Striborg
Spiritual Catharsis

The sound of nature. Cathartic, wild, a forest at night populated by demons lurking among the tree bark, sonic visions of a forgotten land with boundless primal greenery. Spiritual Catharsis is the banner of misanthropy, a totem meant for the few who will appreciate it, the most uncompromising and deconstructed black that merges with a milky, icy, and anxiety-inducing dark-ambient component.

This is Striborg, an artist who puts into music the alienation of a mind trained (and delighted) in solitude, abandonment, nostalgia after death, beyond life. A challenging experience for the occasional listener, difficult but ever so necessary to gradually understand the poetics of the sole member Sin Nanna. In this case, it is highly recommended to listen in the extreme quiet of darkness, preferably with headphones, remaining alone with oneself, without external involvement to fully appreciate the work.

"Within The Depths of Darkness & Sorrow" is composed of a noisy, violated, sandpapered six-string, a skeletal noise that accompanies the listener into sonic landscapes teeming with otherworldly life forms, the drumming that follows, monotonous, muffled, the screaming almost an accouterment that tears and contorts within itself. The Spiritual Catharsis of the Australian artist is then reached in the gloomy sonic glimmers of the title track, opened by an endless ambient rift, distant echos act as a forerunner to a slow churning of black riffs into white noise, alien, distorted, and filtered vocals make their way with violent jolts along the solemn thirteen minutes of the piece, a dark and wonderful vision of ecstasy that transcends, illuminates the immutable passage of time.

Musical paths that flow like rivers in our minds, in the silence of the night while the apparent quiet is occasionally shaken by the acidic rains of instruments, synthesizers, and vocal manipulations of a "Dicksonia Antarctica", by the funereal and martial visions of "Black Metal is the Forest Calling..." or the paralyzing "Beneath the Fields of Rapacious Blood". The advice is to completely abandon oneself to these notes, let oneself be flattered and involved by the art form of Striborg, appreciate the chromatic passages aimed at describing distant and forgotten landscapes, appreciating it means delving into a mysterious and unrecognized clearing. The album closes with the track "Eternal Blackness Surrounds the Bushland" an oneiric instrumental that is shaken by industrial noises and a vocal synthesizer that only enhances the mystery of this concept. The nocturnal vision of the forest thus finally has its shamanic counterpart in music: everyone is in search of "Spiritual Catharsis", a journey over seventy minutes long, between the ecstasy of torment and the power of weeping. Like getting lost inside a web of mystical/arcane sensations where thought precedes sound, where sound is lost, deep and ungainly, in the more perverse and secret recesses of the human mind.