In what is easily Canadian black metal noise extremists Wold’s most mind-numbing and surreal listening experience yet, Stratification is a listening experience not for the weak at heart; a harsh audial sleigh ride through a violent unforgiving winter landscape.

A scenario where you picture yourself helpless and alone on a vast desolate prairie, caught in a winter storm where there is no chance of escaping. If Wold have created polar reactions within the extreme black metal underground, then Stratification is destined to bridge that chasm even further.

Thoughts about Stratification from the mouth of the beast:

“The creation of Stratification was not only about generating waves and strange sounds. Music inspired by winter or music that tells winter tales in general also played as a huge influence; such as Winterreise by Franz Schubert among many others.

“Also later stuff like R. Strauss’s use of high soprano vocals, especially Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and even some Polish shit like Lutoslawski’s Twenty Carols. I was also inspired by the sickness of Romantic music and the ideal of an eternal feminine spirit. Stratification is nihilistic with its escape into harsh whiteouts and its procession of graceful crystal-like airy sounds.”

To download and listen to the track “Frost Crystal Symmetry,” click HERE.

Somewhat ironic in a way that Profound Lore releases Stratification in the heart of the summer then. But let it serve as its antithesis:

“During this sad time, with the snow going away, all we can do now is remember the winter. And at the end of the day the season in which Stratification is released in is not important to us, June is fine. The winter that I keep going on about doesn’t really exist. It is an ideal winter in my mind.

“But with that said I would not have been able to construct my winter realm without the collective experiences of my action with actual winter, material winter. Other times the metaphor can become intertwined; it is loneliness yet it masks loneliness. And I do write in ‘The Frozen Field’: ‘In summer she shall she shall turn golden/With rape seed or rye.’ ”

The track listing for Stratification goes as follows:

1. Stratification
2. Sleigh Ride
3. White Winter Wanderer
4. Frost Crystal Symmetry
5. Nine Paths
6. Nine Creeks
7. Wintertime
8. The Frozen Field
9. Auld Tree