Moorgeist

Wehrgoat is mainly known for his main project Czarnobog which released numerous albums throughout the last decade. In the early days, this project was dedicated to raw, slightly "ambientified" atmospheric black metal, but changed its sound towards a more pagan-inspired style as time went by. In order to keep the spirit of his early days going, Wehrgoat crafted Moorgeist which is designed to be a continuation of the early sound of Czarnobog. It only took a few days to record the first album, presumably by using scratched Czarnobog ideas, and release it to the world.

Moorgeist's music is dominated by a spooky, eerie and very hypnotic atmosphere that is mostly created by the rough production with muffled, fuzzy guitars and vocals with a strong reverb as well as a very dominant ambient aspect. Everything blurs into a big, dense piece of atmosphere with monotonously pounding drumming adding some sort of forward momentum. The guitars are building up a fuzzy wall of sound, backed up by swirling ambient and the only thing disturbing this inexorable machine are some dungeon synth-strings that provide a slow and soft melody that really sticks out.

Minimalism is the key element on this record which also makes it sound like Darkspace reduced to their essentials. The drums never change, slowly pounding their way forward, the riffs and background ambience never changes, providing a very hypnotic and calming wall of darkness and the vocals blur into that with its eerie, muffled grumbling and cawing. It really makes it sound like some form of demon or ghost is ranting against humanity in a foggy, dark bog and I'm very sure that's deliberate. The only real variation in this piece of darkness is found in the synthies that offer distinct melodies and arrangements for each track. They are, for example, adding a demanding magical melody to "Moorgeist" and a more mysterious, dark one to "Der Sieg der Natur über dem Menschen". The latter also received some choral vocal element in the second half, further adding to the eerie, unsettling atmosphere of this record. Aside from that, not much is going on, so in the end, it all comes down to whether you get sucked into the monotony or not.

The first self-titled record by the one-man project Moorgeist hasn't much to offer aside from a hypnotic monotony, some melodic synthies and an eerie, ghost-ish atmosphere. Yet he manages to make it work really well. Everything gets merged into a sinister atmosphere while ghost-like vocals make for an unsettling vibe that fits the music perfectly well. If you're a fan of ambient black metal of the minimalistic way, this is exactly what you're looking for. As for me, I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it got a bit too samey towards the end despite the clean chanting in the closing track.