Haus Arafna - Asche (2020)

The dudes from Brunswick present us a brutal, enormous, extremely dark, sad and completely hopeless work. Something very appropriate for this time. Already the opening song “Leiden An Deiner Statt [Schwarzer Strom I]” puts you in the mood in a very eerie and sad way for a work that sounds very mature and consistent in its entirety. It is a journey into the heart of pain infused with screams of desperation and screams of anger and impuissance. Into the inside of fear, inside the substance of fear. It is kept very minimalist and it seems to me that this fact ensures that the effect of the tones has an even more merciless effect on the pain-racked ear canals and the sore brain. An album that seems like you're lost forever in the forest alone at night. In reality, however, this is just a reference to the fact that man is lost in the world. In a very gloomy and hopeless world from which there is no escape but through death. Insofar this disc is an exposure therapy for confrontation with one's own darkness and the realization that there is no other security than death, which can only and ultimately give consolation. Face death: “Look at me (when you die)”, this sentence could be the motto for this work, or “listen to me when you die” or “do you hear the death?” In any case, you feel a little closer to death and, by holding out to the last note, again, as if you had jumped death off the shovel at the last second. In any case a remarkable and relentless return by Mr. and Mrs. Arafna into a world riddled with fear and hatred, which leaves one filled to the brim with emptiness and loneliness in the black fucking nothingness. Thank you for this intense and not new but once again bitter realization. 

A sentence by Giovanni Papini comes to my mind at the end, which I find very appropriate as a description for this album: „its emptiness is revealed as a bottomless pit; its nothingness frankly confesses to nothingness, and Despair comes to perch in the soul."

Overall Score: 8/10

...in the playlist since 2020...