When the artist known as Ayloss—Greek for “immaterial,” like a phantom—first began playing metal, he had no intention of making political music. His first band, a melodic death metal duo called Divine Element, lived strictly in the realm of fantasy. When he started Spectral Lore, his flagship black metal project, it wasn’t borne out of a political impulse but a desire to record and release music more quickly than he could with Divine Element. (Divine Element did eventually re-form and release two albums.) Ayloss is one of the most outspoken leftists in the black metal scene today, but his stridency didn’t come naturally. “In the beginning, I would say that I wasn’t as political as I am now,” Ayloss says. “This interest, and also, to some extent, me being political, started from my engagement with the black metal scene.”
Black metal has historically been a haven for outsider ideologies—including those on the far right. While fascists are by no means a majority of black metal musicians or fans, they’re an unignorable part of the scene. The right-wing presence that hovered around the music he loved began to radicalize Ayloss. “Nobody was speaking about this stuff,” he says. “As a young, kind of unpolitical person, I was going with it up until the point when I wasn’t going with it anymore. Up to the point when it started annoying me very much, and I saw the bad aspects, not of the music itself, but of the culture. This kind of complicity that I saw through the scene made me want to talk about it a lot.”
Ayloss describes what happened next as a “process of politicizing myself.” He studied political theory, history, and current events, and he began writing his leftist awakening into his lyrics. The music itself was becoming more radical, too, as Ayloss graduated beyond melodic death metal and atmospheric black metal to touch on international folk music traditions, epic heavy metal, dungeon synth, contemporary classical, industrial music, and more. Over the past decade or so, Ayloss has become one of black metal’s most fascinating figures—an increasingly confident antifascist firebrand, as well as a bold musical adventurer and formal experimentalist. In a long video chat and several follow-up emails, he shed some light on his ever-growing discography.
Spectral Lore
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Ayloss started Spectral Lore as an experiment to see if he could write and record an album by himself. What began as an ambient black metal project soon turned into a showcase for a wide range of musical ideas. “I want to put basically almost everything that I like in music in Spectral Lore,” he says. “There are few things that I wouldn’t put in Spectral Lore.”
To date, that outlook has yielded 17 releases under the Spectral Lore banner, with dizzying variety among them. There have been three volumes in the mainline, Roman numeral–bearing series of Spectral Lore albums, with a fourth due later this year. Outside of that series, he’s dipped into dissonant black metal (Sentinel), cosmic black metal (the Wanderers split with Mare Cognitum), and kosmische synth (11 Days). Ayloss may not have been political when he started Spectral Lore, but 11 Days, the project’s most recent release, is a furious, deeply moving response to the Pylos migrant boat disaster in the waters off his native Greece in 2023. The Greek coast guard tried to force the boat into Italian waters rather than rescue it, and hundreds of migrants died in the ensuing shipwreck.
“This is taking place at the same time as a huge increase in racism and anti-immigrant sentiment in Greek society,” Ayloss says. “Watching this unfold during the last decade has radicalized me into seeing how deeply racism is embedded in society. But I would say the most important part that has given me inspiration to create a concept album like 11 Days, is encountering a strong pro-immigrant, grassroots movement in Greece that is fighting against the odds, criminalization by the state, the dominant culture which averts its eye from such issues, and to which I wanted to contribute to somehow.”
Mystras
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP, Cassette
If Spectral Lore took a while to find its political footing, Mystras had antifascism baked into its concept from the jump. “One of the main concepts of black metal projects in the 2020s is reclaiming this music from the far right and giving it new meanings,” Ayloss says. “Taking the aesthetics, taking the themes, and trying to give new and better meanings and stories to that.”
For Mystras, that meant looking at medieval history through the lens of class struggle and anti-imperialism. The heroes on Castles Conquered and Reclaimed and its follow-up, Empires Vanquished and Dismantled, aren’t the kings and dukes—they’re the peasants. “I’m not a historian, but I tried my best to find things that, in a modern sense, can appeal to me,” Ayloss says. “About progressive political movements, liberation stories, overcoming oppression, and these things. I was trying to come up with medieval stories that we can take and produce meaning from.”
Mystras is also the project in Ayloss’s discography that’s most influenced by folk music, both in the longer black metal compositions and short interstitial pieces that reinterpret traditional songs from across the medieval world. “I wanted to make clear from the beginning that there is no claim of authenticity and experience,” Ayloss says. “But it was a kind of an experimental project, that is trying to imagine old medieval themes, but doing it in a completely new way.”
Auriferous Flame
Ayloss thinks it’s important for black metal artists to reckon with and process their problematic influences. Auriferous Flame draws on the sound and spirit of some of the bands that metalheads encounter early on their journey but may later choose to renounce. That makes an album like Ardor for Black Mastery radical, in Ayloss’s mind, even if its sound is relatively conventional compared to some of the wild experiments in his catalog. “As far as reclaiming goes, perhaps it’s my boldest attempt,” he says. “Because it goes into the kind of black metal music that is perhaps the most ‘dangerous’ one. The very aggressive, the very dark, the very bleak styles of black metal music.”
Clarent Blade
Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
Unlike a lot of metalheads, who start with Iron Maiden or Judas Priest and gradually get into more extreme stuff, Ayloss went straight to black and death metal. “It took me some time to get to heavy metal,” he says. “But when I did, it was very interesting for me to discover the more melodic aspects of metal music. Metal music that’s more associated with light, metal that’s not just dark and destructive and bleak.”
In Clarent Blade, Ayloss celebrates that luminous sound, citing influences like Manilla Road, Cirith Ungol, and Lordian Guard. On the project’s lone album, Return Into Forever, he performs triumphant, melodic, epic heavy metal, complete with clean vocals—something he knows isn’t his strong suit. “I don’t know how to sing,” he admits. “I wanted, to be completely honest, to do it a little bit like one of the demos of the heavy metal bands. Things aren’t perfect yet. The singer isn’t perfect. That’s not a problem if the emotion is there and the heavy metal fire is there.”
Fortress of the Pearl
One of Ayloss’s strangest projects is Fortress of the Pearl. “I wanted to discover new soundscapes that I didn’t venture into up to this point with my projects,” Ayloss says. “I wanted to try completely new structures, new sounds. Unconventional sounds, and all these things. And to have no expectations about what would come out. Just do completely experimental stuff.”
At first, that experimental urge manifested as something like psychedelic black metal. On the two most recent releases under the Fortress of the Pearl name, The Grove and Agony and Ecstasy, the sound has started to borrow more from 20th century minimal classical composers like Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and Arvo Pärt. “For the last two albums, I was very much immersed in minimal classical music,” Ayloss confirms. “I was trying to come up with an eccentric black metal sound for Fortress of the Pearl on these particular two albums.”
Under a Banner Black as Blood
Cassette, T-Shirt/Apparel, Compact Disc (CD)
Ayloss also has a handful of non-metal projects, including the “militant dungeon synth” duo Under a Banner Black as Blood. A collaboration with the keyboardist and percussionist Spider of Pnyx, the self-titled UABBAB album doesn’t sound much like traditional dungeon synth. Pounding, martial rhythms keep bubbling to the surface, and there’s an austerity to the music in the place of dungeon synth’s typical playfulness. “The idea was in the beginning to do a darker dungeon synth record,” Ayloss says. “But as we started working, we combined this with the industrial element, and we had this idea to do a sort of politically inspired, industrial-inspired album.”
Under a Banner Black as Blood is one of Ayloss’s most explicitly political projects, despite its wordless songs. “When we don’t have any lyrics, you are forced to make certain references in the aesthetics themselves, or in the song titles, or on the cover,” he says. “You can produce messages in a lot of ways without actually saying them out loud with words. This is the interesting thing about art. We have done this with this project.”
A Compendium of Curiosities
The most open-ended of Ayloss’s projects is undoubtedly A Compendium of Curiosities. Its breadth almost defies description, despite much of the music being rooted in dungeon synth and related genres. (For one especially gonzo example: The Book of Privileges features synth covers of Spanish Renaissance composers who Christopher Columbus may have heard before his last voyage to the Americas—with proceeds benefiting the Legal Defense Fund for Tiny House Warriors and Indian Residential School Survivors Society.) “I like what the name of the project alludes to,” Ayloss says. “This is a collection of random ideas, musical ideas, that I have, without any particular preconceived style or identity. It’s another project in which I’m experimenting for my own pleasure, usually doing albums quickly, in a kind of stream-of-creativity way. It’s very close to my heart, this project. I think it’s one of the more unique things that I have done.”
Ontrothon, Saga of the Ancient Glass
Compact Disc (CD)
Imagine taking part in a five-year-long Dungeons & Dragons campaign with your friend. Now imagine that friend is Ayloss, and he’s made a soundtrack for you to listen to while you play. That’s the origin story of Ontrothon, Saga of the Ancient Glass, an epic dungeon synth score for a campaign led by the Dungeon Master and writer Mistdancer. You’ll never be able to experience the album in quite the way Ayloss and his fellow players did, but he hopes the music brings you into its world. “The idea is to describe the world in little musical vignettes,” he says. “They represent either a location or an event. The idea is to do musical storytelling. It’s like a soundtrack. This is a very interesting thing, and hard to do, to produce a story without any words, to create a sort of world and story that you get by listening to it.”
