Thy Catafalque have released Cseremisz, and the song is a forgery in the best sense: a folk song from a tradition that never produced it.
Cseremisz is an older name for the Mari, a people of the Volga and Kama region, and Tamas Katai first heard about them in a classroom. "This song is a fictitious folk song from that region that could be connected to recent historical events as well," he says, which is a careful way of pointing at a war without naming it. The lyric moves between animals, open grassland and a black ship carrying sleeping soldiers down the river at night.
The Male Choir of Tiszafoldvar sing on it, twenty voices, next to traditional instruments. In total thirty four musicians and vocalists appear on the album.
XIII: Sarga erdo, Yellow Forest, arrives on 20 November through Season of Mist, and Katai says it has no single story running through it, only the feeling of walking through a forest made of the past. The label points out something else: for the first time in thirteen albums a human being played the drums, Szenti, rather than a machine.