Striborg will do just fine as our monthly dose of occult-sounding, fucked up and fiendishly retarded black metal. This supposed one-man project from Tasmania, Australia is all about noise and the rain forest of Striborg’s homeland. Rain forest black metal!

The eight track album is split into two recording sessions. Nocturnal Emissions starts with the 20-minute song of the same name, whose first half is like the condensed hiss of a winter wind. Then it all starts to unravel in cult, stumbling black metal fashion.

You get fog, eucalyptus trees, ravens, noise, decrepit drum machine, and ambiance to rival the best the genre has ever put out. Sounds like a winner. (Kult/10)

review by: Mladen Škot (added 07/2007)

Instead of the usual precautions about Striborg, how about letting the music speak for itself? Just press "play." As a "screw you, I'm doing what I want" statement, hardly anything can beat an intro of three minutes of horrible trebly noise with one long, repeated scream over it. If you aren't "tr00" and "kvlt" enough, you're already looking for something else. Save your ears for Cradle of Filth or something appropriate for your age. Poser.

Nocturnal Emissions is a self-released 2002 Striborg demo. For those familiar with the Tasmanian, cabin-dwelling, one-man band’s work, there are no big surprises here. You expect majesty, you get majesty, period. All that is necessary to disclose are the nuances making Nocturnal Emissions different from the project’s other albums. Some of them concern the sound: Although always absolutely lo-fi, it seems that Sin Nanna never uses the same settings twice. This time the guitars are stripped of everything but distortion, but the bass can actually, sort of, be heard.

As slow as the riffs are, It's still hard to make them out. Played too loud, the guitar, combined with the continuous and persistent ride cymbal, sounds like a motor-driven wood file constantly scraping off the tissue the ear drums are made of. After a while, the listener might begin to fear that there's some kind of damage done, but the sound, translated into a physical force, forces him to stay and suffer. Speaking about black metal, this is what can be described as authority through arrogance.

Although 22 minutes long, the title track is mesmerizing. There's the trebly guitar filling the space, there are the thin, cruel screams, there are the apparently sloppy, but never repeating drum patterns, and there are the slow, gloomy keyboards for the first 14 minutes. But, once submerged in this, the minutes seem like seconds and seconds seem like hours. In other words, the space component is possessed, and the time component is irrelevant. Then the drums go faster, the riffs become clearer and the once-sloppy drums go for the "fastest drummer in the world" at around the nineteenth minute. But the atmosphere is intact. There's hardly a more efficient way to instantly get lost in a nightmare realm of your choice than this one.

The other three tracks of the Nocturnal Emissions part are not without surprises, either. "Despondant Cries" is as good a slow, persuasive track as anything Burzum has ever done, but where with Burzum you were being taken to the Scandinavian dark wastelands, Striborg proves that Tasmania has just as many threatening, unexplored places. Kid you not.

Also, there's no kidding with "Son of the Moon" or "The Freezing Northland" (that would be northern Tasmania, then) which are pure hypnotic violence, the latter done through a constant Darkthrone beat and silent, unequal, but dramatically disturbing bass. Who knows what the other instruments and vocals are doing, all the hope of seeing the light has been shattered and then scattered a long time ago.

Rain and thunder, along with the native Australian instruments announce "Under Black Rain" and the moistly sinister instrumental brings forth claustrophobic feelings of panic, being lost in a dark, vast, damp forest in the middle of nowhere.

The remaining three tracks of Nyctophobia (a 2003 demo) are classic Striborg, but this time played through a stinking, blood-soaked cloth. None more evil... though evil is an irrelevant topic here for it is a human invention. What Striborg is about, as confirmed by the superb lyrics (this time — usually they are random anti-human ramblings), is that the human race should be exterminated and erased from history, and Nature let free to blossom without obstruction. Most of the two-legged pieces of meat are just a waste of molecules and a failure in the evolutionary process. Not very hard to relate to. Let's just mention the whipping drum sounds in "Across Thornfields" and the macabre experience is complete.

So, is Striborg what you'd call music by the people, for the people? Yeah, right. Social types, better stay away. But, if you are looking at the world and yourself critically, detached, from a distance, and want to hear an aural equivalent of your thoughts, Striborg will take you as far as you want to go. (9.4/10)