There's no drummer on To Embrace the Vampyric Blood. Scorpios and Nocturnal Overlord programmed the whole thing on a drum machine, tracked it to four-track tape in a San Diego bedroom, and opened the record with nearly five minutes of narration, wind and unresolved synthesiser before a single riff arrives.
Crimson Moon began in 1994 as three musicians out of the wreckage of San Diego death metal band Infested, but the third, Trommelnd Herr, left after a handful of rehearsals, and Scorpios and Nocturnal Overlord carried on alone - Scorpios on bass, vocals and lyrics, Nocturnal Overlord on guitar, keyboards and drum programming. Two demos followed as a duo - a self-titled tape recorded that December, then Into the Nocturnal Forest in 1995 - before the pair recorded their debut album in 1996 and put it out through the American label Abyss Productions.
For a bedroom recording, it reaches oddly far. Aphazel, guitarist in the Norwegian black metal band Ancient, guests on lead guitar for "The Eye of the Draconis" - a genuinely transatlantic favour to call in in 1996, when arranging it meant letters and cassettes rather than an email.
The riffs, when they arrive, are efficient rather than showy: songs like "Kingdom of Shadows" and "Carpe Noctem" move fast and don't overstay. But Crimson Moon plainly care as much about the spaces around the songs as the songs themselves - the whispered introduction, the long synthesiser outro titled simply "Embraced" - as though the vampire in the title is less a character than an atmosphere they're trying to sustain for forty minutes straight.
It suits the man behind it.
Scorpios is by most accounts a serious student of the occult rather than a tourist in it, given to writing long essays on lucid dreaming, medieval theology and astral projection under his own name. "It is not an image," he has said of the band's subject matter. "It is what we do and we will not change this because it is getting too trendy or too hated." Crimson Moon never played live to promote the album - their first show wouldn't come until a decade later, in 2006.
The album has barely stayed in print in any conventional sense, and that's exactly why it has never gone away. Copies have surfaced on a cassette label in Canada, a vinyl press in China, a CD reissue out of Australia, another vinyl edition from Greece - the record moving, decade after decade, through exactly the kind of small, devoted labels that keep this corner of the genre alive decades on.
That distance from Scandinavia is the point. To Embrace the Vampyric Blood belongs to a specific mid-'90s moment when American and Norwegian black metal were reading the same books - Anne Rice, Bram Stoker, whatever occult paperback was circulating - and arriving at the same conclusion from opposite coasts: that the genre's real subject was never violence, but the theatre of it.
