Friday, September 2, 2022

Winter '98 [Mixtape 35]

The Crown • Sacrilege • Dark Tranquillity • Edge of Sanity • Ceremonial Oath • The Haunted
In Flames • Dawn • At The Gates • Eucharist • Dan Swanö • Opeth • Hypocrisy


Direct Download [right click + "Save As"]

The Crown: "Earthborn"
taken from the album "The Burning"

Sacrilege: "Torment of Life"
taken from the album "Lost in the Beauty You Slay"

Dark Tranquillity: "Silence And The Fimament Withdrew"
taken from the album "The Gallery"

Edge of Sanity: "Silent"
taken from the album "Purgatory Afterglow"

Ceremonial Oath: "Dreamsong"
taken from the album "Carpet"

The Haunted: "Invein"
taken from the album "The Haunted"

In Flames: "Dead Eternity"
taken from the album "Jester Race"

Dawn: "Falcula"
taken from the album "Slaughtersun (Crown of the Triarchy)"

At The Gates: "Forever Blind"
taken from the album "Terminal Spirit Disease"

Eucharist: "Dissolving"
taken from the album "Mirrorworlds"

Dan Swanö: "The Big Sleep"
taken from the album "Moontower"

Opeth: "Demon of the Fall"
taken from the album "My Arms, Your Hearse"

Hypocrisy: "The Arrival of the Demons, Pt. 2"
taken from the album "Abducted"

In college, I never "went home for the holidays". I spent the first 22 years of my life as a foreigner in someone else's country, and so "home" was literally an alien concept to me. I had nowhere to go back to, and so mostly stayed in Brooklyn during the breaks between semesters.

I spent the winter of 1998 in my dorm room. Unable to sleep regular hours, I'd watch horror movies til dawn and wake up late in the afternoon - just in time to watch the sun go down again. For a nineteen year old who grew up near the equator, the winter light and seeing the sun set at 5 pm was magical.

I hardly saw another human on campus during those weeks between Christmas and the beginning of the spring semester. For the most part, I had the dorm all to myself. Aside from walking to Myrtle Avenue to get Chinese food, I rarely left my room. It was the the first taste of the isolation that's characterized most of my adult life.

The Swedish death metal scene that I was obsessed with was blowing up (Terrorizer referred to it as "The New Wave of Swedish Death Metal", while other publications called it "The Gothenberg Sound"; the phrase "melodic death metal" had yet to achieve widespread use.] I had ordered some albums from Century Media's distro before the semester ended, and used the time to myself to get know them. Names like "Opeth" and "Arch Enemy" that were clandestine and obscure only a few years prior were on their way to becoming inescapable in the metal world. But isolated in that dorm room during the Winter of '98, I still had them all to myself. They were all I had, and helped me enjoy the solitude.