumbles, falling deeper and deeper into the recesses of the dark world their music creates. It is a horrible path of introspection, and it is a perfect tour of where black metal can go with its worst intentions.

When one normally thinks about "Dark" black metal, the suicidal styles of the genre normally come to mind. Ashdautas however do not fit in with this style whatsoever. Their music is not weak, but rather terribly violent and full of an endless dark energy which drives this one song along quite quickly regardless of its half hour length.

The vocals on WTSIS, and in Ashdautas in general, are the perfect guiding force to compliment the music. This inhuman wail, which is a feat of depravity in itself, lays the perfect unsettling mood across the song's top.
Whether it's male or female or human cannot immediately be determined. It is a sexless, formless sound that is only the essence of pain.

Lyrically and thermatically Ashdautas have to be given some credit in the face of so many failed attempts at poetic meaning by other black metal contemporaries. Not only is the title of the Album a perfect embodiment of the cruel dark storm they conjure, but the individual song titles (like "With Blades we Speak") put a rare poetic flare on the typical black metal theme.

Having first heard this material nearly 4 years ago and now revisiting it in 2010, it's effects have only strengthened and become more defined. What Ashdautas are is hard to perceive at first. Especiallly WTSIS is not necessarily comprehenisble as a conventional "song", but after having that taste in your mouth or feeling in your bones for a long while, you can feel a grave authenticity in their sound. There could be nothing false about this.

Their status and notoriety as a truly BLACK metal band will surely only grow over time.