Some more obscure black metal-adjacent weirdness from French label Infernal Kommando, featuring another set of Hiemal demos from 2011 and 2012 respectively. This New Zealand-based one-man band had previously released earlier demos through the same label, and I loved the project's bizarre brand of black necrotic ambience.

More experimental, freeform, and noisy, the band's demented demo III blends sorrowful minor-key distorted guitar with maelstroms of reverb and hiss, "Daybreak" like a drum-free funeral doom tune stretched out in the glow of a setting sun, all mournful drone and crackling amp, setting stage for "Suspended By Ice”’s sudden and jarring shift downwards into a much more subterranean space. There, the guitars merge with swarming tremolo-picked progressions, painfully scathing shrieks buried far beneath the snow banks, blasting flecks of blood against the skeletal drumming slowly moving through this no-fi frigid doomscape, freezing synthesizer melodies swirling ghostlike over the raw blackened dirge. There's an uglier, more violent edge to this demo compared to the first two, but it's still intensely isolationist and remote. The keyboards are most prominent in the mix, often drowning out the other chaotic sounds swarming beneath that icy sheen, and even clash at times with the Burzumic black metal melodies and tumbling drumbeats creeping torturously through an almost wah-like rush pf phased fuzz. That atonality and hideous visage really reveals itself with songs like "Hoarfrost", deformed icicle-encrusted shrieking funereal doom where guitars clank and scrape against each other to produce these sour, soul-warping dissonances, slipping further and further into bilious, nauseating delirium sort of like some fucked-up No Wave-damaged Skepticism-meets-Striborg jam. This whole tape has this weird, unearthly, ketamine-dosed warbly presence that's pretty different (or at least a lot more pronounced) than Hiemal's other demos. The latter tracks even shift into some kind of quasi-freeform guitar / synth / piano ambience that really gets me glazed over, hurtling skyward in a kosmische ascension like some old Tangerine Dream gone hopelessly goth. Lovin' it.

Onto Demo IV, Hiemal dives right back into Ildjarn–Nidhogg style territory, sprawling vistas of moody arctic ambient brought to live through layers and layers of murky , bleary keyboards and simple chordal movements, but backed almost instantly on "Wandering" by a more aggressive black metal undercurrent; the music still moves at a languid pace, but there's more force and power in the drumming and guitar tracks this time around, crafting this monolithic ice-doom fantasia with more than a couple of breathtaking interludes and buzzsaw-heavy summits. Four songs in all, "Wandering", "Within Cold Forests", "At the foot of the trees", "Awaken", each unfolding a near symphonic grandeur of funereal majesty, Burzumic tremolo-picking, Teutonic electronics all washed together into powerful and evaporative slabs of monochrome melancholy. Still raw and rough in the editing and production, but this is easily the most "epic" sounding of the first four demos, shifting into slow-burning melodic intricacies and explosive emotional apogees that can even evoke stuff like Mono or Year of No Light to a degree, albeit enshrouded in this omnipresent blizzard of low-fi black metal wintersynth churn.

Released in a limited edition of sixty-six copies.