Sung to the North (Natural Snow Buildings)

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!  At 59 minutes and 42 seconds, The First Conjuror from Natural Snow Buildings' 2008 album Sung to the North is the longest track in the NSB discography, as far as I can tell.

Sung to the North was released in an extremely limited edition of 100 hand-numbered copies.  It was initially available only with purchase of The Snowbringer Cult, another attempt by label Students of Decay to promote NSB's music.  Sung to the North's cover art of a wandering Eskimo is similar to the art on Snowbringer Cult. I suppose the beast following the wanderer is a tupilak, which was also a song title on TDotMatS.  In Greenlandic tradition, a tupilak is an avenging monster conjured by ritualistic chants, and then placed into the sea to seek and destroy a specific enemy.  The beast is created by a witch or shaman using various objects such as animal bone, skin, hair, or sinew and even body parts taken from the corpses of children.

The opening track, At That Time, It Was Always Winter, is probably my favorite on this album, starting with some pretty, Dance of the Moon and the Sun-type music before turning toward the darker side midway through.

The First Conjuror starts with some foreboding drone and ominous-sounding percussion.  The wordless vocals in this portion remind me of the chorus during the monolith scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The sense of imminent dread builds throughout the track, as various sounds, some pleasant and some not, arise up from the drone until it's almost unrecognizable from the original portions.  The musical allegory here is of a conjurer summoning his tupilak, and then the physical manifestation of the great beast itself.

After the hour-long First Conjuror, the album title track actually sounds short at "only" 9½ minutes.

Titles and track times are as follows:

1. At That Time, It Was Always Winter (10:30)
2. The First Conjuror (59:42)
3. Sung to the North (9:28)