Paysage d'Hiver - Steineiche (1998)^{Release ID: 1394}

The debut release (demo?) from Paysage D'hiver captures the harsh and scathing attack of their sound superbly whilst managing to express the familiar amount of atmospheric and ambient moments also.  With Winterherr in the driving seat for everything on all three tracks, the release follows the same unpredictable format as the rest of his discography.  Tracks don't necessarily conform to any standardised structure and the degree of predictability is low with passages moving from ambient to blistering intensity in a mere second.  

This sounds off-putting to some reading this review I am sure but the fact is that this all works brilliantly as despite the sudden and caustic changes in delivery everything still sits under this thin veneer of cold and dank atmosphere throughout.  This could be down to the kvlt production values more than anything else but regardless of how you sense this it means Paysage D'hiver have their own feeling.  I sense any release of theirs beyond just an auditory experience and Steineiche which is the very start of the discography exemplifies this capability superbly right from the very start of the project itself.

I do get caught in seasonal metal listening trends (although I never describe this as consciously determined) with black metal often occupying my listening space from October through to March usually, but I find Steineiche transcends this binary system of listening patterns and is able to effectively make the warmest of summer mornings seem a few degrees lower than the thermometer would have me believe.  It's murky sounds infect the very air around me as a listener and even when the odd riff breaks through that wall of noise or muffled vocal front it only acts to further dispell the warmer tones in the air, spreading farther the icy notes of tracks like Der Baummann.

At this point in Wintherr's career he was already producing thoughtful and vast soundscapes before he ever set foot in Darkspace (as Wroth).  Anyone familiar with the astral projections of the Swiss black metallers would enjoy discovering the start of the darkness that Wintherr was delivering some four years before Darkspace was even a thing.