Rating: 7.0

Country: Italy

Release Date: 2007

Record Label: ATMF

Track list:
1. Kampf 
2. Mabuse
3. L`ereditf del Cinghiale   
4. Funeral   
5. Sth 492  
6. Radio Europa MMII Version   
7. Epilogo  
8. Journey
9. Moti Ragnarokum (Burzum cover)  

Total playing time   52:15

Band Website: Tronus Abyss

Tronus Abyss - Kampf

B. Malphas - Synths, piano, machines, samplers, programming, bass, acoustic guitar
Mord - Guitar, machines, samplers
Atratus - Vocals

Tronus Abyss tag their music with the dubious label of "electro-apocalyptic," but there's really nothing apocalyptic about something this thoroughly and intentionally joyless. Post-apocalyptic, maybe; it's more like dragging your belly across skull fragments & debris just to swallow a mouthful of radiated water than watching mushroom clouds swallow orphanages.

Kampf is an ordeal of grave industrial/neofolk music I assume I can only enjoy at maximum efficiency with my fingers bridged whilst wearing a deeply solemn expression. Almost entirely composed of depressive exposition and thickly accented melodeclamation led by a perpetually lurching tempo, the album more heavily emphasizes texture and hypnotic repetition than traditional melodic development, built on rising layers of sound; clattering piano, organ patches, throbbing electronics and shimmering synth drift in and out in spacious loops, while the only discernable hooks emerging are distinctly neobaroque -- medieval, even -- in arrangement. It's scary electronic renaissance fair music, basically.

Although this sounds much more modern and much less horrible, a key influence here is Burzum's Dauði Baldrs (there's even a cover of one of its songs... I'm not among the three or four fans of that album, so I can't say anything positive in that regard, but at least it's more interesting than the original). Kampf also occasionally carries a passing sonic resemblance to the eerie ghost Wagner militance of Arditi, but is for the most part more brooding and refrained than bombastic. To give you an idea of Kampf's striking minimalism, "Radio Europa" is an almost entirely piano-based song (and is one of the best songs on the album by that virtue), and it contains more throbbing reverb and silence than music. To be fair, a couple of the songs do betray the album's generally humorless atmosphere with an almost light-hearted air of playfulness, like music you'd hear minstrels playing in a courtyard. Even so, Kampf never seems earnest in its minuscule flashes of positivity due to the said songs' brevity in contrast to the exhausting heights achieved by the clattering industrial scariness comprising the meat of the album.

More of an exercise in lofty intellectual histrionics than a cohesive album, this is a grossly arduous listen; in fact, I'm sure the more metal-inclined among you would consider it boring. Still, the more I listen to this, the more I begin to suspect that's the point; Tronus Abyss don't seek to instantly gratify the listener -- or even gratify at all, for that matter, but instead challenge him/her with an absurd extremity of somber sparseness. As with most minimalist ambient music, you get about as much as you bring to it. Kampf is not for short attention spans, but it rewards titanium patience.

June 26th, 2008