• Kekht Arakh “Pale Swordsman” Cassette

Sacred Bones


Cassette format.

Këkht Aräkh is the Ukrainian project founded in 2018 by Dmitry Marchenko. The sophomore album Pale Swordsman follows yet expands on what Dmitry was already experimenting with in the debut Night & Love. Originally released on the Finnish label Livor Mortis in 2021, Pale Swordsman goes to even greater extents in building a bold and atmospheric sonic palette, and it’s now seeing a worldwide reissue via Brooklyn label Sacred Bones.  

Work on the record started in spring of 2020. “I decided to give my absolute everything to the next album” said Dmitry reflecting on this period “and for the sake of better concentration, I tried to isolate myself for a couple of weeks at our family’s country house outside of the city. There I came up with half of the songs for the album (Thorns, Night Descends, In the Garden, Amid the Stars, Crystal).” 

For the sound design of the album, Dmitry was inspired by The Stooges’ Raw Power to deliver a more soft sounding album, decisively less “metal”. Traditional black metal song structures still persist in songs like “Night Descends” and “In The Garden”. However, their rawness and fast tempos is quickly cut through by dark ambient passages in “Amor” and “Intro” and softly played desolate ballads like “Nocturne” and “Lily”.