Lost in Lustrous Night Skies

A collection of mostly unreleased tracks from past years, "Lost in Lustrous Night Skies" has lofty ambitions to fulfil: to immerse you in full soundscapes of shining night skies and the invitation they hold out to you of knowing their mysteries. Taken as a group, the titles of the five tracks from "Spirit" through "Echoes of Transcendence", "Into the Ancient Darkness" and "Neath the Black Veil" and finally to "Resplendency" suggest as much: release from our mortal coils will take us through the cosmos and beyond into another universe that promises far better than our limited physical universe does.

Intro track "Spirit" is a joyous piece thanks to energetic black metal guitar and Nachtzeit's aggressive vocal, less slurpy and clearer than what I've heard on some of his other recordings. That repetitive synth-loop rhythm of toy-box music tones is very loud and has a hard-edged tone that almost overpowers the rougher guitar; a slightly changed mix in which the guitar is about as loud as the tones would have improved the track and made the keyboards less annoying. Similar can be said for the next track as the keyboard-generated tone-rhythm loops overpower the harsh BM-string showers and spoil the overall ambience with an unintended bouncy cheerful mood. The rhythms are a bit too fast for the track as well so the intended atmosphere doesn't sink in very deeply.

"Into the Ancient Darkness" is something of a peculiar oddity even by my relaxed standards of whatever passes for experimentalism: the scream loop, allowed to continue for too long, turns what could have been an intense and emotional track into desensitised kitsch and the orchestral loop, intended to be sorrowful, turns out to be banal through sheer repetition. The track that follows is a repeat of the demo released in 2009: an opportunity to vary it so it becomes integrated with the rest of the music here and a part of what Nachtzeit might have intended with this collection is missed. Although the tough black metal guitar element is good, it's not enough to overcome the seemingly endless ghost-voice machine loop.

The collection ends with a short glockenspiel piece that sounds suspiciously Christmas-carol, complete with the soft blowy night-wind ambience: not quite the resplendency I had in mind which would have been mind-blowing black metal psychedelic horror-film / screamorama soundtrack debauchery. (I certainly have been hearing far too much of that Black Twilight Circle stuff - maybe time to get my head out?) The track could have been much longer and more developed - at least 10 minutes in length, in my opinion, for something spellbinding and emotionally exhausting and satisfying. There is the possibility that the cute-n-cosy ambience of the track might be a little joke if you assume that the entire album is based around the concept as described earlier.

As a group, these tracks are disappointing: the intro piece sets up listeners to expect something really compelling, only for their expectations to tumble into the more kitsch realms of synthesiser music as used (and abused) throughout its history since Robert Moog perfected his instrument in the late 1960s. Taken separately, the tracks are uneven and need a bit more tweaking here and there; in a couple of tracks, the guitars only need to be brought forward more in the mix and the synth-generated rhythm loops to be softened, for the music to be better.

The big problem here is that the Lustre project is too much of a hostage to the keyboard-generated rhythms and beats which end up dictating too much of the structure and direction of the music and turn it into something too machine-like.

Let me lay this out on the table: I'm what you might call a raving Lustre fanboy. I think Nachtzeit has an uncanny ability to create some of the most serene, ethereal music I've heard through a relatively simple formula: a determined, crawling pace marked by very basic percussion, thick, fuzzed out guitars tuned down a bit from what you'd expect forming the textural and melodic backbone of his often lengthy dream sequences, airy keys floating above the chords, mirroring them in the sky, and then his signature space-glockenspiels or similarly crystalline synth patch plucking out the lead melodies as the tracks drone on into the deepest realms of space. Off in the background he occasionally supplies single syllable stretched-out blackened lamentations. His single biggest influence is no doubt Burzum but he does something that for some reason never crossed Varg's mind: he takes the repetitive black metal dirges of songs like “Det som en gang var” and combines them with the dreamy “Tomhet” into single pieces that go nowhere and far away all at once. It's not for everyone, with heavy use of repetition and a general minimalistic approach that doesn't see much evolution in any one song once its basic elements are introduced. He reached an early pinnacle on the glorious Night Spirit album, though subsequent releases have been quite satisfying, if to somewhat varying degrees.

The material on Lost in Lustrous Night Skies is made up of (supposedly) previously unreleased tracks from throughout the project's history. Fortunately, Nachtzeit has been fairly steady in the band's output through the years, so you can expect uniformly great production and a solid sense of uniformity of aesthetic. This is almost true, but there's a marked shift in quality that makes this collection less refined and much less consistent than his other releases.

While track-by-track reviews are one of my least favorite styles, I feel it's somewhat appropriate here due both to the cobbled-together nature of the songs on this compilation and due to the large shifts in quality of the material.

Things kick off with the longest track here, the 12-minute “Spirit”. While outwardly not all that different from most Lustre songs, there are a couple of things about it that sort of turn me off. There's a clean guitar intro to this song that lasts well over a minute, but then totally disappears before the synths come in, with a chunk of silence in between. This uncharacteristic gap interrupts the flow of the song, with the intro guitar bit establishing a mood that isn't really expanded upon. The guitar riffing in the track is a more prominent feature in this song than in others. I love a good riff as much as the next guy, but it seems a little odd and even out of character to have the guitar mixed in such a way that it actually steps on the synths, especially since it's really just playing a couple of chords anyway. Finally, when the guitar falls away for the vocal sections, the song feels anemic, something which isn't a problem in other Lustre tracks when this same technique is used because the synths usually have so much more weight relative to the guitars that the vocals never feel so naked as they do in this track. Not a horrible track by any means, but not quite up to the project's lofty standards. Makes sense that this one went “previously unreleased,” I think.

“Echoes of Transcendence” is a fine, if fairly brief (for Lustre, anyway) song whose greatest mistake is a distant and slightly fuzzy production on all of the instruments. It sort of neuters an otherwise pleasant song. The writing on this one is handled just fine, though, and I could easily see this track working alongside other early non-album material such as the Serenity or Welcome Winter EP's. It's also an instrumental, so it is lacking that little extra factor that Nachtzeit's vocals bring to his music.

“Into the Ancient Darkness” is plain fucking awful, the only truly bad Lustre track I've ever heard. Instead of his usual distant, reptilian rasp, here Nachtzeit uses a more banshee-like, DSBM-style howling shriek. While I can understand the use of this style in more traditional black metal contexts, this song is devoid of any guitar or percussion at all, with subtle synths holding the chord pattern while Nachtzeit wails single unintelligible syllables at regular intervals throughout the song's nearly nine minute length. The synth chords sound alright, as usual, but the lack of the rest of the band's trademark instrumentation just makes it impossible to ignore the really stupid sounding vocals. There's not even that glockenspiel-ish lead synth, either, just those airy Moog-ish notes that usually play the roots of the chord progressions. This sounds either like an experiment that Nachtzeit knew was a failure, or an unused synth line that he wailed over to make it more interesting. Either way, it sucks.

Next comes “Neath the Black Veil,” another previously unreleased track that's rather perplexing as it was, actually, previously released. That or I'm going insane, as it's clearly listed on the band's Metal-Archives page and I've got a copy of the tape sitting right here on my desk. As with “Echoes of Transcendence”, the proceedings on this one suffer from a murkier than usual production that renders the percussion nearly inaudible and buries the vocals deeper than usual. The song is also a bit more repetitive than usual, with the main melodic theme continuing unabated throughout the entire track. The dynamics present in releases like Night Spirit are one of the project's greatest strengths, so the relative lack of them here is somewhat disappointing.

Finally is the brief “Resplendency”; only four minutes long but sporting a really beautiful synth xylophone lead over some wind samples. It's really quite pretty, and I'd have loved to hear it get incorporated into a longer, more fleshed out Lustre song, but it works quite well as a short track that could be an interlude or, as it's used here, a peaceful conclusion to an album.

So, while there are some neat ideas here, there are some duds as well. Only the first track exists as a really fully realized Lustre track that we actually haven't already heard, and it has a few flaws that keep it from being really top-tier material. Superfans and completionists like myself will still want to grab this, though the lack of really compelling material will limit its appeal to more casual fans of the band. Newcomers should start with a full-length or maybe the Welcome Winter EP rather than this compilation.