Aokigahara

This is the second album by the duo that began in Salzburg and Vienna in 2011. Michael "JJ" Kogler sings and Matthias Sollak plays guitar, bass and drums, and AOP Records of Germany released it on 21 April 2014. The title is the Aokigahara forest at the north-western foot of Mount Fuji. Nine songs run to nearly eighty minutes, between eight and ten minutes each, drawing melody out through cycles of tremolo and deceleration. The fourth track, "69 Dead Birds for Utoya", takes its name from the Norwegian attack of 2011, and the writing circles loss and suicide throughout. The band's position comes from using the raw material of black metal and turning it all the way toward grief rather than hatred. On stage the two are joined by Thomas Dornig on bass, Marrok on guitar and Mischa Bruemmer on drums. They have worked repeatedly with bands from the same area -- Alcest, Heretoir and Austere among them -- and in 2017 were nominated in the hard and heavy category of the Amadeus Austrian Music Awards. The order here is the nine tracks of the original digipak pressing.