Tasmanian devil

Striborg - Catawampus (mp3)
Striborg on MySpace
Striborg is an one-man-band of a guy called Sin Nanna. He is also often called The King of Tasmanian Black Metal because his from Australia. And he certainly knows how to create a creepy atmosphere. It's not that kind of aggressive war-against-christianity attitude, but it's like some kind of evil hypnoze. The sound is one of a low-fi home recording and it matches perfectly when the goal is to portray the agony and isolation. The guitar sounds are like roaring waves on high frequency, the bass is like that same rustling sound when you blow or whistle into the microphone, and if you beat the rhythm with your fingers on a cardboard you can get the sound of the drums. But it doesn't make you deaf as it may happen with Ildjarn, for example. It all comes through echoes and reverbs, so the overall feeling is that you are surrounded by the music. When listening to spacerock, due to all this you can get a cosmic feeling. When listening to Striborg you can get the feeling of the elemental forces of nature - stormy weather, freezing winds etc, because the echoes come here with heavy buzzing. I think Striborg is one of the few blackmetallers who really can understand what are the possibilities of these lo-fi sounds. And he truely creates something artistically enjoyable out of it.

Sometimes Striborg uses synth too, but please don't expect any string arrangements or other dilettante symphonic stupidities. I must say that Striborg's synth parts are one of the few that I can tolerate in black metal. Of course it's not that I hate synthesizers, but it's about the approach and the sounds that most of the bands use. Take Burzum's synthalbums and you know what I mean. Striborg has also used those terrible string sounds, but it sounds so retarded that it seems intentional. He probably uses some really cheap kids keyboard and he doesn't care much about clean notes and harmonies. In the mix these strongly echoed obscure synthlines are somewhere between that fuzzy even more obscure guitar sound and they may come in whole different harmony.

The songs are long, sometimes 20 minutes or more. Striborg takes his time in changing themes. But it doesn't make the music boring (there are very few BM albums for my taste, that have only interesting tracks. Striborg isn't one of them, but 90% of it's material is still very inventive), it helps the listener to dive into that hypnotic buzz.
The vocals combine nicely with the general creepiness. Depending on the mood of the song, Sin Nanna uses many different approaches. A lot of different distorting effects are used, there is one track on "Nocturnal emission", where Sin Nanna sounds like a possessed animal trying to spell human language. The most impressive is when he screams with really high pitch. In one of the sequels of Police Academy there was a funny character - a caricaturistic personification of a rebellious hairmetal guy. He performed all his textlines in a high pitched shrieking voice ("HI! AAARGH! HOW ARE YOU! BLUAAARGH!!!) That's what this vocal reminds me.The feeling is kind of mysterious - let's say it feels like being face to face with some retarded magician - you don't know if he is going to turn you into a toad or will he give you some plastic flowers.

The lyrics are about coldness and misanthropy as ordinary with that type of depressive atmospheric black metal. Some song titles are still quite funny - take "The haunted gum trees". But what is there to expect anyway - Striborg is serious stuff. Sin Nannas is obsessed by creating total darkness (indeed it's a cliche in BM, he even has guts to admit it), but at least it's not about satanic christian bullshit (his own words). But you just can't keep from smiling when you hear how far out this guy must be with his evil spaciness. When compared with outsider music, which I think has a lot of similarities with these types of BM acts, I would say Striborg is Space Lady of black metal.