Deafest -- Glen and Precipice

Hemelbestormer, Aether

Iskra, Ruins

Deafest - Sculpting Canyons

Deafest

§ 37. Next, note the quantity in these hills. It is an element on which I shall have to insist more in speaking of vegetation; but I must not pass it by, here, since, in fact, it constitutes one of the essential differences between hills of first-rate magnificence, and inferior ones. Not that there is want of quantity even in the lower ranges, but it is a quantity of inferior things, and therefore more easily represented or suggested. On a Highland hill side are multitudinous clusters of fern and heather; on an Alpine one, multitudinous groves of chestnut and pine. The number of the things may be the same, but the sense of infinity is in the latter case far greater, because the number is of nobler things. Indeed, so far as mere magnitude of space occupied on the field of the horizon is the measure of objects, a bank of earth ten feet high may, if we stoop to the foot of it, be made to occupy just as much of the sky as that bank of mountain at Villeneuve; nay, in many respects its little ravines and escarpments, watched with some help of imagination, may become very sufficiently representative to us of those of the great mountain; and in classing all water-worn mountain-ground under the general and humble term of Banks, I mean to imply this relationship of structure between the smallest eminences and the highest. But in this matter of superimposed quantity the distinctions of rank are at once fixed. The heap of earth bears its few tufts of moss or knots of grass; the Highland or Cumberland mountain its honeyed heathers or scented ferns; but the mass of the bank at Martigny or Villeneuve has a vineyard in every cranny of its rocks, and a chestnut grove on every crest of them.

§ 38. This is no poetical exaggeration. Look close into that plate (46). Every little circular stroke in it among the rocks means, not a clump of copse nor wreath of fern, but a walnut tree, or a Spanish chestnut, fifty or sixty feet high. Nor are the little curves, thus significative of trees, laid on at random. They are not indeed counted, tree by tree, but they are most 289carefully distributed in the true proportion and quantity; or if I have erred at all, it was, from mere fatigue, on the side of sparingness. The minute mounds and furrows scattered up the side of that great promontory, when they are actually approached, after three or four hours' climbing, turn into independent hills with true parks of lovely pasture land enclosed among them, and avenue after avenue of chestnuts, walnuts, and pines bending round their bases; while in the deeper dingles, unseen in the drawing, nestle populous villages, literally bound down to the rock by enormous trunks of vine, which, first trained lightly over the loose stone roofs, have in process of years cast their fruitful net over the whole village, and fastened it to the ground under their purple weight and wayward coils, as securely as ever human heart was fastened to earth by the net of the Flatterer. (John Ruskin)

Krallice - The Mountain

The soul tries out a thousand cures, in vain;

Since I was taken from my early road,

Vainly it worries how it can return.

The sea and the mountains, and the fire and the sword,

All these together, I live in their midst.

The mountain, he'll not leave me, who has seized

My intellect, and taken away my reason.

Aura - Pillars of the Earth

As the ocean swallows the sun Shadows appear on the horizon White headed peaks crowned by the dying light Mark the funeral of day and the birth of the night I begin my ascent Towards the pillars of the earth As I stumble along this meandering path The bitter wind sweeps aside waves of mist Perched on the throne of the mountain I now gaze out onto the desolate plain As I let my thoughts swim amongst aurora's light Tonight I have conquered the stars

Negură Bunget - Nămetenie

Mare Cognitum - Phobos Monolith

Above All Summits

Anguish, Mountain

Thou - At the Foot of Mt. Drisskill (elevation 535 feet)

 We are but antlings, vain in our assumptions. We would presume to grasp at the unfathomable. We would presume to dress it as man, to give it names, to speak its intention. Yet we are humbled beneath the shadow of true greatness. Now the earth crest rises to meet our gaze. We are but fleas. We are but lice. We are nothing. Insignificant. Dust motes blown away by the breath of time. Vague memories of no consequence. Vanquished are the fires in the eyes of the friends I knew. Just as they are deafened to my wasted breath. Each one more wasted than the others you can bet. Now I see through the illusion of permanence. I am diminished in the presence of vastness. Useless are my tools of science, of religion. There is no understanding of limitless power. We are at peace in our minor, subordinate role. Accept our frail, short lives.

Ildjarn - Mountains Covered in Snow Forever

Ildjarn


"There seemed to be no limit to the mountain range, or to the length of the frightful stone city which bordered its inner foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each direction showed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpselike through the eternal ice." (HP Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness)

The Inverted Abyss

Deafest -- 14,000 Feet

Deafest

Divinity of Mountains (tour poster)

AHAB

OMEGA MASSIF

VALBORG

Bergmetal: Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond

A veritable new orogeny, via gnOme books:



Nab Saheb & Denys X. Arbaris. Bergmetal: Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond. ISBN-13: 978-1494907204 ISBN-10: 1494907208. HWORDE, 2013. 114 pages.

Bergmetal is an exploratory tract on the trisonic intersections of MOUNTAINS, MYSTICISM, and HEAVY METAL. Mixing theoretical reflection and studious redaction into ascending gestures of alpine musical thought, the book proceeds via seven poetic emblems plus commentary addressing works by Bathory, Darkthrone, Sleep, Aluk Todolo, Omega Massif, Schrei aus Stein, and Sapthuran. Opening essays by the authors on the ideals and history of the bergmetal genre provide a logistical starting point and contextual basecamp.

CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: On Bergmetal
I. Enter the Mountain
II. No Way
III. Slumber Killed
IV. Occult Rock
V. Abandoned Mine
VI. Scream of Stone
VII. Never to Descend

“A casual email…a voidal exposure…! In this slim volume, metal, lyrics, and philosophy combine - “with spirit deathless, endless, infinite” – to launch a ferocious assault on the imagination!” – Manabrata Guha, Prize Fellow, Univ. of Bath

“A strange creature I am now, burnt by the sun and yet frozen, clung onto my will to take just another step” — Stormcrow

“Metal! Mysticism! Mountains! Whoever loves one will be interested in this book. Whoever loves two will like it. Whoever loves all three might be in paradise.” – Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College)

“An ascent into the wilderness of alpine aesthetics and heavy metallurgies, with poetry, mysticism, and esoteric philosophy illuminating the peaks and abysses of sublime human experience alongside the indifferent expanse of geological time.” — RH, Schrei aus Stein

*

"The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence; hence we knew that they that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only because of their abnormal height.  Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds.  In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation.  It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultradimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things--mountains of madness whose further slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.  That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world" (HPL, At the Mountains of Madness).

Halmos - To Climb the Mount

Eismond

Album information at Honour and Darkness

the tarns are frozen

and the summit is beyond all sight

ascendance through the clouds

the mountain awaits

all i once knew is now lost

all i once had is now gone

my memories are now forgotten

only a mountain of sorrow remains

-- "The Gilded Mountain"

Ancient Remembrances

Battle Dagorath -- Interdimensional Passageway Between Worlds

"The temple of this spirit is the primordial majesty of the peak, the glaciers, the crevasses, and the boundless blue sky. In this context the mountainous peaks and the spiritual peaks converge in one simple and yet powerful reality" (Evola, "The Mountain and Spirituality")

Battle Dagorath