NETHERWORLD - The Hermit

One of the most evocative questions in documentary filmmaking is Werner Herzog's "but why?" The existential query is posed in the face of the behaviour of certain penguins who, for no apparent reason, abandon their colony and head into the interior of the icy continent — towards certain death. The footage of their dramatic, clumsy dash into the vastness of the mountain ranges stirs deep feelings, both moving and unsettling. The immense indifference and cruelty of nature seems cut through by the bisector of the spirit, which madly follows its own mysterious, disturbing course.
Netherworld, the project of Alessandro Tedeschi, founder and curator of the Glacial Movements label, seems — if not to directly answer this question — at least to try to portray the relationship between the troubled soul and the inscrutable vastness of the ice.

"The Hermit" is a peculiar work, born from the reworking of old, deteriorated tapes recorded in the early 2000s: sketches of electroacoustic experiments, field recordings, small instrumental fragments that the passage of time has darkened, amplifying them into a primordial, ecstatic voice. The result is a ghostly echo, huge and menacing, enveloping and all-consuming, which draws us in with its majesty and enchants us with the brutal force of a cataclysm.
We should look at this album the way we would look at that penguin's journey. "Loneliness" is a heavy, wary trek, sustained by the wavering reverberations of gongs and metallic strikes. "The Hermit" echoes the crackling contractions of a suffering immensity, as if it were the lament of a glacier about to fracture and collapse upon our wonder — a track of terrifying beauty.
"Vastness", and above all "Last Breath", enrich the textures used in the opening track with warped, manipulated samples, unsettling and barely intelligible voices, indistinguishable noises that languish, desperate, funereal and submerged.

"In The Blizzard", on the other hand, is docile and freezing: the pads blow an arctic wind in which the frost of electronic counterpoints glimmers, creating an expanse of fresh snow beneath whose heavy blanket an almost imperceptible beat can be heard. And while "Hidden Caves" leads into the depths of dark rocky crevices, labyrinthine in its brass resonances, "Melancholy" seems to lead us to where the journey ends: beneath a dome of perennial ice, high and inaccessible, hardened like an indifferent sky — a door against which that question, "but why?", keeps knocking, finding no answer but the echo of its own blow.

It's a remarkable work that, compared to its predecessors (such as the crystalline "Alchemy Of Ice"), doesn't fold back on itself and its own inner solitude, but projects outward, "to the ends of the earth", letting itself be terrified and seduced by the dizzying vastness of natural existence and its mystery buried beneath the ice.

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13/09/2026