AN NCS INTERVIEW: RAUHNÅCHT

 Interviews  No Responses »
Sep 102025
 

(Not long ago the Antiq label released a new album from Rauhnåcht named Zwischenwelten. It is a very impressive and moving assembly of music, and so are the eloquent answers given by the band’s mastermind Stefan Traunmüller in response to the questions of our Comrade Aleks in the interview we present below.)

Stefan Traunmüller is a veteran of the Austrian underground. His first project was the melodic black gothic band Golden Dawn, founded in 1992, and it’s still somehow alive. But Stefan also took part in about a dozen projects, the most fruitful of which is Rauhnåcht. Zwischenwelten (“In-between Worlds”) is the fifth album in the fifteen-year history of the project, not counting five smaller releases.

The new forty-minute full-length consists of six compositions, performed in the spirit of nostalgic, charged, and aggressive (by measure of anger-management courses) yet atmospheric black metal. Conceptually, as one can already assume from the cover of Zwischenwelten, Stefan adheres to pagan positions with an emphasis on the spirit of old Bavarian legends.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t call this work totally “pagan” or “folk”, and the author himself entitles his creation precisely – “Alpine black metal”. Hence the prickly cold of high-speed black metal and the sublimity of contemplative ambient, providing short-term respites along with infrequent acoustic interludes – it’s a breathtaking journey through the blizzard and piercing cold of the mountainside in the company of old spirits of that land. The vocal parts are represented not only by screaming, but also by clean, harmonious singing, which is characteristic of pagan metal in general.

All the elements of Zwischenwelten are composed in such a way that you easily agree that Stefan‘s black is precisely Alpine, and Stefan is the best choice if we want an excursion in the world of Rauhnåcht. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: RAUHNÅCHT — A MEDLEY OF MUSIC FROM “UNTERM GIPFELTHRON”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Nov 142018
 

 

Rauhnåcht is the solo project of Austrian musician Stefan Traunmüller, who has been a presence in many other projects over many years, including Golden Dawn, A Portrait of Flesh and Blood, and Wallachia. Although he began releasing music under the Rauhnåcht banner as far back as 2010, with two albums, two EPs, and a split with Sturmpercht recorded over the next four years, it was Rauhnåcht‘s wonderful 2017 split with Hanternoz and Tannöd, which we premiered, that first brought the artistry of Rauhnåcht to our attention.

That split, which was released by the underground French label Antiq Records, was an hour-long concept recording about the legends of the Alps. It was not the first nor the last example of the ways in which the natural splendor of the Alpine peaks and valleys, through all their changing seasons, and the old cultures that have evolved in their presence, have inspired the music of Rauhnåcht. The most recent example is a new album named Unterm Gipfelthron, which will be released on December 7th by Debemur Morti Productions.

We’ve already written about the album’s opening track, “Zwischen den Jahren”, which at four-and-a-half minutes is shortest of the album’s fives songs. The two that come last — “Ein Raunen aus vergess’ner Zeit” and “Winter zieht übers Land” — are long compositions, at ten-and-a-half and more than 11 minutes, respectively. To provide alluring glimpses of what they’re capable of doing to your head and heart, DMP has prepared a medley of the music from those two tracks that we’re sharing with you today. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): RAUHNÅCHT, VARATHRON, ILLUM ADORA

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Oct 232018
 

 

As explained on Sunday, the surprise release of the new Kriegsmaschine album de-railed my plans for the regular SHADES OF BLACK column, causing me to move the music I’d originally picked into the second part of what had suddenly become a two-part post. And for other reasons I won’t both you with, I couldn’t finish Part 2 on Sunday. Once the whirlwind of Monday began, I couldn’t finish it for yesterday either.

There was a lot of new music I had planned for Part 2, including three full releases — and I still haven’t finished writing about those, given the volume of premieres I’ve been writing about yesterday and today. Rather than delay further, I’m just going to include the individual tracks and videos from Part 2 here and come back to the full albums as soon as I can.

RAUHNÅCHT

My interest in folk metal, which many years ago was once eager, became nearly moribund when I felt like I was hearing very similar Celtic melodies over and over again, regardless of what country they were coming from. Granted, the original Celts spread their culture over a wide swath of Europe, from what we’d now call “The British Isles” to what we now call Turkey. Still, the sameness of the music began to grow tiresome, or maybe I just wasn’t exploring as much as I should have. I still prize ethnic melodies when they’re less familiar to my ears, but in general I’m at the point when I’m hard to win over. Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE: TANNÖD, RAUHNACHT, HANTERNOZ

 Premieres  1 Response »
Nov 302017
 

 

The underground French label Antiq Records has recently released an hour-long concept split about legends of the Alps by three black metal bands from different countries that share that famous range — Tannöd from Germany, Rauhnåcht from Austria, and Hanternoz from France. The title is Spukgeschichten – Anciennes légendes des Alpes.

A few of these ten songs have previously been released for streaming, but today, as the album is being released digitally through Bandcamp, we have the full album stream in its entirety — preceded by a few remarks about the musical contributions of each band.

TANNÖD

The five tracks by the Bavarian band Tannöd that begin this new split are the band’s first publicly released output, and they make for an auspicious debut. Continue reading »