mare cognitum

When we gaze at the stars, we often describe it as “looking out” at the night sky, as if we’re contemplating something separate from ourselves. But in a way, by looking out into the cosmos, we’re also staring back at ourselves, aren’t we? There’s something elegant and wonderful about this, but it can also call to mind our disappointments as well. This was something very much on the mind of Jacob Buczarski when he crafted Mare Cognitum’s latest album, Solar Paroxysm. ¶ “I’ve been dwelling quite a bit on the reality of our failures as a species here on earth and the way we continue to treat each other and our planet as completely disposable,” says Buczarski. “It both saddens and angers me, and I see no end to it. I feel that this planet is very close to wiping us all from it soon if we don’t change our ways.” Saddening as this thought is, he was able to put it to good use: “I felt frustrated by this reality, and meditated on it a lot. I ended up channeling this into the music.”

Indeed, Mare Cognitum has always been a dazzling blend of melodic grandeur and thunderous power, making the project one of the most vital in modern black metal. For this album, Buczarski says that he “stripped things down a bit” and “wanted to do a guitar-focused album, focusing on riffs and a very direct, very traditionally ‘metal’ approach.” This meant “no lengthy ambient sections, no keyboard-driven writing or symphonics, rolling down the dial on the reverb. I wanted everything up front, very present and very aggressive in sound. And I pushed my limits as a guitarist on every song.” This aggression is immediately evident with the use of palm-muted guitars, which Buczarski tellingly indicates as, “a bit of a return to my death metal roots, maybe.”

Like many artists, Buczarski was able to use the isolation of the pandemic to his advantage. “If anything,” he notes, “it has allowed me more time to devote to musical endeavors.” And although he actually recorded Solar Paroxysm prior to the pandemic, Buczarski says that it “did finally offer me a lot of time to dedicate to ideas that were trapped in my imagination before. So, I’ve made the best of it, and this is just the beginning of what I’ve managed to accomplish.”

As for the multi-instrumentalist’s worries about us as a species, it might help if we start building back up with each other. After all, it was Carl Sagan who wrote in Cosmos that, “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not