Some of us grew up and nourished with the sound of the razor blade guitars, blast beats and corpse paint.

With the passing of time all these Norwegian black metal heroes became exotic memories in our hearts, statues of freedom and extremity from our adolescent years. Now these figures grew older & grotesque, started using synthesizers, MIDI controllers, MaxMSP patches, tourist visas, sunscreen, kombucha cocktails, washed their corpse painted faces and chilled in their brand new crocs, underneath some air conditioning unit in a far away southern land, in their newly purchased apartments (in really good prices too!), somewhere in the Mediterranean graveyard.

These recordings are an oral comment on the loneliness generator of modern civilization, it describes in sound how things have evolved in our mind set, economically, culturally, musically or otherwise and how (we) and all genres are all eventually going to disappear.

The story tends to speak with Athenian parables, through black metal tourists that at the end became locals and whom we once had on our walls but now we silently forgot – these walls just don't exist anymore, sold or rented. These shady figures linger now in front of ghost buildings and hypermarkets.

The instruments used here are all carefully picked so that they fulfill their parabolic nature: Xylophones, glockenspiels, vibraphones and bells for a sense of pseudoexoticism, modular patches for the digital nomadic office ravers, MIDI consolidations for the artificial intelligence dreamers, autotuned vocals for a meta new age romanticism that at the end became a real chronic disease.

Greek Orthodox tradition is detected through the tracks, transplanted and transfused in the subconscious of the orchestration, but only randomly or incidentally, never on purpose.

This album works both ways: It is a musical funeral to our inheritance of our European, colonialist fathers but also a renaissance paean on the ability of modern culture for creating loneliness. Our black metal orcs paid for their newly acquired homes in the Athenian hell and they found their neu petits characteristics only to complete their financial profile in this bloodless, occupational massacre.

This album is a slow burner, an ambient doom soundtrack, a time travel in the past through the bleak future. A documentation of failure.

Enjoy your stay!
credits
released October 6, 2023

All mallets, midi programming & voices performed & recorded by Stylianos Ou in Athens, 2022
Mixed by Kimonas Vlachakis at Aux Studio, Athens 2022-2023
Mastered by Nasos Nomikos at VU Productions, Piraeus, 2023
Artwork by Stylianos Ou.
Photos by Nikos Razis.

released on tape on Fruit Evil Fruit Records

fortevilfruit.bandcamp.com/album/rififi-ston-epitafio-an-oral-history-of-extinction