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If you have checked out my music list, you will probably quite quickly find out that a significant portion of the blackmetal I listen to comes from the Mystiskaos corner of the scene. A not insignificant reason for this is that they put out their music for free on Bandcamp.
I found out about this part of the blackmetal scene back in 2016, during the death throes of Fallen Empire. At the time I found the idea that "Fallen Empire had fallen" quite funny. The Fallen Empire people had moved on to Mystiskaos at the time, which had a really striking aesthetic to it; black on a sickly pinkish red on their home page.
Then there were the artists' individual logos and pages, all of them in the same striking style.
The artists they had managed to get on board were a lot more focused on producing a Deathspell Omega inspired aural hellscape then most of the Fallen Empire ever had.
And it all had a very fitting tagline.
Aural delicacies for the similarly afflicted.
I quickly went ahead and downloaded everything they had to offer. One artist jumped out at me because they were the only ones with a purple logo instead of a sickly red logo.
It was Andavald.
When I put on Undir skyggðarhaldi, at first I thought I was in for a fairly standard meandering aural hellscape like I'd come to expect from the more focused artists on Fallen Empire. But then when the intro ended and the guitars hit, I felt there would be much much more than just that. As I am writing this, I find I lack the words to accurately describe it. It easily became my favorite album of 2019. If you do decided to check it out, I recommend you do don't do the same thing as I did and make sure you're mentally in a fairly stable place. This three track full length _will_ take it's toll on you.
Andavald - Undir skyggðarhaldi
Recently I decided to check back in on Mystiskaos as they had been rather silent in my inbox, even for Mystiskaos standards; most of the time they'd send around one or two messages to their followers around december, much like Права Коллектив (lat. Prava Kollektiv), one of the other refugees from Fallen Empire. I couldn't find their Bandcamp among the top search results however, so decided to look for Andavald specifically. When I found their page, it had a button to go back to Dissociative Visions.
So it seems Mystiskaos has gone the same way as Fallen Empire.
Dissociative Visions, in turn, has taken on a few more of the Fallen Empire refugees that were left without a label for a while.
Still, this post is to celebrate what Mystiskaos had brought to my attention, and what Dissociative Visions will hopefully continue to do.