| Reissue of Ääniä Yössä, the fifth full-length album from Finnish black metal legends Horna, originally released in 2007 by Debemur Morti Productions. Entirely conceived and recorded by founding member Shatraug and vocalist Corvus, the album was created in two separate sessions during 2004. A harrowing conceptual work, Ääniä Yössä delves into the horrors of the Yersinia pestis pandemic—the Black Death—that ravaged Europe in the 14th century, capturing its grim atmosphere through bleak, unrelenting soundscapes.
Horna’s Ääniä Yössä stands as one of the most immersive and suffocatingly atmospheric albums to emerge from the Finnish black metal scene. A concept piece centered on the horrors of the Black Death, the album abandons traditional songcraft in favor of pure emotional immersion—despair rendered into distortion, dread sculpted into sound. Few albums are as effective at capturing a theme without relying on gimmicks; here, there are no keyboards, no ambient interludes—just pure black metal, executed with chilling focus and vision.
From the moment the first track, "Raiskattu Saastaisessa Valossa," opens with scuttling rats and distant screams, a sense of doom and pestilence permeates the air. The guitar tone is suffocating—thick, murky, and punishing—while Corvus’ vocals slice through the mix with a tortured clarity that’s equal parts human and spectral. There's an eerie tension between the raw production and the deliberate structure of the songwriting: riffs repeat like fevered thoughts, hypnotic and inescapable, drawing the listener deeper into the fever dream.
"Noutajan Kutsu" offers a slight reprieve, with its more uplifting—if still thoroughly bleak—tempo and cadence. Yet even its dynamism feels like false hope, a dying flicker of life before the oppressive curtain drops again in "Mustan Surman Rukous," a dirge of slow decay. Each track flows seamlessly into the next, like stages of infection—denial, pain, delirium, and, finally, death.
And death arrives in full force with the 21-minute title track, "Ääniä Yössä." This closer is the album’s crown jewel—an epic meditation on agony and finality. The production shifts noticeably: the drums hit harder, the bass more prominent, and the guitars echo like ghostly wails in a fevered hallucination. It's as if the track was recorded from inside a dying man's mind. Despite its length, the composition never loses momentum, instead building on subtle variations and textures that slowly unravel into a ritual of madness and surrender.
What makes Ääniä Yössä exceptional is Horna’s ability to build atmosphere without sacrificing raw power. Corvus’ performance here is among the finest in Horna’s long career, and Shatraug’s riffcraft walks a fine line between repetition and revelation. Even the programmed drums, often a weakness in underground recordings, are tastefully integrated and offer a solid backbone without distracting from the organic decay at the album’s core.
For those new to Horna or skeptical of black metal’s potential for conceptual depth, Ääniä Yössä is essential listening. This isn’t just music about death—it feels like death, patiently stalking its listener in the shadows. Alongside the finest works of Beherit and early Sargeist, this album solidifies Horna’s place in the pantheon of Finnish black metal. It’s a harrowing, hypnotic, and masterfully executed vision of plague-era suffering—and one that demands to be experienced in full.
|
