Lamia Culta are a project from the city of Lviv, Ukraine, formed almost a decade ago. The first album was called Patre Satane (self-released in 2009, re-released in 2011 via More Hate Productions from Russia) and brought a bombastic, majestic and occult form of Symphonic Black Metal. In mean time, however, Lamia Culta evolved from a band (which included former / current / session / live members from e.g. Capitollium, Ambivalence, Molphar, Ruina or Kroda) into a one-woman project (with Karina Kulyk aka Fosco Culto taking care of the better part). The moniker did not change, but the musical approach did, even though the initial obscurity remained.
Woman Scarred, the first release from Lamia Culta as solo-outfit, has duration of forty eight minutes and still is ‘black’, but not ‘metal’ anymore. The album opens with a strange (and short) intro, called Retap Renson, which is a sampled thing, but the second title, Into The Night, shows the new face of Lamia Culta. After a rather obscure and bombastic start, the instrumental composition evolves into a fairy-like atmospheric piece of melancholy, reminding me to the likes of Grabesmond or Skythrone. Dwelling In The Dark goes further, by adding distantly-present blackish screams and operatic choirs to dark-occult spheres of Dark Ambient / Neo-Classical. It sounds like a haunting symbiosis of Autumn Tears (again referring to the fairytale-influenced atmosphere), Profanum (the bleak grimness), Sui Generis Umbra (the mystic and occult eeriness) and related acts. And this is the essence of the album: an industrialized and / or neo-classical mixture of Dark Wave, Ambient and Black Atmospheric Music with an occult, mystic and spiritual approach. It has not much to do with ‘metal’, as mentioned before, even though a song like She-Wolf comes with some guitar violence, but this album exhales the blackness of Summoning, Finnugor, Uruk-Hai or the first Lamia Culta-album by covering the whole in a mostly uncomfortable veil of Dark Art. A haunting soundtrack it is, f*cking with your mind!