Artist: Old Forsaken Realm
Title: Eerie Apparitions Upon A Path Long Forgotten
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Dale Of Shadows
Released digitally last year but now given physical form in this reality by Dale Of Shadows, this is the second release from the Germany based project and I loved the first so much I had to give this a purchase and listen. And I needed to be in another world as we all do from time to time.
The title track opens up this journey with the sound of bitter, cold winds blowing across some precarious ridge. The superb, resonant synth rises and that one touch of percussion opens the world wide. The winds subside before it, a sedate and magical melody leads us carefully over rock and stone I like to think. It is so strangely restful despite feeling like a hard, cold journey. I don’t know how, why, but it is…. until the melody shifts and becomes more eerie. Darker. Notes rise and seem to show the outlines of something about us. It feels like something is being half shown by the music, something out of reach and not quite within our vision. It shifts from dungeon synth through the waters of electronic ambient and back but fluidly and a perfect demonstration as to how boundaries fade in the hands of devoted musicians.
The recording quality of this is worthy of mention too – it is so rich you get that feel that Ghoest brings but the edge, the rawness is still here and it is like turning up the contrast on a photograph; sometimes hidden things come to the fore, sometime it simply sinks deeper into the listener but leaves cuts as it passes.
What apparitions you will see I don’t know, but the faint edges of ragged robes, withered hands and a desperation of repeated gestures so long bereft of meaning is with me. I watch, I stare and try to move on with so many questions unanswered. The rise, he swell towards the end is almost heartbreaking as I leave the ghost to its own world once more, swallowed by the winds.
‘Towards The Distant Echoes Of Castle-Crowned Mountains’ has an imposing presence immediately. The music is more stately somehow. Solid. There is cold and there is stone and there is silence in the tone and the tune. You feel as though you trudge uphill, thoughts within walking with the memories that still live in such places. There is a real sense of grandeur to the melody and of it reaching out from the centuries past. But somehow there is no sense of loss to the tune, for me it shows a place that is proud of its place in the years, that it served well its duty and now the need long past it is a place content simply to let traveller recall what it once was. The tempo rises as though simply looking upon these craggy eyries can bring the wonder back to their shapes in some small manner, that for that they show their gratitude by welcoming the hardy traveller to enjoy what is there, still.
‘Through A Sea Of Crimson Mist Beneath A Towering Crystal Keep’ is our final destination for a while. The imposing nature is here, once more, but perhaps this secretes a warning within that mist. Not malevolence, simply a place to be respectful of as it does not need you. But the melody holds such mystical wonder in its flow, in the steady percussion marking your steps towards the slowly revealed wonder. If this music does not transport you then maybe, perhaps, little will. It is beautiful and deceptively layered, bold in strokes but never brash. It has a depth of colour like an old Frazetta painting but a stillness far from those works. This world comes to you in its own time. I have been absorbed in the game Crimson Desert of late and this is the soundtrack to the moments in that game when you climb a peak because it is there, and you can, and the weather clears and what you see before you is beautiful and strange and overwhelming. But you are there.
Old Forgotten Realms is such an impressive outlet from the entity Nordic Sentinel: Grace and grandeur and such a sense of scale but seen through the personal experience of you as a traveller. That is the key. It allows you to feel like the inquisitive one made miniscule by the age of the places you visit.
I love it, I really do.
Gizmo
Eerie Apparitions Upon A Path Long Forgotten | Old Forsaken Realm
Walking The Liminal Space 