The Industrial Twilight: Kastchei

Monday, April 17, 2017

Kastchei - "Hydronymy" [2014]

Artist: Kastchei

Title: Hydronymy

Genre: Black Metal

Country: UK

Release date: 2014

Track List:

Days Of Iron
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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About this blog

I created this blog mostly because I wanted to practise my English skills, and to showcase the industrial, gothic, punk, metal, neofolk and progressive rock scene of Russia/ex-USSR and Eastern Europe (especially Hungary) in the meanwhile.

As you can see, this blog doesn't take itself seriously enough, but I hope I'm doing good enough with my reviews even if my proficiency in English is limited. Along with the aforementioned stuff from Eastern Europe, I occasionally post some classic and rare albums that aren't to be missed, and generally whatever I want. Other categories of note:

* finno-ugric rarities - various music (including pop) in minor Finno-Ugric languages which I'm interested in because of my heritage. The music from Hungary, Finland and Estonia can be found under the respective categories;

* lo-fi - various poorly recorded demos from before 2000 that are of historical importance. Most of these demos come from the USSR era, so you might want to check out the USSR category as well.

As of now, I try to post only music that has already been made free by the artists themselves, or the rare old releases that are out of print. But if you're an artist and would like me to remove the download links of your work, just contact me using the form below.

Sorry, I don't do reviews by request, I don't have the time. Moreover, I think the bands that feel the need to advertise themselves by sending their demos to as many blogs as possible are usually just plain boring. If you want to contact me for any other reason, use the contact form below.

It should be obvious enough that reviewing anything on here doesn't equals endorsement of artists' personal views. This especially concerns neofolk and martial industrial. It'd be fair enough to say that I have the same approach to the political and religious topics in these genres as Laibach do.

Many of the female musicians featured on my blog are amateur models, and in many cases their modelling work is no less interesting than their music. Right now I'm working on giving it a separate section of the blog (just in case if anyone wants my review to be only about their music and not their looks). The work is in progress, check back later if you're interested.

The title of my blog comes from a song by The Kovenant (album "SETI", 2003).