Schammasch - Between the Empyrean and the Abyss

The Swiss band Schammasch are an obscure presence in the metal underground. They owe their name to Šamaš, the Mesopotamian god of justice, who in the famous "Epic of Gilgamesh" opens the passage to the underworld for the hero, allowing him to be reunited with his friend Enkidu. Even this choice reveals the band's particular focus on the theme of life and death, as well as the unusual nature of their sources of inspiration. The band is shrouded in a cryptic silence, to the point that on their official website the names of the four members are replaced by initials. For a while they summed up their aesthetic in the hermetic motto "expressing light through darkness," and more recently they've used "music between the Empyrean and the Abyss." At their core they have a black-metal soul, leaving ample room for doom, death-metal elements and progressive ambitions. Finding an exhaustive label, however, is difficult: what makes Schammasch exceptional is their ability to merge seemingly irreconcilable elements into monumental compositions and elaborate concept works. Let's retrace a career built on dizzying oxymorons.

A light in the dark: "Sic Lvceat Lvx" and "Contradiction"

Little is known about the band's origins, other than that they formed in 2009 in the Swiss city of Basel. In 2010 came the debut Sic Lvceat Lvx (Latin for: so let light shine). In terms of format we're still far from the colossal proportions to come: seven tracks across 43 minutes. Already evident is the desire to shape an extreme, anguished sound to their own liking, drawing heavily from the most elaborate and progressive black-metal from the very opening tracks "Lvx Æterna" and "He Whose Face Is Made Of Entrails". The ability to slow down and exploit the atmospheric potential of metal is already one of the band's clear goals, but here the will to terrify with gruesome visions still prevails. The longer tracks "No Light From The Fires", with its extended acoustic finale, "Black But Shining", with its harrowing deceleration, and "The Venom Of Gods", more dissonant and death-metal leaning, all show strong potential. While close to France's Deathspell Omega and other ambitiously contaminated strains of metal like Norway's Enslaved, this incarnation of Schammasch is still essentially a band in search of its own identity.

The second album, Contradiction (2014), turns the ideas of the debut into a more evolved language, offering their first truly colossal compositions. This time there are nine tracks totaling 84 minutes. The title immediately reveals the theme of the oxymoron, central to their aesthetic: combining light and darkness, infernal torment and spiritual vision.

The track "Contradiction", which runs past the ten-minute mark, introduces this new direction with a composition recalling the tortuous musings of Neurosis, layering virtuosic guitar over a ferocious metal mass of roars and cavernous spoken word. An obsessive finale translates into music a question with no answer: the contradiction remains unresolved.

"Split My Tongue" manages to sound terrifying and colossal while moving for the most part at moderate speeds. Precisely for this reason, the thrilling carpet-bombing at the five-minute mark proves especially epic: a lightning-fast, majestic black-metal passage followed by a liturgical coda.

Black-metal, death-metal and sludge come together in "Provoking Spiritual Collapse" and in the more psychedelic, longer "Until Our Poison Devours Us". "The Inner Word", at nearly 14 minutes, is a black-metal track with shadowy chanted vocals, a long, dark psychedelic interlude, and an instrumental tour de force, especially from the drums. The track closes with two telling lines: "All is one/ All is none".

The bleaker, more melancholic "Serpent Silence" lingers for a long stretch in semi-acoustic territory before exploding, then closes with a long melodic coda that foreshadows the band's future atmospheric explorations. It's with the closing "Jhwh" (seventeen minutes; the proper name of the God of Israel in the Bible) that the band definitively forges a music that is at once physical and spiritual, violent and philosophical, tinged with a gothic elegance and wrapped in a mystical aura. The theatrical spoken-word passage is a sort of terrifying vision of divine power:

I have created you, so I have the right to do with you what I will. You have done nothing against me, that I do not deny. And for my pleasure, I make you suffer

Afterwards, a desolate section dominated by acoustic guitar opens up. When the track explodes again, English phrases and Latin prayers alternate, exploring philosophical, theological and esoteric concepts from various authors, before the long instrumental coda. Among others, we find biblical quotations, an apothegm from medieval scholasticism, a maxim from Seneca and one from Nietzsche. There's also Hippocrates' principle "contraria contrariis [curantur]", meaning "opposites are cured by opposites", which here takes on a broader meaning. The search for a synthesis of opposites has become Schammasch's guiding purpose, and "Jhwh" closes with two programmatic lines: "Worship what you've burned / Burn what you've worshipped". These are the same lines that open the album, ideally closing the circle.

Contradiction transformed the ideas of Sic Lvceat Lvx into a metal of oxymorons, also opening up to the psychedelic and the atmospheric. The next step is to go beyond metal itself, embracing different styles with greater conviction, as France's Blut Aus Nord had already done with their "777" trilogy (2011-2012).

A masterpiece of life and death: "Triangle"

The third chapter of their discography, and their masterpiece, is called Triangle (2016), a triple album where each disc runs 33 minutes, for a total of a hundred. Each of the three parts has its own title and a precise theme, forming an elaborate concept album. The first part, "The Process Of Dying", deals with the theme of loss and the change that occurs with death and its acceptance. The second part, "Metaflesh", seeks to describe the balance between life and the spiritual world. The final destination of this journey comes in the third part, "The Supernal Clear Light Of The Void", which describes the definitive detachment from the body and the arrival at an "other" dimension made of light and void. The musical style changes profoundly across the three parts.

The first is the one closest to their earlier work: it alternates lugubrious doom-tinted moments with black-metal outbursts, in a progressive and solemn style. "Father's Breath" gets things going with the symphonic grandeur of an emotional nightmare between black and death metal, flowing into the following "In Dialogue With Death", driven by epic tones and an oppressive arrangement. After a funereal slowdown, "Diluculum" takes off breathlessly and hints at an acidic melody. Then comes the bestial scream of "Consensus", the first major track, a synthesis of Deathspell Omega, Neurosis, alien death-metal and extreme prog-metal, with a finale of acidic foam and Gregorian chant. The first part closes with "Awakening From The Dream Of Life", which scatters pitch-black hallucinations in the form of guitars fluttering madly, closing with liturgical chants. Once the process of death has run its course, a mysterious heartbeat remains.

The second part, "Metaflesh", has the task of depicting the moments following death, the transition between the physical and spiritual worlds. The band moves beyond their usual metal hybrid, offering music that's more atmospheric, akin to psychedelic rock. The inspiration is heavily cosmic, even in the Lovecraftian sense: a threatening, hostile otherworldly space, mysterious and delirious. "Satori", the second major track, is an obsessive tribal rite that then turns into a dark black-metal mass sucked into a black hole, closing with a choir of monks. The following "Metanoia" combines a desolate confession with a black-metal storm at breakneck speed, inlaid with camouflaged guitar melodies and closed out with more tribal rhythms steeped in alien esotericism. The peak of the whole work arrives with "Above The Stars Of God", a fusion of the melancholic psychedelia of Pink Floyd, the inconsolable desolation of doom-metal, the most furious black/death, a martial assault and a dark hallucination. "Conclusion" closes the second part with a semi-acoustic ballad of hallucinated folk.

Total emancipation from the music of their early albums is only achieved in the final part, which abandons metal for a series of dark-ambient bad trips colored by tribal touches and, above all, by instrumental passages. "The Third Ray Of Light", closed out by jazz fumes worthy of Jon Hassell, and "Cathartic Confession", a mystical ritual that turns into an anguished lament by its end, are abstract alien visions, unsettling and evocative. "Maelstrom" marks its slow build with a new-age choir, while the overloaded closer "The Empyrean" brings back deafening, dissonant guitars. Despite a few longueurs, this part is the boldest and most unexpected, profoundly different yet perfectly integrated into the massive narrative arc.

Triangle is the result of a long reflection on spirit and body. It draws on elements of Christian culture and mythology but closes with the "Gāyatrī Mantra" dear to Hindus. Death is seen as a moment of truth, of liberation and emancipation from the body and from matter. This imposing triple album conveys its message through varied and often experimental means, which can be forgiven for only the slightest touch of excess. A flaw that barely dents an album that is bold and highly ambitious, and which has become a cult favorite over time.

Surrealismo decadente e buio assoluto: “The Maldoror Chants” e “Hearts Of No Light“

The colossal Triangle is followed by the shorter The Maldoror Chants: Hermaphrodite (2017), a half-hour EP. The project is a musical transposition of "I canti di Maldoror" ("Les chants de Maldoror"), Isidore Ducasse's 1869 masterpiece. The focus is on the figure of the Hermaphrodite, described in the Second Canto of this nihilistic, blasphemous and grotesque book so beloved by the Surrealists. Rather than unleashing black-metal fury, Schammasch opt for an atmospheric approach, also venturing toward suffocating industrial-tinged exercises like "The Weighty Burden Of An Eternal Secret" and leaning further into dark-ambient passages. Even the occasional outbursts are balanced by atmospheric passages, always very dark, while singing is replaced by spoken-word recitations of verses drawn from Ducasse's work. The only breakneck-speed moment is "Chimerical Hope", still wrapped in hallucinatory miasmas, which flows into the closing "Do Not Open Your Eyes", which slows toward a more atmospheric liturgical chant and dies away into sidereal silence.

The Maldoror Chants: Hermaphrodite is a synthesis of Triangle's ideas in a darker, more theatrical and certainly more accessible format. Above all, though, the lengthy spoken-word passages come across as a somewhat simplistic way of transposing a literary work.

The true sequel to Triangle is Hearts Of No Light (2019). After building tension with the opening "Winds That Pierce The Silence", anguished and obsessive, the band rediscovers its devastating power of old on the following "Ego Sum Omega". A mephistophelian album from its very title, Hearts Of No Light thus reveals its anxious, tense dimension, without giving up on the atmospheric side, which is central to the esoteric ritual of "A Bridge Ablaze", with piano taking center stage.

The rest of the album moves between these souls and their synthesis: offering tortuous mid-tempo black-metal ("Qadmon's Heir"), more dissonant explorations of extreme metal ("Rays Like Razors") and theatrical, gothic moments ("I Burn Within You"). The gamble is "A Paradigm of Beauty", a track that recalls Fields Of The Nephilim and their gloomy gothic style, where the vocals attempt a more melodic and somewhat mannered approach. "Innermost, Lowermost Abyss" (15 minutes) returns to the tribal, psychedelic moments of Triangle, dwelling a bit too long on acoustic guitars and an extended coda of cosmic drones.

Hearts Of No Light is a grandiose album, with several extended tracks and a complex metal vocabulary. The comparison with their masterpiece, however, is unforgiving: these 67 minutes risk coming across as more frayed and confused, not least because they lack an effective framing sense of purpose, a recognizable arc. Triangle was never going to be replicated, but Hearts Of No Light is "merely" a good album for those seeking contaminated, elaborate black-metal — it is not a new cult classic.

The band also added The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean to their discography in 2024, following up on the 2017 EP. The original text is finally integrated in a less simplistic way.

The atmospheric, tense "Crystal Waves" (almost 14 minutes) picks up again from the spoken-word recitation of the first chapter, in a more psychedelic context. After barely four minutes it surges into a whirling sludge-metal section and then dissolves into a gothic hymn, imposing and heartfelt, which rediscovers its black-metal soul in the finale. A second extended track, "Your Waters Are Bitter", offers a synthesis of fierce, melodic prog-metal. "They Have Found Their Master" (11 minutes), the album's high point, opts for a more dynamic approach, moving between highly melodic moments and devastating bombardments, closing with an evocative dirge sung by a female voice. The shorter "Image Of The Infinite" is even an elegant gothic ballad for male and female voice. The long closer "I Hail You, Old Ocean", a full eleven minutes, instead goes for the epic, turning their black-metal into an heir to the most bombastic Bathory and closing with a baritone gothic vocal. The coda is a more mundane funeral march.

After Triangle, Schammasch have struggled to surpass their masterpiece. They've revisited that same idea of open, contaminated black-metal on an album like Hearts Of No Light, more modest and at times long-winded, and in the multi-part project The Maldoror Chants, which improved with its second chapter. Despite a more than respectable level of quality, the impression remains that Contradiction and especially Triangle are destined to remain their most creative moments, if only because those are the records where the supposed boundaries of their sound were first pushed past.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google