Upon the street date of their new album, Spectres from the Old World, venerated black metal specialists DARK FORTRESS are releasing a video clip for “Pali Aike,” which can be seen below.
Santura (guitar) comments on the song: “‘Pali Aike’ is a song with a particularly compelling groove and a very dense atmosphere. If you wanna hear some fast stuff, though, listen to the album in its entirety!”
Morean (vocals) further explains: “An ode to the violent volcanic forces that shaped our Earth, inspired by my visit of a remote, little-known volcanic site in Southern Chile. The area had been inhabited for many thousands of years before the first European settlers arrived, and these natives called this site the ‘home of the devils’ in their language (‘pali aike’).
“The lyrics are a literal description of how I experienced the place – eerily haunted, scattered with sun-bleached bones left by hunting mountain lions, and filled with mirages invoked by awe-inspiring shapes and colors of moss-covered lava formations and lakes that miraculously disappear when you get close to them. The violent and tragic history of settlement of this remote corner of the world gives a morbid twist to the site’s now tranquil and peaceful aura of abandonment.”
After a six-year gap, Germany’s darkest sons continue where Venereal Dawn (2014) left off conceptually, Morean (vocals) explains: “Together with the rest of the human race, the protagonist reincarnated as a disembodied creature of pure light in ‘On Fever’s Wings’, the last song of Venereal Dawn. The new album attempts to draw a picture of such a mind’s perspective on life – reincarnating as pure, massless energy. The narrator has become the fabric of the universe itself. This is where heavy physics and string theory come in.”
Spectres from the Old World is more direct, more aggressive than its predecessors. At no time in DARK FORTRESS’ history have they reached so far out into the darkness, only to find the domine of astronomy non-existent, the end merely an end. Recorded, engineered, mixed, and mastered by V. Santura at Woodshed Studios throughout 2019, Spectres from the Old World marks an important milestone in DARK FORTRESS’ journey along actual and spiritual left-hand paths.
