There can be a fine line between black metal that is purposefully retrograde, contemptuous of signs of progress because they skew far too close to something like optimism, and black metal that is hidebound in its fealty to Scandi-Second-Wave sonic and ideological dogmas. Wulkanaz seems to look backward for the former reason, locating the abyss into which all human energy inevitably tumbles and joyfully stumbling along its edge. Swedish freak Magnus Eriksson (who uses a variety of stage names, including Kumulonimbus, Wagner Ödegård and Wulkanaz, the proto-Germanic moniker he adopts specifically for this project, now in its 13th year) gets really weird and really loose with Luftuz, sharpening its acid-fried, punk-inflected iteration of black metal. The result is the most musically dense record Wulkanaz has released, and it’s mesmerizingly strange.
Some of us thoroughly enjoyed (if that’s the right word) the more stripped-down incarnations of Wulkanaz that Eriksson released alongside his numerous other projects; check out, among others, the somewhat more conventional black metal of Tomhet or the glitchy dungeon synth of Mauvet Mauve. Even among that gonzo plenitude, it's hard to beat the winningly demented combination of acid-victim psychosis, space-rock vibe out and black metal nastiness you can hear on earlier Wulkanaz songs, like the sublime “Blætan þek Kunungam Durisa” from the excellent Kwetwan jah Dreuzaz demo, or the considerably more aggro assault on your frontal lobes mounted by “Gryningsgrå” from Wulkanaz. The performances are charged with the thrill of witnessing a consciousness playing a grim game of chicken with its own internal coherence.
The songs on Luftuz are a bit more structured, and the production is marginally cleaner, but the intensity and the singular texture of Eriksson’s sensibility are as wild as ever. “Rydning” rides its hammering and weirdly waxing riff with ecstatic abandon; the song has a lividity, a respiring quality. “Bradhnavitni” drops in and out of little spaces of chiming psychedelia, delicate and soon overwhelmed by the return of the blasts and Eriksson’s signature, scratchy, crackling vocals.
As was noted above, it all feels very acid fried. Critical chatter concerning the psychedelic end of black metal’s continuum seems to gravitate toward the modifier “lysergic,” and it’s a nicely poetical word. But Wulkanaz resonates with a variety of psychical damage, the ill function of brainwaves forever damaged by excesses — drug-fueled rituals of one variety or another. It’s kind of fun that the first track on Luftuz is called “Hökvind,” which this reviewer chooses to hear as a reference to space rock burnouts Hawkwind. You can perceive a whole cosmos in the best music that English band made, if your brain has been cracked open wide enough. Maybe it’s good that the cracks never completely heal and seal. Wulkanaz’s music — and a worldview — wends its way through bizarre, undulant fissures. It thrills, in proportion to its twisted, knurly shapes. Likely that’s not a space you’d want to occupy permanently, but it’s bewitchingly compelling as long as the songs last.
