Artist: Traum
Country: USA
Label: Torture Palace Productions
Formats: Demo Tape
Year: 2025
Honestly, I missed this project’s first offering, ‘Demo 2024’, but I would like to make amends by spending a few words on this follow-up, which was recently released by Torture Palace Productions, a label that was previously unknown to me as well. Since there is no further information about Traum to share, let us just sit back and enjoy a 20-minute exercise in Raw Black Metal…
If we’re starting with some sort of verdict: ‘Diminishment In Perpetuum’ is a fairly good demo tape with plenty of good ideas and decent musicianship, but it lacks consistency and coherence. Some of the riffs are definitely great and memorable, especially the slower ones that have a melancholic and overall sombre tone, the same can be said about the more “depressive” passages and the folky-melodies. There’s a bit of older Satyricon and Burzum in the songs and loads of more traditional American Black Metal (USBM, if you prefer), a combination that works remarkably well. But the individual songs lack a common thread that ties them together. Some random screaming and rattling chains samples doesn’t help to keep a certain flow in the music. As a listener it feels you’re being tossed around a bit, and after the twenty minutes it is hard to really come up with a concrete idea what you’ve just listened to. Sometimes it is slow and doomy, then it comes back to more classic Black Metal and, most importantly, the transitions between them aren’t smooth and left me a little unsatisfied.
My guess is that the person behind Traum is a rather young and inexperienced musician, so it’s not appropriate to tear it down or just be offensive. Encouragement is more in place, and despite my reservations, this demo gives us enough reason to look out for the next demo.
