Monday, April 17, 2017

Kastchei - "Hydronymy" [2014]

Artist: Kastchei
Title: Hydronymy
Genre: Black Metal
Country: UK
Release date: 2014

Track List:
  1. Days Of Iron
  2. Hydronymy
Just like Grazniygrad, Kastchei is a very obscure black metal/punk project with a name that's rather unexpected for a band from an Anglophone country, although this demo is much less noisy than the s/t album by Grazniygrad. It's mostly lo-fi black metal with some ambient synths in the middle of the second track - nothing really outstanding, but not bad for a demo.

The lyrics on "Hydronymy", however, are interesting. As far as could understand, they deal with the theme of European prehistory, reflected by the phenomenon of the "Old European hydronymy". To explain it in a nutshell: some river names can be incredibly persistent, reflecting traces of languages that went completely extinct several millenia ago. This is a quite interesting topic that I haven't seen being mentioned in any form of art before. Can't say I've read many academic works on this topic either, yet right now I'm trying to read A.Matveev's magnum opus "Substrate Toponymics of the Russian North, pt. 1-4" (right now I'm far from being finished with it, though...)

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