“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

“Let us descend to Hades, where I must see if the ghost will speak.”

— Homère, The Odyssey XI

Hypogean lair, born under the aegis of Gladivs Records, the Katábasis collection (from the Greek κατάβασις, "descent"), dedicated to Black Metal, plunges the initiate into unfathomable abysses. Nightmares relentlessly tear at consciousness, while a negative, chthonic, cruel, and implacable radiance bathes a vast labyrinth of ruins in its glow.

Katábasis is a fundamental topos: a journey through the underworld, whether subterranean or internal, abstract or cloaked in a catacombal visage. A heroic initiation on the banks of the Styx, the traveler, broken, confronts the specters of their most visceral terrors. It is a trial, a passage. The hero braves their own finitude to be reborn… or perhaps to sink forever. Lost in Pandæmonium, under the piercing gaze of the black raven and governed by Saturn, this descent intertwines with the Nigredo, the alchemical phase of blackening. Matter disintegrates. Primordial chaos asserts its reign.

Draped in the black night of the soul, Katábasis confronts the initiate with metaphysical affliction. Calcined, condemned, he wanders through a maze, forming an abhorrent perspective. Within this sanctuary-dungeon resonate a thousand and one sepulchral chords, saturated by the necrotic echo of vociferations and apocalyptic visions. Here, the music is a mystical putrefaction, a dissonant liturgy. An immersion in strident litanies, Katábasis is also a sonic archaeology of nothingness: a song of collapse, a darkroom. This path is an obscure sun—ineffable, monumental, both beautiful and terrifying—that fascinates as much as it reveals, illuminates as much as it blinds.