Darkwood
Notwendfeuer

Darkwood by Henryk Vogel, like the fellow countrymen Forseti, Sonne Hagal, and Orplid, perfectly exemplifies what is meant by the label of German neo-folk.

What is German neo-folk? The German neo-folk, in three words, is a declination of apocalyptic folk that emerged at the dawn of the new millennium and stands apart from the Anglo-Saxon one by predominantly using the German language, adopting a stylistic formula that draws heavily from the European folk tradition, and addressing themes such as nature, paganism, and mythologies/beliefs of Central and Northern Europe.

In truth, at the center of Vogel's reflections have always reigned the history and love for the motherland (the essential component of Germanic mythology rather spills over into the more purely musical aspect, at the level of moods and atmospheres), an aspect that makes the proposal of the Darkwood entity peculiar, at least from a lyrical point of view: born at the end of the last century under the protective wing of the historic English label World Serpent (the one of various Death in June and Current 93, so to speak, thanks to which they participated in the historic compilation “Looking for Europe”), Vogel's creature can count today on a rich discography, also thanks to the constant support of Heidenvolk, Vogel's personal label (a label created to care almost exclusively for the production of his works, except for occasional exceptions, like the beautiful “A Ghost to Be Forgotten” by Americans In Ruin, produced for reasons of friendship and obvious stylistic and ideological affinities).

With “Notwendfeuer”, released in 2007, Vogel delivers what to this day can be considered the work of his maturity, at least from a formal point of view, as he finally achieves the long-cultivated intent of replacing definitively with natural sources what had been produced in the past with the means of electronics. Synthesizers and sampling eliminated, therefore, for a folk that definitively abandons any industrial contamination and can finally spread its wings thanks to a respectable ensemble (violin, cello, trumpet, accordion, and even a female voice) and coherently tread paths that turn toward an unrecoverable past.

Henryk Vogel, after all, born in a small village of the former East Germany, grows up surrounded by the ghosts of the past and symbols of World War II, serves in the NVA (the People's Army of Germany), then witnesses the fall of the wall and the advent of capitalism, and today lives in a city like Dresden where recent history has left deep grooves, in places and people; artistically he is a self-taught, minstrel for himself and a few close friends, during the years of the regime that did not allow independent record productions: his reading of History, for him who is inspired by the Wandervogel (a nationalist, patriotic movement antithetical to a bourgeois conception of society, born at the beginning of the 1900s), thus becomes a painful realization of what has been lost through the processes of 20th-century history, emphasizing the vital need to coagulate a new project around spiritual values that transcend the prevailing materialism today and rediscover the sense of community life that stems from love, respect for one's land, and identification with it. All themes that Vogel addresses in a lucid, passionate way, strong in solid cultural preparation that prevents him from slipping into the trivial.

The thematic concept of this “Notwendfeuer” (as already hinted by the beautiful cover) centers on youth and on that energy, that passion, that “Fire” that can and must be channeled, between the weight of the past and hopes for the future, in the direction of a hoped-for change for the better: according to what the author himself stated, in the present album “the role of youth connected to changes” operable in the world and as a vision of an alternative way of living is addressed with love and hope.

The music that results, despite a dry and essential form that sees the predominance of the voice/acoustic guitar duo, has something magnetic and indefinable that makes it fascinating in every aspect. Less visionary and complex than that of many peers from the same country, Darkwood's proposal is articulated in often short ballads and stripped of the song format, which, of course, bring to mind an essential name for the scene like Ian Read (his Fire + Ice, and particularly a work like “Birdking”, are certainly the most evident benchmark, even before the usual Death in June and Sol Invictus, which always constitute the fundamental background for any musician dedicated to these sounds). The opening track “Wintermarchen” exemplifies its coordinates: a subdued start based on melancholic arpeggios and just hinted singing, which imperceptibly gives way to fuller chords that in the finale blend with the inspiring urgency of the strings, generating a crescendo that can excite despite the rigor and the intrinsic sobriety in Vogel's poetics.

“Notwendfeuer”, overall, is a single emotional flow, essentially devoid of drops in tension, which evolves constantly without big leaps, except for the martial step of the percussion in “Verlorenes Heer” and the distortions (of the bass?) in the pairing “Roggenfelder”/“Ostenfeld”, a duo placed almost at the end of the journey, before the intimate closure left to tracks like “Westensturme” and “Winterrune”.

Darkwood can therefore constitute an interesting listen for all those who wish to delve into this specific strand of the broader world of apocalyptic folk, and certainly “Notwendfeuer” is a mandatory stop for those who appreciated the works of Forseti, Sonne Hagal, and early Orplid.