AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TJAKTJADÁLVVE — “ENCOMPASSING NOTHING”

(written by Islander)

For most people (definitely including this writer) the name Tjaktjadálvve will be a tongue-twister. Apart from wondering how it is pronounced, I also wondered what it meant, and so I spent some time searching for an answer.

One thing I found was an interview from last fall in a Hungarian publication of Matthew Bell, the Australia-born but Sweden-residing musician behind the black metal project he named Tjaktjadálvve. With some help from an online translation tool, I saw that Bell gave this answer about the word’s meaning:

The word means “autumn winter” in the Sámi language. A lot of my music is based on my experiences in northern Sweden, so the name seemed perfectly fitting.

I continued searching and came across an article about snow at the Swedish Lapland site. I’ll excerpt the most relevant part:

People say that the Sámi have more than two hundred words for snow, but what they actually have are two hundred words describing the quality and condition of the snow – its soul….

The Sámi have so many words for snow, and they haven’t made do with only four seasons either. They are sometimes called the ‘People of Eight Seasons’ and their seasons have nothing to do with the sun or the calendar, they’re connected with the life cycle of the reindeer.

The latter part of August, for example, is called tjaktjagiesse, a time for harvest and fall foliage. It’s followed by autumn, tjaktja, which then becomes the beginning of what we call winter, or dálvve. But the Sámi also have an “autumnal winter”, tjaktjadálvve, in between. This isn’t easy to come to terms with if you don’t understand that life isn’t always as easy as the calendar leads us to believe. Life is always larger than the time frames we try to squeeze it into.

So now you know as much as I do about the meaning of tjaktjadálvve — the meaning of the word. Soon you’ll also know about the meaning of Tjaktjadálvve’s new music, as embodied in a new album named Encompassing Nothingness.

That album, the third full-length from Tjaktjadálvve, will be released on January 26th by the Italian label Flowing Downward, which is also behind the music of such projects as Sadness, Trhä, Abstract Void, Kaatayra, Nostalghia and others, and you’ll get to hear the complete album via the player below.

Matthew Bell, as you may know, is a prolific music-maker with a variety of musical vehicles in front of his name. In the case of Tjaktjadálvve, he has identified Austere and Germ as his biggest influences (he has been a live member of both of those bands), which will give some of you an early guide to what you’ll hear.

The new album includes four songs, which range in length between six minutes and nearly 10. You need not be as intimately familiar with snow as the indigenous Sámi people are, or to have personally lived through the in-between season of tjaktjadálvve in the far northern climes, to imagine those experiences when you listen to these songs. Beyond what visions of an unknown place you might imagine when listening, the moods of the music are quite familiar, regardless of where you live or the places you might have visited.

“The Solitude of Abject Darkness“, which opens the album, tells you about its inspiration in its title. Backed by slow and steady beats and the musing hum of a bass, the music flows like icy tides in tones both raw and gleaming. Especially when joined with Bell’s tormented screams, the mood of the music is anguished, but its expanse is sweeping and its effects immersive.

Glittering keys ring through the whirling sonic blizzard created by the synths (and/or guitars), adding an even more mystical aura to a song that already has mystical aspects, and that aura deepens when the percussion vanishes and soft cold winds whisper behind mysteriously chiming notes.

And so the song creates visions of wonder (both chilling and bright), but it also rings familiar emotional chords, channeling sorrow and regret and (especially though the vocals) a wrenching kind of pain.

The other three songs likewise straddle intersecting lines of panoramic expanse, depressive and yearning moods, chilling cold, and glimmering beauty. The riffing and synths are dense and indeed tidal in their flow, and elegant in the way they rise and fall (often like massed strings), slowly pulling listeners upward toward lights and then submerging them in greater darkness.

The songs also include a variety of keyboards, some ancient and some futuristic. Gentle piano melodies reappear, like moving ice crystals, even more elegant but maybe even more haunting than the music’s great swells. The closing title song (the best of these four IMHO) also features solemn organ chords and darting electro-pings before Bell leads us on another staggering march through deep drifts and whiteout gales — and then reveals the album’s most wondrous and ephemerally beautiful visions.

The drumming is mostly slow and simple, though it does modestly change speeds as the moods of the music shift, and Bell periodically punctuates the rhythms with acrobatic fills. As for the bass, it’s more subtly felt than prominently heard. It’s the oceanic and blizzard-like music, the sparkling keyboard-snowflakes, and the utterly traumatizing vocals that command most of the attention.

Encompassing Nothingness is a pure example of atmospheric black metal, music to get lost in, music that inspires visions but also locks arms with the parts of us that sometimes feel loneliness, melancholy, intense yearning, and ravishing torment.

Encompassing Nothingness was mixed and mastered by Nekkomix. The cover photo was made by Francesco Del Vecchio.

Flowing Downward will release the album on vinyl LP, CD, and digital formats, and they recommend it for fans of Woods of Desolation, Austere, Panopticon, and Mesarthim (and I would add Lustre to that list). Pre-orders are available now:

PRE-ORDER:
https://flowingdownward.com/prodotto/tjaktjadalvve-encompassing-nothingness/
https://flowingdownward.bandcamp.com/album/encompassing-nothingness

TJAKTJADÁLVVE:
https://tjaktjadalvve.bandcamp.com/