Back in early 2022, I was in a weird place mentally.

I had just released my first handful of singles under the Rotgod moniker, after years and years spent working on "Sonic degeneracy"... and yet, now that I was finally on the way to fulfill my vision, I was feeling confused and directionless, not sure anymore of what I really wanted, after all this time spent working myself to death. Most importantly, for the first time ever, I was feeling the need for a different kind of artistic experience - not just raw blasting noise, so to speak. Among the many songs I had been working on in previous years, there were a few ones ("Inner crisis", "Jesus Christ pornostar") betraying a certain Maiden-like melodic instinct amidst all the nihilistic chaos. Perhaps, the time had finally come to delve deeper into these melodic sensibilities, in a way that would be entirely antithetical and incompatible with what I had done up to that point with Rotgod. This thing needed a different name, and an utter 180° of a presentation compared to my main project: not grotesque, offensive and over-the-top anymore - on the contrary, just elegant, restrained and beautiful.

And so, The Ineffable was born. Just for the time of one song.

For many years, I'd been humming a certain tremolo-picked riff in my head endlessly. It sounded blatantly inspired to the swedish melodic black metal sound pioneered by bands such as Dissection, Sacramentum, Dawn, Naglfar, Vinterland, Unanimated and The Moaning, which I always loved due to their sharp, epic brand of sublime melancholia. Around past summer, I had even come up with a potential melodic intro to that riff - perhaps already daydreaming about a side-project to some extent. Starting from these ideas, in january 2022 I wrote "Defeated by Chaos" - a song that explored everything I felt I had to say in this particular music genre within the span of ten minutes.

However, I also was well aware that a song like this would require much higher recording/mixing skills than my own - being used to work only within the confines of the rawest, vilest brands of sonic extremism up until then. So I reached out to Lutto, a brilliant gothic black metal band from Siracusa led by my dear old friend Miasma Sulfureo (who had already appeared in the "Sybaritic metal" videoclip, playing the characters of Osvaldo Paniccia and Prof Testo), asking for a collaboration to record "Defeated by Chaos" for my side-project. No sooner said than done. Over the course of spring 2022, the song was entirely recorded and mixed by Lutto guitarist/producer Dionysius, with Miasma Sulfureo on bass, me on lead vocals (under the less ostentatious "N.M." nickname) and Azrael on backing vocals. The result was astonishing, managing to fully capture the sharp, cold sounds from the 90's Swanö/Tägtgren school of production I used as main reference.

With such shellproof musical offering, and an exceptional artwork/logo provided by Gore Occulto, digital single "Defeated by Chaos" was finally released on august 8, 2022 - being met with enthusiastic responses and shared around notable underground promotional spaces such as Museo del Black Metal Italiano.

My collaboration with Lutto did not end here: on february 21, 2023 a limited split tape (30 copies only) was released, featuring the song "Defeated by Chaos" on one side and Lutto's recent single "Romantico odore (di cripta)" on the other side.

A few copies can still be ordered from The Ineffable's Bandcamp page.

The Ineffable was conceived from the very start as a project living on borrowed time: just enough to drop the bombshell, and then it would go on self-destruct mode. Many to this day still resent this choice, claiming The Ineffable is actually the best project I've ever done. The truth is, some things are better left to rest once they have outlived their usefulness. With Rotgod, my inspiration can go up or down depending on time period, but it can never wane completely: new ideas for more bursts of underground rawness never stop blossoming inside my deranged mind, whether I want it or not. The Ineffable, on the other hand, was a rare, delicate experience, not to be marred or messed with: it was the only time I ever found myself making music with the intent of conveying beauty and elicit wonder, instead of brutalizing and shitting all over my listeners as I usually have so much fun doing. Perhaps, in this context, the "black metal" label isn't even entirely accurate: "Defeated by Chaos" is not a particularly dark or "evil" song by any means (something you might instead say for a band like Dissection) - it's just a very aggressive, melancholic, epic tune, sounding more akin to a heavy metal track filtered through basic black metal technique (and I'm aware this is a remark that has also been made by very insightful listeners in regards to albums such as Immortal's "At the heart of winter" or Naglfar's "Vittra", just to name a couple). Maybe that's the reason why everything I had to say with The Ineffable amounts only to that one ten-minute song: capturing beauty and wonder (what we might call... "the ineffable", if you will) is something much more rare and difficult compared to the free-flowing channeling of all those negative, destructive emotions which are instead part of my day-to-day life, always feeding me with renewed inspiration. To force inspiration on a project with such "noble" intents would mean to water it down almost certainly, which is why I preferred to nip it in the bud instead. "Proud to commit commercial suicide!", as said by Max Cavalera and Alex Newport while slaughtering their newborn industrial side-project Nailbomb in its cradle.

Nevertheless, The Ineffable remains an extremely important chapter in my musical journey: together with the two "Polemics and obscenity" EPs (which I finished writing around the same time, despite releasing them only in 2024), it helped me crawl my way out of a creative/identity crisis I was going through at the time (in this regard, lyrics for "Defeated by Chaos" are extremely personal, which is why I never published them), allowing me to explore unknown territories and express a more vulnerable side of myself (without irony or anti-climactic dissimulation) before returning home, in the realm of raw sonic sewage, with a renewed confidence in my own abilities. In this respect, I can add that without my brief experience as The Ineffable, I don't think I would have started the Black Katharsis project - which instead is a thorough, proper exploration of black metal's rawest, darkest, most lo-fi essence that still goes on to this day, and for which (coincidentally) the first few songs were written just shortly after the release of "Defeated by Chaos". Nothing's created and nothing's destroyed, I guess?

The Ineffable is dead, long live The Ineffable... unless fate still has some surprise in store for us.

- N.M.