Abyssos — The Summoning of Darkness

PROLOGUE — A RECORD THAT OPENS INTO DARKNESS

If you hold the original 1997 Cacophonous edition of Together We Summon the Dark in your hands today, the music is not the first thing that speaks. The object speaks. The cover, the photograph of the band shrouded in mist and Gothic darkness, the album title, the reddish-black visual world, and then the booklet, which does not simply unfold but takes the shape of an inverted cross. Before a single note has sounded, the record announces that it wants a space of its own. It does not invite you into ordinary 1997, but into a world where the moon, blood, mist, autumn, witchcraft, and vampire mythology seem more important than any particular date.

And yet the date is very precise. The original British edition was released by Cacophonous Records on October 6, 1997, under catalogue number NIHIL 26CD. The recordings had been made a few months earlier, in May, at Academy Studios in Yorkshire. Christian Rehn played guitar and keyboards, sang, and composed the music; Daniel Meidal played bass; Andreas Söderlund played drums and wrote the lyrics; and Sedusa contributed female session vocals. Mags worked with them as producer and recording engineer, assisted by Keith Appleton, while mastering took place at The Exchange in London, with Guy and Frater N. credited. Helene Persson took the photographs; image artwork was credited to Nicklas Westin, and the backgrounds and graphic design to Digitalis. The release also bears a Schnozza Music publishing credit. It all looks as if an entire professional apparatus stood behind a meticulously constructed Gothic artifact — because that is exactly what happened.

Nine tracks, almost sixty-six minutes. The Metal Archives entry gives a running time of 1:05:44, while the duration calculated from Discogs data is eight seconds shorter. Those few seconds already anticipate something that would recur again and again in the history of Abyssos: memories, physical editions, and databases do not always fit together perfectly. There are firm points in the story, and there are gaps. Yet those firm points reveal a remarkable arc: within a matter of months, a circle of school and rehearsal-room friends in Sweden produced a demo and then a full-length album on a British label; after two albums the band all but vanished; and decades later its debut could still provoke diametrically opposed judgments.

Someone who sees only the cover might easily suppose that this is merely another artifact of the 1990s vampire craze. Someone who reads only the reviews might even believe that several different albums were being described under the same title. Some heard Dissection; others heard In Flames, Mörk Gryning, Naglfar, Dimmu Borgir, Dismal Euphony, or Cradle of Filth. Some called it a masterpiece, others unnecessary. To some, the long songs were rich; to others, the same quality was over-elaboration. But the story began well before these arguments, in a city whose name does not appear on the cover, even though everything started there: Sundsvall.

CHAPTER 1 — SUNDSVALL, BEFORE THERE WAS ABYSSOS

Abyssos was not born as a studio project hastily assembled from strangers. By the time the name appeared, Christian Rehn, Andreas Söderlund, and Daniel Meidal already knew one another. They attended the same school, frequented the same rehearsal facilities, and moved within the same local circle of musicians. The death metal band Insalubrious was their shared prehistory, without which Abyssos can scarcely be understood.

Insalubrious formed in Sundsvall in 1993. Söderlund played drums, Meidal guitar, and Rehn also spent time in the band as a bassist. When Rehn later looked back, he described no great ideological rupture, only something much simpler and more characteristic of musicians: after a while they began writing material that departed too far from what they felt Insalubrious should be. They did not want to confuse the direction of the older band, so they gave the new music a new name. Söderlund came up with Abyssos. In another interview he said that, to them, the Greek name conveyed the meaning of hell; they did not intend to build a philosophical treatise around it, merely to have a strong, memorable name.

The first uncertainty appears at the very beginning. Years later, Rehn dated the band's formation to 1995. A contemporary interview with Söderlund and the former official biography used January 1996. Metal Archives likewise gives 1995. If we refuse to force the sources into a single artificial date, then Abyssos took shape in late 1995 or early 1996. This is no trivial detail, because the events that followed came so quickly that even a few months mattered.

By February 1996 they were already in a studio. They recorded the Wherever the Witches Might Fly demo at Hedberska Studios, with M. Sjöbom handling production, recording, engineering, and mixing. Guests appeared on some recordings alongside the three-man core: Niklas Johansson on rhythm guitar, and Vincent Dahlqvist on vocals and keyboards. Yet here, too, the physically documented tapes and later recollections fail to coincide perfectly. Three principal tracks are known with certainty — As the Sky Turns Black Again, Return of the Nightgale, and Through the Gloom into the Fire. A documented five-track version also exists, whereas Rehn later recalled a seven-track demo, five songs from which were reworked for the debut album.

The discrepancy may never be fully resolved. We do not know whether Rehn was remembering a longer working version that differed from the surviving cassettes, or whether the passing years had altered the numbers in his memory. What matters more, however, is not in doubt: a substantial part of Together We Summon the Dark already existed during the band's first year. It was not a repertoire hastily put together after signing a record deal. Return of the Nightgale later re-emerged as Lord of the Sombre Reborn, while As the Sky Turns Black Again and Through the Gloom into the Fire provide a direct bridge, even in their titles, from the demo period to the full-length record.

At this point the band still lived within an underground infrastructure that now seems almost archaeological. Connections were built through cassettes, letters, photocopied flyers, fanzines, and parcels sent through the post. A band seeking a label did not upload a link and wait for an algorithm. It sent something tangible. According to Rehn's later recollection, this was precisely what they did: they mailed the demo to various labels, received several offers, and chose the one they considered best at the time. That was Cacophonous Records of London.

A cassette edition from Spiritual Winter Productions can be documented for September 1, 1996. Evidence also survives of earlier, simpler versions with photocopied covers and later, more professionally printed, hand-numbered copies. The official biography spoke of a strong international response and claimed that certain fanzines and radio stations ranked it among the year's outstanding Swedish demos. That promotional claim cannot be independently verified with complete certainty, but its consequence speaks for itself: the demo really did attract interest from record labels.

The Cacophonous offer looked good at the time. According to Rehn, the band was satisfied with the label, the work proceeded smoothly, and the contract covered not one album but four full-length records. Later, that detail would acquire an almost tragic irony. At the beginning, though, there was nothing tragic about it. Three Swedish musicians, who had chosen a new name for their new songs barely a year before, suddenly had a British label. Nor did the label seem like some distant, nameless venture. The Cacophonous catalogue included names that were shaping the international visibility of dark metal in the 1990s. The demo cassette had travelled from Sundsvall to London in a remarkably short time.

The pace was almost unbelievable. Late 1995 or early 1996: the band takes shape. February: a demo. September: a documented cassette release. Late 1996 and early 1997: a recording contract. May 1997: full-length album sessions in England. October: release. This was not a long story of slow maturation, but a compressed acceleration. Abyssos had no time to become a decades-old local legend before producing an international release. Perhaps that is why the album so powerfully retains all the excess of that first period: the band was working not from polished routine, but at the speed of an opportunity that had suddenly opened before them.

SUNDSVALL — THE BACKGROUND FROM WHICH ABYSSOS EMERGED

A city in 1996

Sundsvall's geographical position was more than a mere biographical detail in the band's history. Located in the Medelpad region of Västernorrland County, facing the Gulf of Bothnia, the city was at once an industrial and commercial centre, a regional centre of education, and a place with its own cultural communities. The shared school and rehearsal-room connections of the Abyssos members have already been described; what also deserves attention is the environment in which communities of young musicians could arise. Sundsvall was not simply a smaller copy of Stockholm or Gothenburg. Understanding its institutions and local networks helps explain how an internationally released metal band could emerge from a more northerly Swedish city as well.

The stone-built centre, Stenstan, remained a legacy of the reconstruction that followed the great fire of 1888. The harbour and the timber industry connected the region to a much longer history than the metal movement of the 1990s. By the middle of that decade, however, the city was also carrying the consequences of changes in traditional industrial employment. These circumstances were not hidden sources of inspiration for vampire lyrics, but tangible historical conditions of everyday life. No document establishes that any particular street, factory, or stone building in Sundsvall supplied the original idea for an Abyssos song.

Municipal data in a 1997/98 Swedish parliamentary proposal concerning Västernorrland describe this environment more precisely. They give Sundsvall's population as 94,531 in 1995 and 94,328 in 1997, while the county as a whole declined from 258,290 to 254,354 people over those same two years. City and county, therefore, were not following exactly the same trajectory. The open unemployment figure for Sundsvall in 1997 was 7.8 percent, compared with a national figure of 6.6 percent; the document counted participants in labour-market programmes separately. These figures make the social tensions of the period tangible. They do not establish that any member of the band was personally unemployed.

There was also another, less sombre side to the story. Founded in 1993, Mitthögskolan brought together higher-education institutions around Sundsvall–Härnösand and Östersund, and by 1997 it was already involved in an initiative seeking university status. The region was experiencing both the retreat of older forms of employment and the hope of expanded education. No verified information survives concerning the personal relationship of the Abyssos members to these particular institutions of higher education. Nevertheless, this changing society surrounded the world of the young musicians.

Local musical paths that did not all lead to one genre

Long before Abyssos recorded its first demo, Sundsvall already had a self-organising concert culture. The history of Sundsvalls Musikforum, established in 1973, and later of the Pipeline club makes this especially clear. The organisation moved to Kyrkogatan 6 in 1985; alongside concerts, the venue was also connected with rehearsal opportunities for local bands. Punk, hardcore, alternative rock, and metal did not necessarily attract identical audiences, but they did not exist in hermetically sealed worlds either. A local club and community organisation could offer not only a stage, but also a meeting place for musicians, releases, and news.

We must not retrospectively invent an Abyssos performance from this context. There is no verified concert log showing that the band ever played on Pipeline's stage or rehearsed there. In fact, the opposite point matters: Söderlund later said that Abyssos had not built a permanent live line-up and had not sought live performances. The local musical infrastructure thus explains not some forgotten touring history, but the broader urban environment from which shared musical acquaintances could develop.

The Massproduktion label provides another important local example. Established in 1979 out of the punk movement around the band Massmedia, the venture had become a durable record-label presence spanning several genres by the 1990s. This demonstrates that the worlds of recording, distribution, and local music businesses in Sundsvall did not depend exclusively on major cities. Yet Abyssos's demonstrable first full-length recording contract led to the British Cacophonous; there is no basis for describing Massproduktion as the band's own label or backer. The richness of the city's culture and the band's actual business trajectory are two separate historical layers.

Two earlier traces of band activity

Even before Abyssos came into being, the name Insalubrious was attached to a physical sound recording. According to the surviving discographical records, the demo Pieces of a Dream was released in 1994 under the designation SWP 005. Andreas Söderlund is listed as drummer and Daniel Meidal as guitarist, with other musicians also appearing in the credits. The contemporary information about release and recording dates does not agree in every detail: alongside a June date, there is also a June–July designation for the recording and mixing. It would be wrong to manufacture a single definite day from these data. Christian Rehn does not appear in the surviving demo credits, so his involvement with Insalubrious as a bassist does not establish that he played on this particular cassette.

Another easily overlooked thread in Rehn's career is Sargoth. He is documented as a guitarist on the 1995 Mörkrets Anlete demo and the 1998 full-length Lay Eden in Ashes. This means that his path towards Abyssos was not a process in which every earlier band activity ended overnight. Metal musicians in Sundsvall could work in several groups and on several instruments at once. On the first Abyssos album, Rehn took a central role as guitarist, keyboardist, vocalist, and composer, while his documented guitar work with another band remained partly concurrent. In that sense, Insalubrious and Sargoth are not separate digressions, but elements of a more precise, denser prehistory of the formation of Abyssos.

CHAPTER 2 — AN ERA WHEN DARKNESS BECAME MELODIC

In the history of Swedish extreme metal between 1995 and 1997, Abyssos was not an isolated phenomenon. A musical language already existed around the band in which the cold vocals and atmosphere of black metal, the instrumental discipline of death metal, the melodic sensibility of heavy metal, and longer, more varied compositions could mingle quite naturally. Dissection's Storm of the Light's Bane appeared in November 1995, Naglfar's Vittra in December of the same year, and Sacramentum's Far Away from the Sun in May 1996. Dawn and Mörk Gryning moved within the same broader field. Sundsvall also had a nearby example of its own: Setherial, founded in 1993, released its first full-length album in 1996.

That does not mean Abyssos was simply a copy of one of these groups. The available interviews with Rehn and Söderlund contain no admission that any particular song originated in a specific record by Dissection, Naglfar, or Sacramentum. The parallel is historical and aesthetic. Sweden at that time was particularly fertile ground for a style in which tremolo-picked or rapid black metal riffs were joined by harmonised guitar melodies, arcs of melody inherited from heavy metal, and atmospheric keyboards.

That is why later reviewers constantly sought musical relatives for Abyssos. In virtually every period, someone mentioned Dissection. Others heard In Flames, Gates of Ishtar, Mörk Gryning, Naglfar, Dawn, Dimmu Borgir, or Dismal Euphony. The names changed, but the reflex remained the same: listeners sensed the Swedish melodic character and tried to trace its outlines using familiar points of reference.

Söderlund addressed this himself. He found the comparisons with Cradle of Filth particularly strange, because in his view many of them had already taken shape from the cover before the reviewer had properly listened to the album. He considered the Dissection parallel fairer, however. He said they came from a similar vein, and suggested that both bands had been influenced by the heavy metal of the 1970s and 1980s; that could account for a kinship in the way they thought about constructing songs. He did not claim that they had any relationship with Dissection. They liked the band's albums, but they were not in contact with them.

That small distinction matters. Abyssos's musical world did not arise in a vacuum, but neither is it faithful to the sources to interpret every resemblance as direct borrowing. The common language of the period explains much in itself. Melodic thinking inherited from 1970s and 1980s heavy metal returned in a faster, darker form; precision taken from death metal met the timbre of black metal. The musical identity of Together We Summon the Dark grew from that intersection.

At the same time, the band fitted into another cultural wave of a very different kind. During the first half of the 1990s, the vampire was everywhere once again. Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992, Interview with the Vampire in 1994, the mass popularity of Anne Rice's novels, and the pop-cultural fashion for Gothic romance created an environment in which a vampiric metal cover was an immediately recognisable signal. But Söderlund's interest had not been born at a marketing meeting. By his own account, horror had fascinated him since childhood, and if he had not been interested in vampirism he would not have written such lyrics, nor would the cover of Together We Summon the Dark have looked the way it did.

At the same time, he rejected literal belief in the supernatural. He did not believe in fictional vampires that turn into bats and live on the blood of virgins. He was interested in historical vampirism, legends involving blood, horror, and the erotic imagery surrounding them. In another interview he spoke of a Satanic outlook comparable to the ideas of Anton Szandor LaVey and the Church of Satan, while rejecting the existence of higher supernatural powers. The theatrical darkness of the record can therefore be misleading if read as a literal statement of faith. It is better understood as a deliberately chosen world of horror in which the vampire is at once historical legend, aesthetic, sexuality, immortality, and role-play.

Rehn likewise said later that he had loved, and still loved, the dark, vampiric artwork. If a new Abyssos album were ever possible, he said around 2005, the imagery would be just as vampiric again. The image was thus neither merely Söderlund's personal obsession nor exclusively packaging devised by the record label. It became part of the band's self-image.

Meanwhile, very different things were happening in the historical background. Sweden had belonged to the European Union since 1995 and was stabilising after the severe economic and employment crisis of the early 1990s. Elsewhere in Europe, the settlement after the Bosnian War, the acceleration of integration, and the Treaty of Amsterdam in the autumn of 1997 provided the political framework. But Together We Summon the Dark did not speak about these things. Not unemployment, not EU politics, not the daily news. It withdrew from the present almost demonstratively. Though born entirely from its own 1990s, it abolished the end of the twentieth century within its lyrics. In the songs there is autumn, frost, night, mountain, mist, wolf, pentagram, castle, blood, ritual, and creatures that speak across centuries.

This duality gives the record one of its most intriguing backgrounds. Outside it, modern networks were taking shape: international record releases, mastering studios, promotion, cassette trading, and fanzine correspondence. Inside, the album escaped into a timeless world. Technology and myth were present together. The Cacophonous CD was manufactured industrially, with SID codes and a PMDC identifier, but the booklet unfolded into an inverted cross, as though an ancient rite were trying to emerge from the modern plastic jewel case.

THE CHANGING WORLD BEHIND THE DARK MUSIC

Sweden after the crisis

While the first Abyssos songs were being written in Sundsvall, Sweden was still recovering from the economic upheaval of the early 1990s. The banking and currency crisis of 1992, the extraordinary measures taken to defend the krona's exchange rate, and the subsequent shift to a floating currency transformed the country's economic policy. Contemporary international financial analyses described a substantial decline in employment around 1990–1993. Even the recovery of the middle of the decade did not mean that local labour-market problems had disappeared. Swedish extreme metal therefore did not exist in some self-sufficient world outside time and economics: band members needed work, education, rehearsal opportunities, travel, and the means to finance their recordings.

A social condition, however, is not the same as the inspiration behind a composition. The surviving statements by Abyssos do not establish that the Swedish economic crisis or local unemployment directly shaped the melodies of We Hail Thy Entrance or Misty Autumn Dance. The history of the period is not a meaning imposed upon the music after the fact; it is the temporal reality against which the band's chosen Gothic and vampiric imagination formed such a striking counterpoint.

On January 1, 1995, Sweden joined the European Union alongside Finland and Austria. The country was changing not only economically but also in its institutional and cultural relationships. Under Prime Minister Göran Persson, who took office in March 1996, questions of employment, public finances, and the welfare system remained central. On September 12, 1996, the government submitted its cultural-policy proposal entitled Kulturpolitik, numbered 1996/97:3. Its designation for the parliamentary session does not mean that the proposal was dated 1997: the related decision-making process was still under way in December 1996. Access to culture, diversity, and the circumstances of artists had already become matters of public concern, but none of this provides evidence of direct state support for Abyssos.

Distances between continents, the shared clock of an era

The year in which the album was recorded and released was a time of post-Cold-War realignment in Europe. Following the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War, the peace process, the return of refugees, and reconstruction presented major challenges in 1996–1997. The Treaty of Amsterdam, signed in October 1997, envisaged further changes in European institutions. The recent war and the expansion of integration represented two very different faces of the same continent. All this formed part of the historical present experienced by Abyssos's contemporaries, but it cannot be recast as an unmentioned personal trauma or a lyrical motive of the band.

The global history of 1997 did not end at the borders of Europe. The Asian financial crisis that unfolded in July quickly exposed the mutual vulnerability of global markets; later that year, in December, the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol made climate policy a question of international law. The chronology matters here, too: Kyoto came after the album's October release, so it would make no sense to call it a hidden source of inspiration for music recorded in the spring of 1997. The very distance between these events and the record reveals how distinctive a world the band had created: instead of the European present familiar from the news, it summoned castles, moonlit landscapes, and supernatural figures.

The meticulous infrastructure of the metal underground

International distribution, meanwhile, was built from the practical tools of the age. A demo cassette was not merely music but an object that could be mailed to an address. A fanzine editor or label could write a letter asking for a photograph or promotional material, and the band could reply with a cassette or a printed biography. Small distributors, mail-order businesses, photocopied magazines, and trading lists reinforced one another as a system. The story of how the Abyssos demo reached a British label was therefore more than a stroke of personal luck: it also makes the workings of a particular communications network visible.

The peculiarity of the era lay in the transition. The internet had already entered the lives of musicians, fanzines, and record labels, but it did not abolish postal methods at a stroke. In a contemporary conversation with Söderlund, later published on the web, he was still asking for an international reply coupon for a conventional letter, while also saying that he preferred electronic correspondence. Those two remarks contain the late-1990s underground in miniature: envelopes and cassettes were still circulating in one part of the world, while computer messages were already accelerating contact in another. Abyssos did not become known through the environment of instant online distribution that exists today; its reputation was first carried by a slower system rooted in physical objects and personal connections.

This also helps explain one aspect of the later disputes with the record label. A band did not necessarily receive immediate or transparent information about the sales, promotion, and distribution of a full-length album. The story has already shown the different emphases in Rehn's and Söderlund's subsequent recollections; the transitional nature of communications makes it easier to understand just how far physical sound carriers and label accounting stood from a directly verifiable digital world. This neither acquits nor condemns the label without evidence. It merely places the conflict more precisely within the industry and its rules, under which the band had to operate.

CHAPTER 3 — YORKSHIRE, MAY 1997

In May 1997, Abyssos crossed a threshold that Rehn later described very precisely. Together We Summon the Dark was their first album, and it was also their first genuine experience of a full-length recording studio. The demo was not followed by another local recording, but by a journey to England and work at Academy Studios in Yorkshire.

The sources have not preserved a day-by-day studio diary, so we cannot reconstruct what any particular morning or overnight session looked like. Yet Rehn's recollection tells us what mattered most: the recording went smoothly. The reason, in his view, was simple. He, Söderlund, and Meidal had known each other for a long time and had been playing together for years. He called Söderlund and Meidal talented musicians with whom it was easy to work. The trio did not have to learn in the studio how to respond to one another.

Their roles, meanwhile, were clearly divided. Rehn wrote the music, played guitars and keyboards, and sang. Meidal provided the bass foundation. Söderlund played drums and supplied the lyrics with their entire dark mythology. This division of labour would become especially important later, because when Söderlund left he himself felt that his lyrics represented such a large part of the identity of Abyssos that he did not know whether the band could continue under the same name without him.

The technical side of Academy Studios was in Mags's hands. He worked as producer and engineer, assisted by Keith Appleton. Recording and mixing took place there, after which the master went to The Exchange in London. The booklet preserves the names Guy and Frater N. in the mastering credits. This chain — Sundsvall, Yorkshire, London — shows how far a Swedish underground project barely a year old had travelled from a physical demo cassette.

Academy was not a neutral environment. Mags's name and the professional world of the studio were connected with several significant branches of British dark metal. My Dying Bride, Anathema, and Paradise Lost belonged to the same wider world; in 1997, Bal-Sagoth's album Battle Magic was also made in association with Academy and Mags. That does not mean the studio wrote Abyssos's music. Some of the songs already existed in the demo period. The significance was rather that the band recorded in a place where atmospheric, heavy, and extreme metal sounds were not exotic assignments but an everyday professional practice.

The Exchange, too, signalled a wider world. The mastering location was not some little black metal workshop, but a London studio serving a broad range of clients in the British music industry. The finished record thus became a remarkable meeting point: the music of a local circle of Swedish friends, given its definitive physical form by a professional British infrastructure.

Sedusa's female session vocals also entered the sound during the studio sessions. Such moments helped ensure that the album was not merely guitar–drums–vocals black metal. The keyboards generally do not dominate the music; rather, they envelop it. Interestingly, when speaking later about another project, Söderlund used Abyssos as a counterexample: there, the guitars do all the work, while the keyboards are held back to create a discreet, almost inaudible atmosphere. That sentence describes the sound of the record more precisely than many genre labels do.

At the time, Cacophonous seemed like a gateway. The label was a recognisable presence in the international world of dark, Gothic, black, and extreme metal. Cradle of Filth, Bal-Sagoth, Sigh, and other acts had made it known. For Abyssos, this meant that the horror-and-vampire imagery was not a communications problem, but an aesthetic the label could readily position. The label did not invent Söderlund's childhood love of horror, but it provided a commercial space in which that world was immediately legible.

When the recording was finished, the band could not yet know how persistently the cover would follow them. The vampiric image immediately prompted comparisons, especially with Cradle of Filth. Söderlund later remarked angrily that, in his opinion, several writers had done little more than look at the cover before describing the band as sounding like the British group. Years later, Rehn took a much calmer view of the same phenomenon: whatever you do, he thought, someone will always compare you with someone else, and comparison with a good band can even be taken as a compliment. Two bandmates, two temperaments — the same phenomenon.

The album itself, however, was now ready to put forward its own arguments. Nine long pieces. Songs that often stretched beyond six, seven, eight, or nine minutes, with only the instrumental title track remaining around the five-and-a-half-minute mark. The next chapter is not simply a track list. It is more like a route: nine gateways into the same dark world.

CHAPTER 4 — NINE GATES INTO THE NIGHT

Together We Summon the Dark is not an album that says what it has to say quickly. Its running time makes that clear from the outset. Several of its nine tracks approach ten minutes, and according to Metal Archives the full record lasts one hour, five minutes and forty-four seconds. That duration would later become one of the main dividing lines in its reviews. For listeners who responded to the internal variety of the songs, the length meant richness. For those who heard the same turns as derivative or overworked, the record simply seemed unable to end when it should.

We Hail Thy Entrance

The opening song's very title is a ritual. It is not an introduction but a greeting: it welcomes the arrival of something. The lyrics bring a dark realm, vampires, witches, a pentagram, the summoning of demons, northern skies, autumn and storms together. Nearly all of the album's recurring motifs appear at once, as though the first track were not gradually opening up its world but wrenching the door wide in a single movement.

The music establishes its course just as decisively. Several later reviewers immediately noticed the abundance of riffs. In Chronicles of Chaos, Henry Akeley regarded the first three songs and the fifth as particularly strong, writing of dark, infectious, wintry melodies and skilful changes of rhythm. For a 2021 Metal Archives reviewer, the wealth of riffs in the opening song alone was enough to place Rehn's guitar work alongside Dissection, Mörk Gryning and Naglfar. The very quality one reviewer heard as a strong but familiar Swedish musical language embodied, for another, the essence of melodic black metal.

The collective first-person voice of the lyrics matters too. This is not a solitary Gothic hero speaking of darkness, but a group, a 'we', welcoming the entrant and imagining itself as belonging to another order. That identity runs through the album: darkness is not merely a threat but a home, a realm, a chosen environment.

Misty Autumn Dance

Mist and autumn appear in the second song's title, but its lyrics do not remain a description of landscape. Blood, eroticism, timelessness and death intermingle. An old or immortal narrator speaks, surrounded by images of the daughters of the moon, mourning clothes and the abyss. Love and death are not opposites; they form part of the same Gothic eroticism.

Later critics were divided about the music as well. Some singled out its melodies, while others heard an overly close kinship with other Swedish bands. Thrashocore, for instance, detected a theme resembling a motif by Sacrilege. Such observations reveal just how fine the line can be between a shared stylistic language and a specific resemblance. Throughout the album, Rehn used melodic formulas already familiar within Swedish extreme metal. The question was always whether, for a particular listener, their combination acquired a character of its own.

Along with its title, Misty Autumn Dance is almost an emblem of the way Abyssos employed images of northern nature. There is no documented statement that Söderlund was describing a particular landscape around Sundsvall. Nevertheless, mist, autumn, cold and moonlight return again and again, inevitably casting their shadows over the geographical environment from which the band emerged.

Banquet in the Dark (Black Friday)

The third track turns the ritual into a feast. A goat mask, ancient tales, poems written in blood, vampiric seduction, a stake and erotic imagery of blood all appear. The lyrics are theatrical and sensual at once; here horror does not threaten from afar but takes the form of a celebration. The word 'banquet' suggests a civilised social gathering, yet the imagery surrounding it places that gathering within a different moral order.

Musically, this became one of the album's most frequently praised pieces. The Thrashocore reviewer singled out its ultra-melodic, infectious guitar figures, while DeBaser counted it among the record's masterpieces. The extended form rewards those who enjoy following a song through several themes that turn into one another. Anyone expecting a compact structure, however, might feel precisely here that Abyssos wants to preserve too many ideas at once.

This track demonstrates particularly clearly that the band was not symphonic metal in the later, keyboard-dominated sense of the term. Most of the melodic work is carried by the guitars. Rehn's two guitar parts frequently do not divide neatly into rhythm and lead roles, but harmonise with each other. The 2021 review saw this as one of the album's greatest strengths: the interweaving lines create haunting minor-key passages and a continuously shifting melodic texture.

Lord of the Sombre Reborn

The fourth song reaches back to the demo, where it existed under the title Return of the Nightgale. On the full-length album it appeared under a new title, in a new position and in a reworked form. That history alone shows how the debut was not a separate beginning but a further development of the demo material.

The lyrics construct their own mythology through an invocation of the four elements—earth, water, air and fire—ancient demons, endless night, a succubus and undead descendants. The speaker is no victim. He is a ruler. He speaks of a throne, a superior nocturnal race and a new order. Here the vampiric imagery also takes on a political vocabulary: empire, bloodline, domination.

Interestingly, this song proved especially divisive among later listeners. Different Shade of Black Metal Zine recommended it as a standout track, while the otherwise extraordinarily enthusiastic Metal Archives review from 2021 called it the least original piece. The disagreement shows that even listeners who hold the album in high esteem have no single, settled canon of its finest moments.

In Fear They Left the World Unseen

The fifth track lasts almost ten minutes and is one of the record's central pieces. Images of the other side of the mirror, the full moon, demons, an infernal legion and the reversal of creation depict a hidden reality lying behind the visible world. It is no coincidence that lines from this song were selected for the booklet's credits page. The fragment of lyrics became a visual element, as though the physical release itself wanted to open a passage into that other side of which the song speaks.

Musically, attention fell on the long structure and the keyboard atmosphere. Thrashocore particularly praised the keyboards. It is here that Söderlund's later explanation—about how the keyboards in Abyssos were not intended to overpower the guitars—can be felt most clearly. They work in the background, giving a spectral atmosphere to the spaces between the riffs. Rather than erecting an orchestral wall, the effect is as though an alien depth were opening behind the guitars.

One line from the song, quoted later, sums up its narrator's sense of self particularly well: he defines himself neither as the son of Christ nor simply as a servant of the father of lies, but demands a demonic identity of his own. The album's lyrics do not amount to a coherent religious theology. They use images drawn from horror literature and the occult to construct a role. Here that role is at its fullest.

As the Sky Turns Black Again (Love Eternal)

The sixth song is shorter and functions almost as a concentrated Gothic love story. The full moon, mist, candles, black roses, blood, a bite and the threat of sunrise follow one another. The play between 'love eternal' and 'love infernal' sums up what Abyssos most loved about the vampire myth: the romance of everlasting life and the eroticism of damnation contained within one image.

The song is historically important as well, for it already existed during the demo period. In 1997 it appeared on the Cacophonous label sampler The Unholy Bible, and in 1998 it was included on the Rock Extremum 1/98 compilation. It thus became one of the tracks that travelled independently of the full album through the underground distribution network.

A later French review mistakenly described it as an instrumental. The original album information is unambiguous: the instrumental is the seventh track, the title piece itself. That small critical error is a useful reminder that even enthusiastic contemporary and later reviews are not infallible primary documents.

Together We Summon the Dark

The title track has no lyrics. Five minutes and twenty-seven seconds of instrumental music around the middle of the album; precisely because of that absence, it acquires particular emphasis. Until this point Söderlund has been building the nocturnal mythology continually through words. Here Rehn's compositional world is left on its own. The title itself becomes the lyric: together we summon the dark.

The DeBaser reviewer heard the piece as an organic introduction to the following I've Watched the Moon Grow Old. The 2021 reviewer compared it to the soundtrack of a horror film based on a two-hundred-year-old Gothic novel. That image is especially apt for the album as a whole. Abyssos is cinematic not because it writes background music, but because it thinks in images. The guitar melodies, quieter keyboard layers and long musical arcs shift from one setting to another as though an imaginary camera were moving from corridor to corridor.

I've Watched the Moon Grow Old

The eighth song's title asserts timelessness in itself. It does not say that the narrator has seen the moon many times, but that he has watched it grow old. He speaks as a being who has outlived history. Elizabeth Báthory—rendered 'Elisabeth Bathori' in the LRCLIB-based transcription—the vampires of Transylvania, the pyramids of Egypt, northern mountains, wolves, trolls, witches and giants all become parts of a single memory.

Here a historical person, folklore and horror merge completely. It would be misguided to read the lyrics as a historical document. It is far more interesting to see them as the self-mythology of an eternally living narrator. He turns every age into his own experience, as though history were merely a personal album of memories.

Several critics considered it one of the record's high points. DeBaser singled it out, as did a 2003 Metal Archives review, which ranked it among the best tracks. Together with the title instrumental it really does form a substantial central sequence: first the summoning of darkness without words, then the appearance of a voice claiming to have passed beyond human time.

Through the Gloom into the Fire

The closing track returns to ritual, but now with the experience of an entire album behind it. Autumn cold, frozen earth, the moon, a coven, a pentagram, Acheron, infernal sacraments, graves and crossings between dimensions appear in succession. The song already existed in the demo era, so musically and historically it forms a bridge between Abyssos's earliest recorded period and the end of the full-length release.

Thrashocore highlighted it as a devastating moment. The lyrics, meanwhile, close a circle. The communal, inviting darkness of We Hail Thy Entrance has matured into a complete ceremony. By the end of the record, vampires, witches, demons and nocturnal nature are no longer separate motifs. They form a single universe.

Set the nine songs alongside one another and a dense network of motifs emerges. Blood is at once a sign of horror, eroticism, love and immortality. Witchcraft provides ritual, covens, pentagrams and invocations. The moon and night become time's own calendar. Images of the northern landscape—frost, mountains, storms, forests, wolves—create a mythical space. Christian symbols are inverted, and infernal ceremony replaces sacred rites. The throne and superiority recur, followed by the crossing of the borders of time and dimensions.

This world is not always subtle, nor does it intend to be. It contains the Gothic-horror excesses of the 1990s. Yet the whole record is held together by more than a single kind of decoration. The length of the songs, harmonised guitars, restrained keyboards and the lyrics' unchanging nocturnal perspective reinforce one another. That is why the same album could strike some listeners as laughably theatrical and others as utterly absorbing.

CHAPTER 5 — WHEN THE RECORD LEFT THE STUDIO

On 6 October 1997, Together We Summon the Dark was no longer studio material; it was a released record. The difference is greater than it first appears. In the studio, a band still hears the inner logic of its own work. From the moment of release, everyone else starts saying what the record is. The cover begins to interpret the music, the label places it in its catalogue, distributors send it out, fanzines ask questions and critics look for comparisons. The album leaves its creators' hands and begins a life of its own.

Today, the physical identifiers of the original British CD are almost archaeological markings. Its barcode is 5 017687 512622. The matrix/runout reads NIHIL26CD 10485411 01 %, the mould-area inscription is MADE IN UK BY PMDC, and the mastering SID is IFPI L132. IFPI 0490 is documented as a mould SID, while other copies bear IFPI 0454, 0485 or 0432. These codes say nothing about the beauty of the music, yet they prove that this dark world, designed to appear timeless, existed as a thoroughly industrial object of the 1990s.

The release had a particularly powerful visual structure. Helene Persson's portraits, Nicklas Westin's image artwork and Digitalis's graphic backgrounds did not operate separately; they came together to create a single atmosphere. Opening the booklet formed an inverted cross. A line from In Fear They Left the World Unseen appeared as a graphic element on the credits page. According to a supplementary note on Metal Archives, Söderlund designed the band's logo. The lyricist thus helped shape the band's identity not only in words but through a visual symbol as well.

Söderlund also preserved a small detail of the cover's history in later interviews. According to him, the band was initially offered a different, 'cute' vampire image, which was not used for the record and was later employed for another band's release. Abyssos ultimately chose the band photograph because they felt it had turned out especially well. This decision matters more than a simple artwork anecdote. Rather than placing an external vampire figure in front of the music as an illustration, the cover of Together We Summon the Dark made the musicians themselves the characters in the myth.

Yet the image immediately became a trap. Cradle of Filth already had a strong presence in a similarly dark, erotic and vampiric visual world, so the comparison arose almost automatically. Söderlund felt that some editors were writing their reviews from the cover alone. He said that anyone who actually put the CD in a player would very quickly discover that the music was not the same. Compared with Cradle of Filth, Swedish melodic guitar work and heavy-metal structures took Abyssos in a different direction. He himself considered the comparison with Dissection far fairer.

Still, the vampire imagery was no misunderstanding. The album really is vampiric, just not in the way a hasty genre label might suggest. For Söderlund, vampirism grew out of a longstanding fascination with horror. He spoke about Bram Stoker, Interview with a Vampire and early films, especially the atmosphere of Nosferatu. He liked old vampire cinema because he felt it preserved more of the myth's horror and atmosphere, whereas modern Hollywood versions often moved towards spectacle. That distinction also reveals why the Abyssos world works so well with mist, nearly monochrome tones, forests, moonlight and ceremonial poses. The aim was not simply to show a vampire, but to conjure the feeling of another age.

Following the album's release, the Abyssos name quickly entered the fanzine circuit. On a 1997 page from issue two of Twilight Zine, the band appeared among those the editor planned to interview for the next issue. Alongside Abyssos were Immortal, Lord Belial, Decameron, Deranged, Defleshed, Dismember and Satyricon. It was not a long article, only a few words, but it shows that the band attracted international underground attention in the months surrounding its debut.

The two-page Witching Metal feature in Rock Extremum 1/98 leaves an even more direct trace. The resolution of the surviving copy does not allow every sentence to be reconstructed without error, so nothing should be invented from its unreadable passages. What is certain is that the article discussed Abyssos, Cacophonous, Together We Summon the Dark and comparisons with Cradle of Filth. In the same issue's orbit, As the Sky Turns Black Again (Love Eternal) also appeared on a compilation. The band thus found its way into magazine distribution not only through reviews, but as a musical contribution as well.

Within the 1990s underground, that carried particular weight. For a reader, a fanzine was more than a source of news: it was a map. An address printed in a magazine could lead to a letter, an ordered cassette, a requested mail-order list or a new band discovered. Söderlund himself ran the distribution side of Spiritual Winter Productions and offered in an interview to send a mail-order list to anyone who wrote to him. He remarked that he already preferred email to 'snail mail'. That aside captures the transition precisely: Abyssos began in the postal underground, but was already moving towards the early internet.

The life of Together We Summon the Dark was therefore not confined to one release date. As the Sky Turns Black Again had already appeared on a Cacophonous label sampler in 1997. The following year, the same song was included on a Rock Extremum compilation. Meanwhile, the complete album began travelling onward through official and unofficial cassettes, regional editions and later CD versions. Slowly, the object detached itself from the moment when the three musicians first heard it as a finished master.

CHAPTER 6 — EIGHT REVIEWS, EIGHT DIFFERENT RECORDS

The story of the album's critical reception is almost a novel within the novel. It is rare for a record to reveal the same basic characteristics so consistently to everyone and yet prompt such different verdicts. Reviews of Together We Summon the Dark generally hear the same things: long songs, Swedish melodicism, an abundance of riffs, Gothic-vampiric themes, strong guitar playing and restrained but important keyboards. Opinion divides over whether these are strengths or weaknesses.

On 1 January 1998, only a few months after its release, Henry Akeley awarded the album 7/10 in Chronicles of Chaos. From his opening lines, the cover and the Anne Rice-like vampire fashion were targets. To him, the packaging was a little ridiculous and Gothic vampire imagery had become excessively fashionable. When he turned to the music, however, the mockery subsided. Akeley heard similarities to Dissection and thought Abyssos resembled many other Swedish bands too. Even so, he acknowledged the trio's talent, singling out dark, infectious, wintry melodies, catchy vocal turns, speed, good riffs and rhythmic changes.

His doubt was not whether they could play. The question was originality. In his view, the music followed a path already trodden by many others, so only the finest songs could truly stand out. This judgement would return repeatedly: the album is technically strong, but is it actually needed?

In April 1999, the writer at metal.de heard an entirely different record. Awarding it 8/10, the reviewer was already calling it a masterpiece after a second complete listen. Its style seemed difficult to pin down, somewhere between the thrash/death melodicism of Gates of Ishtar and more modern black metal. It was recommended to fans of early Dimmu Borgir and Dismal Euphony. The same mixture that meant derivativeness to Akeley became a harmonious blend here.

In 2003, an Encyclopaedia Metallum reviewer gave it 85 percent and described the record as 'blackened In Flames'. The long songs were considered complex and interesting and the lyrics reminiscent of Cradle of Filth, yet one serious flaw was identified: the running time. More than an hour of this music was simply too much for that reviewer, who suggested listening in instalments. Thus the other great dispute arose—not about originality, but about length.

In 2006, Thrashocore awarded it 7.5/10, its reviewer practically drawing an entire map of Sweden around the record. In Flames, Gardenian, Sacrilege, Dissection, Mörk Gryning—the names came one after another. The reviewer argued that it takes several listens to peel away the impression of plagiarism. Once that happens, the meticulous compositional work becomes apparent: rapid rhythmic changes, heavy, death and black metal elements, atmospheric passages, female vocals, countless riffs and Rehn's keyboards. The melodies of Banquet in the Dark, the keyboards on In Fear They Left the World Unseen and the power of Through the Gloom into the Fire received special praise. At the same time, the vocals were judged weak and certain themes uncomfortably familiar.

One mistake in that review would later become an interesting detail of its own: it called As the Sky Turns Black Again an instrumental, whereas the original album data establish that the instrumental is Together We Summon the Dark itself. This minor error does not make the review worthless. It simply reminds us that sources documenting reception are not untouchable either.

In 2007, the DeBaser writer left no room for doubt: five stars out of five. For this critic, the album's length was not a problem but a challenge and a virtue. It was almost unbelievable, the reviewer wrote, how different the songs were from one another, with no filler and no self-repetition. Particularly important was the powerful atmosphere, achieved without keyboards dominating the music. The title instrumental was heard as a natural introduction to I've Watched the Moon Grow Old. In this reading, the album's sixty-six minutes were not an excess but an entire world.

Two years later, in 2009, came the most radical opposing verdict. A Metal Archives reviewer using the name ratsalad awarded 45 percent and called the record 'unnecessary witching metal' in the very title. The writing was deliberately insulting and provocative. The vampiric Gothic trappings sounded ridiculous, the riffs unoriginal, the drumming monotonous and the vocals irritating. Yet even this reviewer admitted that the music was competently made: there were technically adequate guitar solos, the drums kept time, the synthesizers were pleasant and the female singing worked. Once again the judgement concerned not competence but necessity. In the reviewer's view, there was simply no need for another melodic black metal album of this kind, especially not for sixty-five minutes.

In 2010, A Different Shade of Black Metal Zine reached almost the opposite extreme. It described the record as a classic, underrated debut, praising the fast drumming, powerful bass, melodic guitars, keyboard atmosphere and professional production. The writer saw witchcraft, vampirism, dark occultism and anti-Christian elements in the lyrics. To this reviewer, Abyssos was not a redundant copy but a talented band that had failed to receive the attention it deserved in its own time.

In 2021, twenty-four years after its release, another Metal Archives review awarded 90 percent and answered the 2009 title by calling the album 'necessary witching metal'. The writer especially admired Rehn's guitar work: how the two tracks do not divide into conventional rhythm and lead guitars but intertwine in harmony. The title instrumental was compared to music for a horror film adapted from a Gothic novel. The album was viewed as a substantial achievement in melodic black metal, with regret that Delomelanicon had never been released.

Eight reviews, eight points in time, and meanwhile the record itself had not changed. The same CD turned in the players. Yet time gave it new ears. In 1998, vampire Gothic imagery could seem excessively fashionable; by 2010 it could acquire the value of an underground object of nostalgia; in 2021 a younger or later-arriving listener could hear, from a historical distance, something that once seemed a cliché.

Perhaps this shows more clearly than anything what an album's afterlife means. It is not merely reissues and new listeners. It also means that the same riffs acquire different meanings in another cultural environment. In its own time, Together We Summon the Dark ran up against its close kinship with other Swedish bands and its conspicuous use of fashionable Gothic imagery. Later those very same features could seem the authentic imprint of a vanished era.

CHAPTER 7 — THE VOICES OF THE FANZINES

Something is missing from the history of Abyssos that forms the foundation of the legend of many other bands: there is no extensive touring archive. There are no long series of concert reports, no posters traceable from city to city, no decades of live recordings. Rehn later said unambiguously that Abyssos never toured at all. At the time it simply was not financially feasible. Söderlund went further in another interview: the band never even had a complete conventional live line-up, because playing concerts did not particularly interest them.

The band's presence was therefore preserved elsewhere: on fanzine pages, in postal correspondence, interviews, cassettes and promotional CDs. If Abyssos had a 'tour', it took place on paper and inside envelopes.

The In Deed Hell / Fobiazine interview is one of the liveliest documents of that world. Söderlund does not speak in sterile press-release language. He is blunt, joking, occasionally provocative. Asked about vampirism, he says of course it interests him; otherwise he would not write those lyrics and the cover would not look the way it does. Asked whether he actually believes in vampires, he says no. Throughout history there have been people who practised drinking blood, but he does not believe in fictional vampires who turn into bats.

The conversation is often intentionally provocative and personal, yet important musical remarks slip into it. His irritation at comparisons with Cradle of Filth. His respect for Dissection. His comment that the songs for the next album are already written, that only the lyrics remain incomplete, and that they may return to Academy Studios in November. His promise that the new material will be somewhat more NWOBHM-influenced while remaining unmistakably Abyssos.

Söderlund's taste in music also complicates the picture. Later he listed Coroner, Mercyful Fate and King Diamond, Kiss, Iron Maiden, Arcana, Arcturus, Borknagar, Katatonia, Therion, Garmarna, Cradle of Filth, Bal-Sagoth, Dark Funeral, Frank Zappa and others. Calling himself a 'discoholic', he said he bought several metal albums a week, sometimes more than he could listen to. That list alone shows why Abyssos's music could be so difficult to confine within one neat genre box. Heavy metal, progressive or avant-garde music, black metal, Gothic atmosphere and classic metal all coexisted in the same listening background.

The printed Rehn interview marked 'Page (27)' comes from the era surrounding the second album, Fhinsthanian Nightbreed, but it also illuminates the first record retrospectively. There Rehn speaks of Abyssos as a band influenced by vampirism and emphasises the atmosphere of early vampire films. He feels closer to the old approach typified by Nosferatu than to the spectacular Hollywood variants. He mentions Bram Stoker as a writer who, in his view, preserved the vampire myth's horror and charm particularly well. That conversation confirms that the visual world of the first album was not a one-off marketing trick. The same mythology was carried into the second album's era.

The Schwermetall interview arose in a different atmosphere. The relationship between the band and Cacophonous was breaking down, Meidal was no longer in the line-up, the second album had appeared and the future had grown uncertain. Söderlund still spoke with humour, but he had harsh words for the label. According to him, they had been arguing for over a year about promises concerning merchandise, a digipak, T-shirts, vinyl and accounting. Ultimately, the label cancelled the contract, citing their 'behaviour towards the label'. Söderlund maintained that this behaviour had essentially consisted of demanding answers about promises and sales figures.

Rehn's later retrospective told much the same story in a less heated tone. According to him, after the second album Cacophonous seemed to have vanished underground. Communication became infrequent, questions went unanswered, and promotion became uncertain. Rehn believed that the label faced serious difficulties and was forced to release many of its bands. The two accounts do not have quite the same emotional tone, but they lead to the same outcome: only two albums were produced under a four-album contract.

The fanzines are indispensable because they preserve more than information. They preserve temperament: anger at misguided comparisons, excitement before a new album, disappointment with a label, stubborn attachment to the band's own imagery. If only discographical database entries survived, the history of Abyssos would amount to a few lines. In the fanzines, however, we can hear how the band members thought about themselves while their story was still unfolding rather than a finished past.

CHAPTER 8 — ACCELERATION AFTER THE FIRST ALBUM

The release of Together We Summon the Dark was not followed by a long rest. By 1998 the new songs had been written. In a contemporary interview Söderlund said that the music was ready, the lyrics were not yet quite complete, and they planned to return to Academy Studios in November. He described the direction as somewhat more NWOBHM-oriented, but emphasised that it would still remain very much Abyssos.

That remark reveals a great deal about the first album's place in hindsight. The band did not simply want to record the same thing again. Rehn would later describe the difference between the two records as a process of development. Together We Summon the Dark had been their first serious experience of making a full-length album in a studio. By the time they went home and began work on Fhinsthanian Nightbreed, they had become older and more experienced. They approached compositions differently and were also given more studio time. The second album became more professional and balanced, partly because the first had taught them how making a full-length record worked.

That development, however, came with a change of personnel. Daniel Meidal missed many rehearsals because of his work. According to Söderlund's later account, two weeks before the studio booking they sat down to talk and concluded there was no longer enough time to make up everything he had missed. He considered it important to stress that it had not been an argument or a conventional dismissal.

He still called Meidal his best friend. The decision was practical: the studio date was approaching and the band could not wait.

In November 1998, Rehn and Söderlund returned to Academy Studios. This time Rehn also played the bass himself. Session vocalists were brought in for the main vocal parts, and the second record featured many more guest voices. Stefan Karlsson contributed male vocals, A-K Anger female vocals, Söderlund's girlfriend recorded a spoken passage, John Oestlund sang backing vocals, Söderlund himself appeared in spoken sections, and Mags even played a solo. Fhinsthanian Nightbreed was thus constructed differently from the debut: a smaller permanent core, more guests and greater studio experience.

The year of its release is certainly 1999, but the precise date once again leads to conflicting sources. The former official biography mentions May, whereas Metal Archives gives 25 December. There is no credible way to erase that discrepancy. More important to the story, however, is the fact that the second album did appear—and that this was exactly when the label infrastructure that had set the first record on an international course began to disappear behind it.

Rehn recalled that the internet did not yet offer the immediate visibility of promotional activity that would become possible later. The band did not know precisely what the label was doing behind the scenes. After the release of Fhinsthanian Nightbreed, however, the silence became tangible. Cacophonous no longer answered as it once had, promotion weakened and information dried up. Meanwhile, Söderlund grew increasingly irritated over accounts, promised release formats and merchandise. The four-album plan suddenly seemed not like a future, but like an unfinished contract.

For the band this must have been particularly frustrating because the creative work had not stopped. It was not a matter of running out of songs. Quite the opposite: Rehn continued writing. When they later sought a new label, a considerable amount of new material was already available. Slowly, the problem had moved entirely outside the music.

CHAPTER 9 — WHEN THE LABEL FALLS SILENT

The end of the relationship with Cacophonous was not a single moment but a long fading away. In Söderlund's memory it was a series of conflicts: promises that never became a digipak, T-shirts or vinyl; sales figures they requested in vain; arguments that ultimately led to the cancellation of the contract. In Rehn's memory it was more a disappearance: a record label that answered less and less often before finally letting the band go. The two perspectives illuminate the same reality from different emotional angles.

Abyssos tried to find another label. The name was known, there were two international albums behind it, and Rehn had finished songs. Yet no viable continuation emerged. Offers came from different parts of the world, but according to Rehn none provided an adequate studio budget. Recording a professional album cost money, and he could not finance it out of his own pocket. If he had been able to, he said, he would have recorded the material long before and offered it for licensing.

Meanwhile Söderlund was growing exhausted. In the Schwermetall interview he announced his departure almost in real time. They had not rehearsed for over a year, no fresh shared inspiration had emerged, and the band was mostly answering letters and giving interviews, as though preserving the possibility of starting again someday. Rehn, however, had been writing all the while and had composed almost enough music for two albums. Söderlund said it would be a shame to throw it away simply because he no longer wanted to rehearse or devote more time to the band. At the same time, he felt his lyrics belonged so profoundly to Abyssos that perhaps it would be better for Rehn to continue under another name.

This is one of the most revealing moments of self-interpretation in the whole story. The identity of Abyssos did not reside in the music alone. Rehn composed its instrumental world, but Söderlund's lyrics supplied the language of vampires, witches, rituals and timeless narrators. If one of them vanished, would the name still mean the same thing? In the end it was not a new record that answered the question, because the new record was never made.

The intended third album was to be called Delomelanicon. According to Rehn, its songs had been written. News of a new Abyssos recording even circulated in 2003, but the complete album never materialised. The story therefore remains strangely open. It is not a case of a band saying everything it had wanted to say and then stopping. Rather, the music of a continuation existed somewhere, but never received the institutional support needed to turn it into a record.

That distinction also casts the debut in a new light. In 1997, Cacophonous had been a gateway that carried a Sundsvall demo to Yorkshire and then to an internationally distributed CD. A few years later, that same world no longer functioned. The band could not create a studio budget through determination alone. Letters and offers were no substitute for genuine financing. One of the most important lessons of the Abyssos story is precisely that behind the romance of the underground stands an extremely prosaic infrastructure: money, studio time, a label, distribution and communication. If enough of those elements fall away, even finished songs may become silent material.

The band gradually disappeared. Its documented ending is generally placed around 2003. Rehn followed other paths. He played keyboards with Evergrey, became associated with Takida, and then formed Angtoria with Sarah Jezebel Deva and Tommy Rehn. Later, the collaboration Torn Between Two Worlds again revealed the cinematic, arrangement-oriented thinking whose beginnings can also be heard in Abyssos's instrumentals and keyboard passages.

Söderlund and Meidal restarted Insalubrious. Both were strongly connected to visual creativity as well; artwork, design, layouts, photography and graphic work were associated with them. It was as if the story had bent back towards its own starting point: the same people, the same early band name, but with two Abyssos albums and the possibility of an unfinished third now lying between.

Around 2005, however, Rehn still did not speak of Abyssos as a past permanently buried. He said that if he ever made another Abyssos album, its artwork and image would be just as dark and vampiric as before. That statement did not produce a new record, but it retained something important: to him, the world of Together We Summon the Dark had not become an embarrassing costume of youth to discard in adulthood. It still belonged to the essence of Abyssos.

CHAPTER 10 — THE RECORD THAT DID NOT REMAIN IN 1997

The disappearance of a band and the disappearance of its record are not the same thing. After the original Cacophonous CD, Together We Summon the Dark continued circulating in other forms. A promotional CD dating from 1997 is also documented, bearing the same NIHIL 26CD catalogue number. In 1998, Mystic Production issued it on cassette in Poland; that same year a Ukrainian Moon Records cassette appeared, classified by the database as an unofficial edition. There are also records of an Angel's of Hell cassette connected with Russia, although sources differ in their handling of its date. A cassette issued by Germany's Transylvanian Blasphemy in 2001, an unofficial Russian CD in 2002, a Malaysian Jamback Records cassette of uncertain date and a later British Cacophonous CD edition all helped keep the material in circulation.

This is not a tidy, straightforward family tree of reissues. It is much more like an underground migration. Official and unofficial copies, different countries, cassettes and CDs, uncertain dates. The record spread to places where the band itself had never toured. The physical objects travelled in the musicians' stead.

Compilations also prolonged its life. In 1997, As the Sky Turns Black Again became part of The Unholy Bible — Cacophonous Label Sampler; in 1998 it appeared on the Rock Extremum compilation under its full subtitle. From the second-album era, Finally I Kissed the Pale Horse was included on Black Metal Vol. 2, while Firebreathing Whore surfaced on Independent Music For Independent People. Those later songs do not represent the material of Together We Summon the Dark, but they show that the Abyssos name continued to circulate in the international underground for years after its debut.

Another form of afterlife is memory. While the band was active, comparisons sometimes felt like an irritating burden. Decades later, however, those very connections help new listeners discover the record. Anyone exploring Dissection, Dawn, Naglfar, Mörk Gryning or the Swedish melodic black/death movement of the 1990s may sooner or later encounter Abyssos. The album thus survives on the fringes of a canon: not necessarily the first name spoken when that era is discussed, but strong enough to keep resurfacing.

The distance between the hostile review of 2009 and the enthusiastic 90-percent rating of 2021 illustrates how strange that legacy is. For one writer, the album was proof that melodic black metal had produced too many mediocre imitations. For the other, the very same material was an essential, necessary work. The disagreement cannot be resolved simply by declaring one side wrong. Together We Summon the Dark really is long. It really does contain recognisable Swedish stylistic traits of its time. Its vampire imagery really is theatrical. At the same time, the guitar work is intricate, the compositions ambitious, the atmosphere consistent, and the record possesses a recognisable physical and lyrical world of its own.

Perhaps that is why it has remained worth arguing about. A completely insignificant record rarely inspires a furious 45-percent dismissal and a passionate 90-percent declaration of admiration separated by decades. Indifference is quieter. Abyssos's first album did not inspire indifference.

EPILOGUE — THE DARKNESS DID NOT END WITH THE NINTH TRACK

Looking back on the story, it is easy to see everything as though it had been leading towards Together We Summon the Dark. The Insalubrious rehearsal room, the new songs, the Abyssos name, Hedberska Studios, the demo cassette, the parcels sent through the post, the Cacophonous offer, Academy Studios—as though it had all been one straight line. In reality, none of those involved could have known what would remain thirty years later.

The record appeared, and a second followed. The four-album contract remained half fulfilled. Meidal withdrew from the band's day-to-day activity, Söderlund eventually grew weary, and Rehn was left with finished songs but neither label nor studio budget. Delomelanicon never became a third chapter. Abyssos did not travel the circuit of clubs and festivals. No great concert legend grew up around it. Judged only by the conventional yardsticks of rock history, the story is too short.

But brevity sometimes means intensity. During Abyssos's few active years there came into being a demo, two full-length records, a recognisable visual world, a distinctively melodic guitar language, fanzine interviews, critical disputes and the shadow of a third album. Together We Summon the Dark captured that first era so powerfully that, even in later memory, it remained one of the principal gateways to the band.

Today the physical album is a historical document in its own right. The PMDC mould, the IFPI codes, the Cacophonous catalogue number, the booklet's folds, the photographs and the credits page are imprints of the same era as the photocopied lettering of fanzines and mail-order lists. It was an age when music travelled more slowly, but every stage left a material trace. A cassette set off through the post. An editor wrote the name Abyssos onto a planned interview list for the next issue. One critic mocked the cover. Another, twenty years later, called the same record an important work of melodic black metal.

All the while the music's own world remains, seemingly unaware of any of this. There is no Cacophonous contract there, no missing merchandise. No studio budget and no Metal Archives percentage. There the moon grows old, the sky turns black again, a dance begins in the mist, a banquet is prepared in darkness, another world opens behind the visible one, and at the end a path leads through the gloom into the fire.

That is the album's strangest victory. It was born entirely of its own age—from one of the densest periods of Swedish melodic extreme metal, the vampire renaissance of the 1990s, the network of fanzines, cassettes and early emails, and the British underground label infrastructure—yet it constructed an interior world of its own as though the end of the twentieth century did not even exist.

On certain points, the sources continue to disagree. 1995 or 1996? Three, five or seven demo tracks? 1:05:44 or 1:05:36? May 1999 or 25 December as the precise release date of the second album? A good story sometimes includes edges that are not sharply defined. Uncertainty is not a flaw when it is acknowledged. It is more like evidence that we are trying to look back at a short-lived underground band through real, scattered traces.

The certainties, however, are enough. Sundsvall. Insalubrious. Abyssos. Wherever the Witches Might Fly. Cacophonous. Academy Studios. 6 October 1997. Nine tracks. A booklet opening into the shape of an inverted cross. An album described both as derivative and as a masterpiece. A third record whose songs were written but never became a physical release.

And one sentence that perhaps closes the story better than any rating: the summoning of darkness in 1997 did not end with the ninth track.