Mróz

Even if you don't know Polish and know that the title of this EP is "Frost" in English, you'll certainly feel the cold and bleakness of the music here. The EP is best heard in its entirety as though it were one piece of music though in fact it consists of three quite different tracks. Appropriately blizzard-wind ambience introduces the music which ranges from a forbiddingly cool and formal-sounding solo guitar melody to primitive, almost experimental-sounding minimalist raw black metal. The instrumentation is stripped down to drums and scratchy guitar that could almost be falling apart - there is not even any bass. The playing is deliberately simple, restricted as it is to pumping out riffs and beats over and over with changes in key and mood being the major variation in the music. A blank background to proceedings completes the picture. The pace varies from medium to slow. As the music continues, FD man Belzebub experiments with the track's mood by moving it from one speaker to the next or slowing down the music to near-deathly snail's pace.

The last track on the EP appears to sum up what's gone before with a mix of cold space ambience and black metal funeral dirge doom. A slow march with just cymbal and snare and gradually encroaching blackness that engulfs the track is a terrifying experience to behold.

The EP has a primitive punk(ish) quality that in its own way captures a mood of finality, that death is coming quickly if silently and steadily. Stripped to its basics in its structure, execution and production, the music oddly gains a huge promise of potential to be something much more and much different than it is. In some schools of Buddhism, the notion of emptiness is defined as voidness from which something may grow, though not in forms or ways that we can see, hear or feel: it is that sense of voidness which this EP captures in a sense. Interesting that death, when it comes in its all-enveloping blackness, might eventually yield a new life.