Pyha’s The Haunted House is nothing short of what you’d expect from the ever cult, damaged, uniquely emotional and artistic output of tUMULt’s black metal stable. Another album from this label, Diamatregon’s Crossroads, has made this writer’s black metal album of the year 2009, and now throw Pyha onto the top of the year list, too.

The Haunted House is a musically simple album. Super fuzzy, blown out guitar, very basic drum machine that picks one loping, plodding, limping, jagged beat per song and sticks with it, the best damn weedy keyboards ever, conveying emotion like we never knew janky keyboards could.

Where a million albums with similar elements should and do go wrong, Pyha goes right, like with the keyboards. Another example is the use of sound clips, normally an abhorrent cluttering element to stumble on during the journey through a record. Here, the clips of women crying or other less-identifiable sounds that seem like a fine audial pairing to the images of war and genocide (depicted in the album’s digipak in what we presume is Korea), and the record would be less strong without them.

And then there are the vocals. Harrowing, tortured black metal vocals with a variety of approaches to performance and production bring much depth, but the icing on the cake are the sections with moaning, almost ritualistic chanting, as blown-out and damaged-sounding as any of the other elements on the record, serving as a focus point of the unadulterated miasma of mourning, screaming forth at all times with a unique voice.

And all that is without throwing in Pyha’s cult aspect, for Pyha is not only the product of one person, which is of casual (and unsurprising) interest, but it’s one person from South Korea, which is more rare, and that one person was 11 years old when the album was recorded, which seems impossible.

What’s astounding about it is what The Haunted House does to the imagination. Pyha’s greatest asset is the sonic portal it provides as a vista into the depths of the tortured part of one person’s soul. It’s like a direct conduit to that place, and the view is stark, bare, uncensored, uncomfortable, ugly, frightening, beautiful, and ultimately, moving. Add to that what the imagination can conjur up about how an 11-year old in particular could create such a vista, where all this emotion and expression is coming from, the person’s life story, leads to interpolations that stay with you long after the record is over.

Pyha’s The Haunted House is not great music, but it is great art, if by great art we are talking about a work that deeply moves, even unhinges, the audience. In that regard, it is one of the best black metal albums ever, and one of the albums of the year 2009. (9/10)