featuring Autolysia — Rainbow Realm (2024), Striborg — “Requiem for a Lonely Ghost” (2009)

Autolysia’s Rainbow Realm (2024): depressive black metal with a sweet tooth — a fairytale walking through the woods with a blade under its tongue, and, for me, a door toward where i want to go next.

i came to her sideways, down through the avant-garde end of black metal, where projects like Yellow Eyes let genres that should not touch lie together until something warm grows in the seam. Autolysia is depressive black metal — the slow, grief-soaked kind — and yet it arrives with a lilt in it, a skip, a small bright hand laid over the mouth of the dark.

to me it sounds like fairytale black metal: an elf, a gnome, something small and old that lives under a root and keeps its own counsel on the end of the world. the weight is real — the tremolo storm, the grey wash of it — but it is carried by a creature that will not stop being tender or stop being strange. most dark music keeps its throat covered. this leaves it bare, the way a child says something terrible in a very small voice.

a commenter under one of her videos put it better than i can: “this album is like having a fruity chewing gum with a razor blade inside and i love it.” it is exactly both — sugar going soft on the tongue, and then the edge. magic with the grief still in it: a pixie walking the woods to a depressive suicidal black metal sound, and neither of them pretending to be the other.

the name tells on it. autolysis is the body’s own enzymes unlocking the cell from inside, the self digesting itself in the dark, and the record that carries that name is called Rainbow Realm. a pixie and a decomposition: rot and radiance in one breath, the self not dissolving into nothing but seeping out into colour.

my favourite track is probably “Der Mann im Mond” — the man in the moon, a fairytale face hung in a black sky, on a record that keeps one foot in the story and the other in the grave. and “Mit uns geht die Zeit” — with us, time goes — names the slow engine under all of it: time working through us like water through a cellar wall, carrying us gradually apart. autolysis is only time at its patient work on a body, and in her hands the passing is made almost kind.

i will say why it has stayed with me. it is not only a record i love; it is a way of walking i want to learn — dark and playful, tender and heavy, unafraid of the seam between them. some records you admire. this one i recognised, the way you recognise a door left ajar in a house you thought you knew.

special mention: after the spinning ヾ( ͝° ͜ʖ͡ °)ノ♪

“He’s Here” reminds me of “Requiem for a Lonely Ghost” by Striborg, and the two sit in my head as a pair, one the reverse of the other. Autolysia is a dance. it makes me want to pirouette in some folklore round, skirts and boots and the ground going by, turning until the head comes loose and the room swims off its hinges. and perhaps after that — when the spinning stops, and the floor is still moving under you — you hear this: the ghost, alone, in the quiet where the dance has been.

i am writing this from weesp, in a fog so thick the town has lost its edges — roofs, bridges, the far end of the street all rubbed out and returned to grey. nothing out there is finished. everything leans toward everything else, and the whole place seems to be quietly dissolving into a softer version of itself. which is, i think, the reason this record has stayed with me. Rainbow Realm sounds the way this morning looks: a small bright thing walking into the white, decay and wonder under one breath, the self coming apart gently into colour. it is a way of walking i want to learn — dark and playful, tender and heavy, unafraid of the seam.

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