Paysage d’Hiver is the best Black Metal this side of the millennium that has not seen the value of its music discovered by enough people. Many more should praise Wintherr and his project for the impressive transfer of classic cold Lo-Fi Black Metal into the 21st century. If anyone is a “trve” heir of what the Scandinavian pioneers did in the 80s, then it’s Paysage d’Hiver. His latest opus Die Berge is just another proof for that.
I remember that my old Music Teacher at high school loved to talk Classical Music and once he was raving about Richard Wagner and his composition skills (that was in a time when people did not talk about Wagner’s antisemitism folks, so don’t kill me yet) – he dropped a term called “the Wagner moment”. When in the middle of a whirlwind of sound (Richard did not know the term Wall of Sound) and multiple melody lines a single, radiating line would emerge the victor of this battle of the melodies and establish itself the shining centripetal point of the whole song. In several Paysage d’Hiver-songs there is something that I would love to describe as “the Wintherr Moment” - when, in the middle of a rich field recording tapestry, the Ambient Black Metal guitar disguised as a natural element takes over and substitutes the field recordings as the spherical foundation of the song. If you listen to the beginning of the opener ”Urgrund”, you will notice the emblematic Paysage field recordings of wind gust billowing across the valleys and mountainsides of the Swiss Alps, the next major sounds are the cracking of a tree surrendering its very being to the storm, the rain and thunder and lightning, a few hollow dark footsteps (we’ll come to this one later) and then a rising of most of these elements and then, after 90 seconds, the guitar sets in, kicks in like the first crack of the now deceasing tree and the way that the guitar billows against our ears, hammers in its very Ambient core is simply magnificent. 133 seconds into the song the drums kick in and we are in the middle of another mesmerizing dreamlike passage through the dark night in the midst of the mountains and the dark night of the soul.
There are lots of these Wintherr-moments throughout the album – and there is also a connecting element to many of these: the sound of hollow footsteps. As the band’s name already implies, Paysage d’Hiver means “Winter’s Journey”, we are following someone on his voyage through the snowy Alps of Wintherr’s Bern-region and its valleys and mountains. Die Berge might only be his third real full-length, but all in all it’s already the 14th installment in this “series” that started nearly 30 years ago (let’s hope we get many many more)! For many years Wintherr released full-length demos and also several split EPs, but his first non-demo-full length only came out a few years ago, so this here might be considered the 14th chapter in this journey. Its main character is a mystery man who is transcending the murderous snowy mountains and in some ways his journey is a classical tale of man’s journey through life and also the passage from the real to the transcendental, when a certain unique reality (or one specific perspective on reality) can be seen as a metaphor on much larger scale. Hence also the central triplet of songs named ”Transzendenz I – III” (“Transcendence I – III”). The way that Wintherr creates such a unique Ambient atmosphere, mimics in such an adequate way the whirlwinds of Alpine gushes and storms, is a feat which only few Black Metal really achieve.
It is obvious that Paysage d’Hiver follow the classic Trve Scandinavian Black Metal classic from before the millennium, but one should not identify them as a simple clone or bad impersonator – the storytelling, the amazingly long overarching story-arch and the aforementioned Wintherr-moments surely make for an awesome listening experience no Black Metal fan should miss!
