Nahtrunar "Existenz" CD Digipack

Released in Digipack.

A hymn to the mysteries that are buried within existence, an amplification of the whisper the soil is trembling with, a study of the secrets of the earth

After hearing "Mysterium Tremendum" and being impressed by that album, I thought I'd go back in time and find out what Nahtrunar was up to in 2016 with "Existenz", the last release before the aforementioned 2018 album. "Existenz" is a straightforward BM album with lots of melody and riffing, and good riffing at that, plus plenty of emotion and feeling, but it's not quite the powerhouse that "Mysterium ..." is. As a second album in Nahtrunar's discography, maybe "Existenz" is a victim of "difficult second album" syndrome, in the sense of it having to be something different or better than the debut album, and not quite meeting people's expectations and hopes for it.
After a maudlin and not terribly auspicious opening track featuring an out-of-tune violin, the album hits its stride with "Woher Ich stamme / Where I come from" which sets the style and pace for the album with whippy percussion and clashing cymbals, rapid-fire tremolo guitars, screaming vocals lost in a background vault, analog synth wash and a sub-par production that gives the keyboards a melancholy Gothic air. The other instruments have a frizzly, slightly acidic edge and are not as sharp as they could be, though they do sound very raw. The music probably could do with a more powerful sound, especially in the drumming, but that could drown out the raw, crunchy guitar melodies and arpeggio chords which seesaw up and down and deliver most of the soaring emotion and drama.
Song after song goes full tilt on lead guitar solo drama and screaming vocals, and to be honest most tracks don't sound very different from one another and could be chapters of an over-arching meta-work. One exception is track 5 "Isa Meditation", a droning experimental ambient noise piece of spitting acid metal guitar carpet noise overlaid by an evil keyboard texture of decay and sinister looming toxic miasma. Another stand-out non-BM track is the mostly acoustic violin-and-drumsticks duet "Ewig in der Wiederkehr / Forever in the recurrence" which doesn't last long and tends to sound as if it stumbled into the recording by mistake. I'd have preferred the track to stick about for another couple of minutes because it did seem like it was going to develop into a very interesting piece of clicketty rhythms and eccentric string seesaw.
The whole album is full of feeling and raw emotion, and Nahtrunar put all their heart and soul into shaping and crafting the melodies and riffs. The singing is as tortured and passionate as can be, both within and outside BM, even allowing for it being raspy and stuck in an ice chamber. The cheap-n-nasty production doesn't do the songs much justice and maybe at a later point in time the album could be revisited and given a better treatment in a reissue. There is plenty of good potential and a couple of tracks demonstrate a real creative bent.
Somehow I think that the Nahtrunar project just isn't going to be enough for the mastermind/s behind it and they'll probably end up branching out into side projects in ambient, experimental and noise genres.

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