I learned Space of Variations from a Jinjer concert in Copenhagen and was happily surprised by the awesome lineup. Their style is weirdly quintessential American for me, but I don’t remember I’ve ever liked an American hardcore band before. So it’s funny that it’s a group from Ukraine that ends up winning me over. Great live band, intense energy and lovely people too.

While this is in no way as atmospheric and ambient like much of the "Cascadian Black Metal", this band certainly seem rooted in the world of anarchic Cascadia, disgusted at civilisation and affirming a wilder world. Brazen Bull of Phalaris = Charging Bull of Wall Street. Financial tools of death for our time: "Disgust of man's cancer of worlds / Invent our ruin / Destroyer of worlds / In the guise of invention / Racing to self-destruction /Explained away by intention"

"Vanquished are the fires in the eyes of the friends I knew. Just as they are deafened to my wasted breath." A truth first depressing, and yet, like other Thou material, I am not weaker when listening ... They are making me perceive the fires not vanquished. Or perhaps other gestures than exhaling words that would reignite fires? So massive this album, like everything else this band makes. How wonderful that such doomy music can inspire raging hope and determination!

This music makes these open hands that once would have offered forgiveness and even rehabilitation wanting to go out and smash something.

Builds and builds and builds gazing at the floor until exploding in a train of screaming black metal until hitting a wall of harsh sludge until releasing into a soothing interlude which surprisingly does not break but builds and builds again until ... it just goes weaving one magnificent thing into the other. Anticipating what this band will become! But where's the lyrics??

Atmospheric and yet so earthly. Black metal got feral. I wish side B was spoken in it's entirety like it in the beginning, because this is one enchanting and sincere gesture of worshipping this raging earth of ours.