The instrumentation is skeletal to the point of asceticism: electric violin, synthesizers, electric bass, and the kind of tape hiss that wraps itself around the ears like cold fog around a gravestone. Van Gore, who has publicly admitted to building his own violin and spending months in what sounds like productive torment attempting to play the thing, delivers melodies that owe less to formal training than to some older, more instinctual understanding of how three notes, placed correctly, can feel like a draught beneath a door that has no business being open. It is, paradoxically, the incompleteness of his technique that grants the record its peculiar power. Paganini need not weep; he might, however, feel a chill he cannot entirely account for.
The conceptual architecture is maximalist even when the sound is not. The EP arrives — or rather, re-arrives, this being a belated proper release of material originally cut loose in 2022 with insufficient ceremony — accompanied by a zine featuring an English translation of a 15th-century epic poem concerning Dracula, a limited cassette, a shirt, and a bonus track, "Renew Me, O Black Imperial Blood," that was excised from the original to keep the runtime below thirty minutes. Its reinstatement here is the right call. The track functions as a kind of gothic exhale, the moment after the ceremony concludes and the torches gutter out.
This is, at its core, a record about atmosphere as argument. The band positions exotica not as a genre but as a philosophical passport — a licence to travel into any territory of the imagination provided the emotional coordinates remain consistent. And consistency, strangely, is exactly what *Unholy Spirits Light Divine* delivers. Strip away the Dracula lore, the cassette nostalgia, the slightly confrontational press materials, and what remains is a sustained mood of foreboding that the band has, across their catalogue, made their genuine signature. The cold does not dissipate between tracks. It accumulates.
Critics of a more forensic temperament will note the amateurism — and they will not be entirely wrong. The violin work is raw in ways that no amount of romanticising fully neutralises. The synth beds are rudimentary. The production, worn thin by magnetic tape and apparent intent, prioritises texture over fidelity. But to mistake these qualities for incompetence is to misread what the record is attempting. Van Gore has spoken of wanting music that sounds like it was never intended for an audience — a private ritual accidentally overheard — and on these terms, the roughness is not a flaw but the very mechanism of the work. You are not supposed to feel welcome.
The Vampire Synth genre — a subculture small enough to fit comfortably in a single Romanian village — has its share of more technically accomplished practitioners. Few of them are making records that feel this genuinely unsettling. AoftheH are tourists, yes, as Van Gore cheerfully concedes, but they are tourists who have broken into the house rather than bought a guidebook, and they have left muddy footprints on the good carpet.
Austere, peculiar, and haunted by something it refuses to name, *Unholy Spirits Light Divine* is the work of a band conducting an honest conversation with its own obsessions, regardless of whether the rest of the room finds those obsessions tasteful. It will not convert the sceptical. It will quietly devastate the already-converted. That, for music operating this far from the mainstream, is precisely enough.
*Physical edition available via Bandcamp. Streaming universally. The zine, reportedly, is worth the price alone.*