Second adventure for the At The Altar Of The Horned God project of Spanish musician Heolstor, already involved in other musical projects. The At The Altar Of The Horned God project was born to range freely from black metal onwards, taking Ulver, Dead Can Dance but also industrial, ambient and much more as inspiration. After the first album ‘Through doors of moonlight’, also on I, Voidhanger Records like this one, Heolstor decided to shuffle the cards even further and broaden his musical horizon considerably.
The album is something that greatly satisfies the listener, there are so many passages of different genres brought together with a very receptive musical wisdom that is completely dedicated to the pleasure of music of whatever genre it is.
Black metal here is declined in its most progressive guise and becomes the underlying substrate on which a pagan cathedral of beautiful, almost epic sounds is erected, as if at some point in the Middle Ages the need was felt to make a record, and here it is, ‘Heart of silence’, a march towards the atomic core of man.
Heolstor, whose interviews on the net we recommend you read because he is very intelligent and inspiring, is a medium in the sense that the music flows through him and brings it out like an antenna.
As evidenced by the beautiful cover, these songs are hymns to the ghosts of the night and to the night itself, the eternal darkness that envelops us from our birth to our death.
Compared to the debut this work emphasises more the black metal side which is remarkable, but there are as mentioned above many other elements. Perhaps the most important feature of At The Altar Of The Horned God is how ingeniously it divides the musical parts, and indeed it is a very airy and powerful record, the perfect soundtrack to a ghostly winter night. The whole Heart of Silence is a tribute to Nature as it used to be, and to the wild but wise man, totally different from today’s man, immersed in a Nature that was hostile but taught him much. In the sea of black metal releases, At The Altar Of The Horned God is something very high and of high quality, with many derivations and much direction to be taken yet.
Honourable mention for the beautiful cover by Romanian artist Luciana Medela. The forest is not ours, it belongs to the horned god.
