Striborg
Mysterious Semblance

Listening to Striborg is completely breaking away from the surrounding reality. Listening to Striborg is a journey into another dimension. Listening to Striborg is not a trance; listening to Striborg means staying conscious in a foreign and hostile world, rediscovering the meaning of simple and primitive emotions such as fear and wonder. Striborg, and not Pascoli, should be the theorist of the poetics of the child, because nothing captures the mystery of the things that surround us better than his music.

This introduction was just a filter for readers; whoever has made it this far is interested in continuing.

The project was born around the mid-nineties by the will of Sin Nanna, a name with strong mystical and esoteric references behind which hides the only member of the band; unlike many one man band Black Metal projects, ours does not choose the (easier) path of Depressive Black, but instead dedicates himself to a sound that I believe is unique within the entire scenario of this subgenre. Sin Nanna wants to give a new form to malaise, a metaphysical form that does not speak the same language as humans; and he does not want to be an interpreter, he just wants to let us see it from afar. To do so, he takes Black Metal, distorts it, completely disfigures it, leaving only a skeleton to vaguely remember it: then he makes the sound as dirty as possible, with such horrific production that, by comparison, Xasthur seems produced like Dream Theatre. To be honest, you can't really understand anything of what this guy plays, and I don't deny that it takes a good number of listens to partially digest just one piece. Striborg doesn't make easy music; his is dreamlike music; dreamlike, I say, not symbolic. Because his intent is not to speak in a language (of sounds, obviously) that is difficult and undecipherable, it is solely the desire to faithfully portray emotions, in their abstractness, incompleteness, in their absurdity when they appear unexpectedly.

The CD, released in 2004, begins with the unsettling "A Sour, Pale, Ghostly Dawn", an intro of a few minutes performed on the keyboard that opens the doors to a new world, a world where man is laid bare and even stripped of that typically Black choreography that seems absurd not to find in such a record. The themes dealt with only border those usually handled by this musical genre and focus more on the traces that certain landscapes and situations can leave on the human soul, more or less like light on a photographic plate. Otherworldly atmospheres, nocturnal, laden not only with icy decadence but also with deep, yet simple thoughts at the same time. It is the case of the title track "Mysterious Semblance Of Spectral Trees", a mastodon of about twenty minutes that has the effect of a good glass of liqueur; mixing reason and sentiment in a unique fluid, impressive for its involuntary complexity. A transparent keyboard enters the song, a guitar that's damned Black joins, but then comes a rich, important bass, along with a drum machine programmed to sound like a death knell. Everything slowly takes shape, animates and moves; then comes the voice, heavily filtered, almost alien. Screaming? Who can say, it's a voice that loses its shape, seems to come from underwater. But it won't always be like this; in the later songs, it will get closer to something "normal".

The sound is distant, feeble but manages to penetrate everywhere: there is no need for instrumental technique when making this kind of music, it would be absolutely superfluous. Because the sounds, in Striborg's production, are not there to make music but to speak; it is not surprising, then, to hear "riffs" or keyboards so cacophonous they resemble the noise of a tile being cut (for those who haven't had the honor, know that it is an extremely annoying thing). It returns again to a more traditional Black with "As Sad As A Cemetery In The Winter Darkness", more than just a simple ode to decadence. Even reading the lyrics, you can easily understand another characteristic that distinguishes this artist from many of his peers, sincerity. Sin Nanna gives the Striborg project an intimate, deep cut, but not depressive: in the lyrics one reads of melancholy, maybe even sadness, but you will never find the self-destructions of Abyssic Hate or Leviathan. Clear but frayed feelings are lost in a sea of unlikely sounds, sounds that no one would ever dream of putting in music (and sometimes very on the edge between Black and Ambient).

In my opinion, Striborg remains one of the most interesting and innovative Black artists of the entire scene, and this "Mysterious Semblance" is one of the works that best expresses all of his musical poetics. An out-of-the-box album, an album that knows no harmony but still has a logic, an album that, like few others, manages to externalize things that no one has wanted or been able to externalize; anyone willing to question the concept of art is welcome.