MZ.412
Nordik Battle Signs

It's not easy to review an album like this. However, it should be said - perhaps initially - that MZ.412 is not a band. They emerged just before the mid-nineties as a collective project operating sui generis within the "extreme music" milieu, from which they extract and deepen the philosophy and ultimate sense both objectively and aesthetically.

At the helm of MZ.412 is the guru figure of Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk, Swedish in birth, upbringing, and influences. A pioneer in the underground genre of dark-ambient, a genre that recently witnessed the birth of the splendid "Vitagen", light years away from the flat ambient(alistic) sludge that clutters (not too rarely) the shelves of some forlorn and struggling little shop.
The music produced by MZ.412 is what one might call a "corridor" of essentially ambient (an absolutely rough definition), within which noise and black-metal simultaneously stir in multiple shades and echoes. In essence (because essence is what we're talking about here), MZ.412 creates a contemplative music (and never superficial, unlike certain facile attempts by some blacksters who have turned to the "cause of ambient" due to force majeure), effective, deep, absolutely evil; which immerses the listener in the core of the aforementioned three genres.
Nordik Battle Signs is an album of pure black-metal - while absolutely not being it - and represents the highest peak of MZ.412's career.

Now that this tedious prologue is over, let's move on to the actual listening.
It is an album that doesn't set precise coordinates. For this reason, it might jar upon listening by those expecting a bit of typically dark ambient (or) shadowy atmospheres through which to pass unscathed an hour or so of inattentive listening.
The music of MZ.412 literally stamps itself into your head. The primary sensation is finding oneself in an already constructed and dark world (and I want to emphasize: not for this reason approximate, gratuitous, and stereotyped), in front of which we can do nothing but contemplate, paying attention to what moves, not even around us, but in front of us. We find ourselves in an "other" place, inside which something is being prepared or is being prepared (a battle? A satanic rite? An invocation?) and which presents itself before us, unleashing doubts, emotions, anxieties, diabolical and adrenaline satisfaction, pure evilness.
There are no coordinates, I repeat, in the sense that it is not a concept album, yet everything is connected, precise, every piece that is there could not be elsewhere. Like a boulder that has always been a few steps from home (provided you don't live in central Milan), which no one has ever bothered to observe in detail.
It is about pure, electric, elliptical, (very) electronic music, ineluctable and eternal for the inner strength it emanates.

In essence: anyone who is not afraid to approach something that goes beyond the surface (the same black-metal in an objective sense, too often suffers from the flaw of superficiality and rigidity of patterns [or too much softness, which ultimately leads back to classifiable and already heard, consumed, and stewed threads elsewhere]) musically should not miss this splendid piece of history of extreme music.
An absolutely unclassifiable album. Extremely intelligent. Sublime.