French black metal project HYVER has revealed "Le Trône des Bois," its closing contribution to Roi des Forêts - Basoen Jauna, a three-way split with Basque acts ELFFOR and ERROIAK. Antiq releases the record on November 11.
The split is built around a single subject: the bear, as forest king and spirit. Each of the three projects approaches it in its own way across eight songs.
ELFFOR, the long-running project of Eöl from the Spanish side of the Basque Country, opens the record with "Urkhal," a 20-minute epic and by far the longest piece here. It follows an immense white bear who protects a clan of wild men and becomes a legend among them. Eöl's catalog swings between pure ambient/dungeon synth and fierce black metal; this one sits firmly on the black metal side.
HYVER, a French multi-instrumentalist's solo project, takes the middle four tracks with folk-tinged atmospheric black metal with symphonic touches. The songs move from ancestral bear cults to teddy bears (and how children carry the cult on today), to a real bear shot by a hunter in the Pyrenees in 2004, and finally to "Le Trône des Bois," a meditative dreamscape glimpsing a mythical place where bears gather. HYVER also put out its fourth album, La Fête de la Forêt Enchantée, via Antiq just yesterday.
ERROIAK (Basque for "crows"), based on the French side of the Basque Country, closes the split with three slower, synth- and piano-led dungeon-synth black metal pieces in a vein that recalls SUMMONING. "Azken Ehiza" ("The Last Hunt") asks whether the hunter tracking the bear is a man meeting his fate, or the bear itself.
ERROIAK's "Azken Ehiza" and an excerpt of ELFFOR's "Urkhal" were revealed earlier.
Tracklist:
- Elffor - Urkhal
- Hyver - Culte Ancestral
- Hyver - Le Premier Dieu
- Hyver - Cannelle
- Hyver - Le Trône des Bois
- Erroiak - Basoen Jauna
- Erroiak - Harpeko Oihua
- Erroiak - Azken Ehiza
Order & Stream "Roi des Forêts - Basoen Jauna": Bandcamp