Carpe Noctem
Vitrun

Very often, when preparing to listen to an album, especially from a band one knows nothing about, the cover can provide many signals about what our ears are about to encounter. Signals regarding the proposed genre, the sounds, the vocals, or even the atmospheres contained in the compositions. If the artwork of an album, for example, shows us a fantasy imagery, with dragons, swords, and assorted warriors that seem to have stepped out of the animated series "Saint Seiya," it is almost certain we are about to venture into the depths of a power/heavy album with an epic, combative flavor. If it were a brutal death album, well, you can indulge in the most bloody and gruesome imagery at your disposal: corpses, zombies, mutilations, and depravations of all kinds. In short, as you well know, there's something for every taste.

But there are also covers that, on the contrary, prevent us from forming any idea about the musical content. Abstract, cryptic images that can encompass several meanings or perhaps none, interpretable according to the sensitivity and ideas of each observer. Elusive drawings, with blurred contours, whose meaning does not fully reveal itself.

Take, for example, the cover image of "Vitrun," the second studio effort by Icelanders Carpe Noctem. It is, indisputably, a human eye. But it's certainly strange for being just a simple eyeball. There is no human flesh around, only black and white stripes and veins. The expression seems to belong to a tense person, on the verge of psychological collapse, captured in a moment of mental delirium, perhaps one confined in an asylum, who can say? And the iris? Shall we talk about the iris? It resembles a descending staircase, a series of steps that, step by step, lead us, spiral-like, toward the very white pupil. A window into an unknown, perhaps parallel universe, where every human logic is shattered, minced, and then put into a pot to boil. Psychological discomfort? Metropolitan stress? Desolation? Escape from a reality too difficult to face? Apocalyptic delusions about a terrifying future for humanity? It is not very clear (oh well, given the current Covid-19 epidemic, perhaps it's all too clear, but it's fine, details...).

Then, bewildered and curious at the same time, when you get ready to place the album on the CD player and press the Play button, all certainty is shattered, and your consciousness is flipped like a sock. The first notes of "Söngurinn sem ómar milli stjarnanna" leave no escape, they take you with them and transport you beyond that very white pupil, that window into the unknown.

Thus opens the musical asylum crafted by Carpe Noctem, a rocky, granitic mid-tempo over which a carpet of dissonant, crooked black metal guitars stretches, drawing unreal melodic (or a-melodic) arabesques, as if emanating from an Escher painting. The track then, between sudden blast-beats and blazing riffs, takes different paths and directions, but the musical discourse is fluid, flowing, yet always at the edge of absurdity, like the monologue of a madman confined in a care home, a discourse clear and comprehensible only to itself. Only after the midway point does the track slow down, with a relaxation of tone and atmosphere, at times almost psychedelic, liquid, dreaming. But it's just a prelude to the last minute, where they resume the initial melody, finally overwhelming the listener already by the end of the first track. And the first stage of madness is already well surpassed.

The subsequent "Upplausn" proceeds with a noticeably changing place and atmosphere. A smoky, black, ominous introduction opens the gates to a desolate urban imaginary. A thick fog surrounds the buildings and skyscrapers of a ruined, abandoned city, immersed in perpetual darkness. Ruined walls, destroyed cars, collapsing bridges, the stench of smoke and industrial fumes, deep cracks rip the streets and the cars almost fall inside. Broken glass everywhere, no one is there with you, you are completely alone. Are you in Silent Hill, perhaps?

A distant sound, a red light amidst all that black, signals to you. And you must run away from that urban hell. A desperate train run begins through the city, on a bridge about to collapse amidst abandoned cars, trash, and utter decay. A kilometer-long track, nine minutes lived at the speed of light, an atmospheric and nocturnal song, a sound train from which you can see, through the broken windows, the chilling disaster of a metropolitan civilization in its final act. Sound echoes of bands like Deathspell Omega and Blut aus Nord (those of "The Work Which Transforms God" or "The Mystical Beast of Rebellion") peek through, but the rhythms are squarer, more straightforward, more frantic. The train slows down and stops in the middle of nowhere; you're outside the city, and a thick fog of guitar echoes leads you, slowly, toward the next sound landscape...

"Og hofið fylltist af reyk" is the third piece of this work, the pivotal track, the most complex and schizophrenic. The introduction is melancholic, subdued, its pace is slow, on the cusp of the gloomiest doom. Then, without warning, the track starts, with a bizarre and dissonant pace as always, guitars emitting gasps in time with the drums on which the singer's voice rests, a shrill growl, at times almost declamatory, like in the rest of the CD. Then the piece speeds up, speeds up, speeds up even more, and toward the middle, it goes completely berserk in a whirlwind of frantic solos and senseless blast-beats until the explosion of the atomic bomb: BOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!! (Yes, it seems like the record has indeed exploded, and you with it, but don’t worry, you’re still there, alive and kicking).

A truce follows, the singer catches his breath, you can feel he’s starting to give in, the tension is almost unbearable. The drums trace a tribal rhythm that increases in intensity as the minutes go by, the guitars emit acidic, screeching riffs, like a swarm of mosquitoes proceeding in a zigzag, super fast until the final meltdown when the war is over, everything is destroyed and only a few debris, soot and broken human limbs remain, scattered here and there... and again, a veil of smoke descends on this devastated scene.

"Hér hvílir bölvun" is the calm after the storm. It's time to catch your breath after everything you’ve just seen and heard. A geometric and hallucinated arpeggio, supported by a few drumbeats, welcomes us. Once again it is deep night. It’s a bit chilly and there is no one outside in the city. Only the arpeggio and drums accompany us through an abstract sound grid, difficult to comprehend. Then slowly the tones increase, more and more until they flow into another medium tempo, lugubrious and tortuous, another symptom of the group's mad DNA. Then follows a deadly whirlwind of riffs and Scandinavian blast beats (perhaps the only moment on the record where the nod to more orthodox genre bands like Mayhem and Marduk appears), with epic and sinister tones at the same time. Again, in the middle, the track seems to pause to begin another disturbing crescendo, like an occult ritual, a procession, a prophetic declamation of what is to come, thus closing the track with a sense of suspense.

And after the acoustic interlude of "Úr beinum og brjósk", we reach the concluding chapter of this absurd journey, the last, epic 11 minutes of "Sá sem slítur vængi flugunnar hefur náð hugljómun". A track that is the sum of everything you’ve heard up to now, a summary chapter of all the previous episodes that magnificently closes this work: screeching guitars, frenzied dissonances, lightning-fast accelerations, odd rhythms, or rather, impossible ones, screams and otherworldly atmospheres alternate relentlessly until the concluding moment, where a placid but unsettling guitar arpeggio accompanies us to the exit door of this true musical asylum that is "Vitrun," and bids us farewell.

Thus, you exit these 52 minutes of music with the sensation of having understood everything and nothing at the same time. You are left with something unhealthy, sinister, as if the reality around you is no longer the one you knew an hour ago. The soundscapes of the album have seeped under your skin, and now you see everything with very different eyes. Perhaps this is precisely the ability of Carpe Noctem: to overturn our concept not only of music but also of reality. Everything in this record is distorted and tampered with until it takes on the form of something indefinable; our anxieties, our neuroses, our worries take shape and engulf us only to spit us out again.

This and much more is "Vitrun." The group from Reykjavik, after that little gem known as "In Terra Profugus" (2013), offers us another pearl of very black, evolved, progressive black metal, light years ahead of everything that passes daily by. Certainly, it is an extremely elitist product, perhaps only suitable for those who appreciate musical oddities or current metal avant-garde. A notable open-mindedness is indeed necessary to fully appreciate this work, but if you have the patience and desire to immerse yourself in sinister and paradoxical atmospheres, "Vitrun" is surely for you. An excellent hit delivered by our local label Code666 Records.