Review Summary: Beherit's music must be thoroughly “experienced” the same way as esoteric rituals and occult ceremonies: By actively submitting Your psyche to the stream of the mysterious, dark and occasionally chaotic elements of form and content.
Beherit has always been a mostly isolated musical phenomenon, bearing a maverick spirit reflecting and matching that of Nuclear Holocausto (Marko Laiho) himself. And whether you like Beherit or not, you can’t deny this band's pure uniqueness.
“Drawing Down the Moon” “The Oath of Black Blood” were both among the very first Black metal albums I listened to many years ago. Their original impression on me was a deep sense of frustration and bafflement. It was a mess! Some chaotic incoherent thing made by a few lads or even kids for the sake of sheer speed and blasphemy. But after a few listens everything changed. After some other rounds it seemed I could never get enough of these truly addictive masterpieces and listening to them was somehow my initiation ritual as another young soul entering the magical realm of Black metal with its cold tempting glare and dark beauty. In fact “listening” as an act and as a verb doesn’t manage to reflect the reality of the mentioned process which definitely transcends any notions attached to the mostly casual act of “listening”. In fact these Beherit albums should be “experienced”, thoroughly and deeply, not just listened to. You should totally submit your psyche, your essence, to this process. You should open yourself the same way as you are suggested to do in esoteric rituals and occult ceremonies and such. Any resistance from your side, even unknowingly, may interrupt the “flow” , distort or distract the stream and nullify the outcome. During a sacred esoteric ceremony, you are not meant to suddenly break in ecstatic out of this world chanting of the adepts to question the integrity of the chant’s words by asking about their exact meaning, origin, etc. And you don’t subvert an ancient tribal ceremony of magic by gripping the medicine man to find out if he is genuinely in a trance – for example by checking out his pulse, breathing, etc! Such an ignorant attitude would never ever allow you to have a taste of the otherworldly experience the ritual is meant to ignite. (And of course this may be the least dangerous outcome!)
That is exactly how works like Beherit’s music should be "experienced": By actively submitting yourself to the mysterious, dark and occasionally chaotic elements of both form and content which metaphorically invoke the chaos within and without. And to the raw production, sometimes tortured vocals and the dark sinister atmosphere, etc. “Electric Doom Synthesis” in its isolated stand and its misanthropic detachment from most of the creative output brought by both the mainstream and the underground scene, may be regarded as one of the most iconic works of Beherit. Stylistically it is really challenging, if not impossible, to put a straightforward label on this album. The style may be defined as something like “Dark Ritual Electro-Industrial Ambient”!
As far as the evolutionary path of Beherit goes it is a more coherent, burnished, refined and more thoroughly planned and designed reincarnation of almost whatever the H418ov21.C delivered or was meant to deliver plus many other great things. I think H418ov21.C, in addition to its importance as a big twist in Beherit’s career then, is still an impressive work in its own right, though not without flaws which have inevitably given it a sharp aftertaste of something unfulfilled and unaccomplished. H418ov21.C divided Beherit’s discography to two distinct easily recognizable phases: The primary Black Metal phase and the second Dark Ambient one. Electric Doom Synthesis is definitely the peak, the crème de la crème of the second phase, as Drawing Down the Moon may be easily considered as the highest point of Beheit in their first phase. And of course the third phase, initiated by the merry resurrection of Beherit and the release of yet another great album (Engram) could be looked at as the so called Synthesis; the end result of the Dialectic of the interaction between the Thesis which was the first phase and the Antithesis of the second phase.
