Auriferous Flame to released "Ardor for Black Mastery" in October!

"Ardor for Black Mastery" is the second album from Auriferous Flame, another musical incarnation of Greek musician Ayloss, renowned for his work with Spectral Lore and Mystras, and follows up his critically acclaimed debut album from 2022 "The Great Mist Within".

“As old-school black metal goes, Auriferous Flame is shot through with a psychedelic streak that makes it anything but straightforward.” Said Treble, while Popmatters commended the album stating “The resulting music is simultaneously fragile like gossamer and as brutal as a maelstrom, while a grandiose, foreboding atmosphere enshrouds everything…”

While the first Auriferous Flame album was a spontaneous recording that should be perhaps looked at as an early manifestation of intentions, “Ardor for Black Mastery” is an album that has been intensely in the works for the greatest part of 2023. It represents a new kind of focus; where Spectral Lore has been expanding outwardly from black metal into different directions, Auriferous Flame aims to deepen into it and search for the golden dark fire that is to be found near its core, exploring violence, darkness, splendor and rebellion. It should also be noted that Auriferous Flame is absolutely not a side-project created for the sake of temporary experimentation, but a new formation with the same dedication and intended continuity as in Ayloss' most well-known project.

In comparison to the debut, an important musical element is introduced to further flesh out the character of the project, the influence of the black thrash style, evident in the increased speed and complexity of the album, which is married with the cold black metal and martial, medieval-like atmospherics already present. Aided by an obvious upgrade in the production quality, the result shows a much more intense and aggressive direction, also incorporating a touch of weirdness and avant-garde tendencies. Inspired lyrically by Hermetic and alchemical texts as well as by the putrid condition of the man-dominated world, Auriferous Flame is fuelled as much by a strong desire to bring back the genre's anti-authoritarian beginnings to the forefront, as with apprenticing in what makes metal dangerous, unique and impossible to be liked by everyone at the same time. The ending goal is, of course, mastery as much as it is reclaiming and transmutation.