2025 Band Lineup

HULDER (led by the self-same artist) was born in 2018 within the dense landscape of the American Pacific Northwest. The hauntingly grandiose new HULDER album Verses In Oath constitutes the most majestic, untamed manifestation thus far in the band’s journey of conquest, as new territory is put to flame and conquered by sword and shield. The ancient sorrow-filled melancholy and seething spirit that are the essence of “Hearken The End” permeate the entire album, by now a fundamental detail in HULDER’s identity where roots run deep in long forgotten soil. 

Ragana is a duo whose members alternate duties on drums, guitar, and vocals to produce some of the most unique and affecting dark music in metal today. The two-piece came together in 2011 in the DIY punk scene of Olympia, WA. Held together by an intense focus on raw emotion and haunting atmospherics, Ragana shifts seamlessly from mesmerizing vocal harmonies to piercing, heart-ripping screams and back again, yielding music that is heavy, beautiful and punishing all at once.

Cinder Well is the musical project of California-based multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer Amelia Baker. Characterized by her singular vocals, Baker's compositions chart a sonic journey through cinematic soundscapes, weaving surrealistic lyricism with stylistic elements inspired by traditional music, ballads and doom metal.

Alda was created by Tim Brown, Jace Bruton, Steph Bruton and Michael Korchonnoff during the Fall of 2007 in Tacoma, Washington. They have released four full-length albums of Black Metal and Dark Folk-inspired music with a thematic focus on the human relationship with death, change, and our place among the multitude of beings and landscapes that embody the living natural world.

The Keening is the solo music project of Rebecca Vernon, weaving a web of lush orchestration, American Gothic sensibilities and wintry murder ballads set against a backdrop of dark, shimmering folk. Vernon’s previous band SubRosa echoes in The Keening’s chamber doom, flowing with flute, strings, harp, French horn, piano, organ and hammered dulcimer. Ultra-melodic forays into haunted bogs, endless wells, secret crimes, jeweled cages and the unenviable curse of being a murder witness abound. 

Aerial Ruin, based in Portland, Oregon is the primarily acoustic solo project of Erik Moggridge whose  

“richly evocative dark folk style makes for a head-in-hand listening experience. Yes it’s dark and minimal, evoking solitude and loneliness but also magic and mesmerizing, soothing and restorative” .

Hail formed in 1996 by Carl Annala fusing extreme metal, performance, and art into a multifaced exploration of occultism, art theory, mythology, and the exploration of the personal psyche. Collaborations in sound, tension, transition, and thought merge through noise, metal, and dynamic motion hell bent on collision.

SORCIA hails from the Snoqualmie Valley in the backwoods of Seattle, Washington. Combining blues-laden groovy riffs, heavy doom and raw grunge with the added dynamic of dual vocals, they deliver their own method of Pacific Northwest stoner sludge metal.

Formed in Santiago, Chile in 2014, IIII ("Cuatro") is a quartet that combines doom, sludge, and post-hardcore, creating equally ominous and luminous atmospheres. Their shows are usually very intense, shifting from the fury of hardcore to moments of intimate calm.

Dunava (from Дунав, the Bulgarian name for the Danube river) is a Seattle-based vocal ensemble made up of singers with broad musical and performance experience and a passion for the folkloric songs of the Balkans. Dunava’s repertoire spans a vast range of vocal traditions, featuring lush harmonies and strident dissonance, dance tunes and mournful ballads. Some songs are hundreds of years old and have been passed on through oral tradition, while others are recent compositions in the unique style of specific regions. The lyrics celebrate home, family, and love, and also lament hardship and loss. The expressive music speaks for itself and communicates with listeners all over the world across language boundaries.

Founded by Ian Campbell in western Canada in 2012, CROOKED MOUTH has developed their own style of post-industrial folk music, blending influences from the original neofolk wave, with the obscurities of 60/70s acid folk, archaic folklore groups, post-punk music, and the contemporary underground. Since 2022, the band has been based in Vilnius, Lithuania. 

Founded in Germany in 2019, MONDERNTE is a one-person satanic musical entity based in Reykjavík, Iceland. The sole creatrix S.W.R. invokes music that oscillates between black metal, dark folk, occult rock and dark ambient, while deliberately dissolving genre boundaries in the name of “Aural Luciferian Witchcraft”.

Liminal Shroud is a three-piece black metal band that released its third album, Visions of Collapse, on Willowtip Records in July 2024. Based on Vancouver Island, the surging oceans and luminous skies of the coast are forces reflected in the juxtaposition of Liminal Shroud's atmospheric and melodic black metal – at times harrowing and explosive, at times somber and contemplative, yet with an ever-present sense of elemental power and cathartic conviction. 

Originating from California's Central Coast, Illudium merges sun-soaked dreamscapes and rich, honey-like passages with the darker, heavier elements of post-metal.

Seek the Light has been integrating storytelling, ritual, and music in the Cascadian underground for two decades, intentionally leaving no digital trace. It is part of a broader constellation of projects, including the World Tree Center and the Fight Like An Animal podcast, uniting animist religion, science, and revolutionary ecological politics.

Phantasmagoric lantern-lit tales sung under the numinous starlight

Vulning is a progressive black metal band from Columbus, Ohio, formed in 2023. Performing an eclectic blend of black metal, progressive rock, folk, and post-hardcore, the raw, pummeling emotional intensity of their performances is matched only by the intricacy and technicality of their compositions. Finding inspiration in not only their extreme metal forebears but in folk and folk rock, jazz fusion, progressive and art rock, they work tirelessly to innovate and expand the scope of extreme metal and even rock music as a genre, to find new ways to tell darkly moving and philosophically poignant stories.

Violinist Andrea Morgan, a lifelong Pacific Northwest resident, has contributed her voice and strings to numerous bands and solo artists over the years such as Aerial Ruin, Panopticon, Exulansis, The Keening, Eight Bells, Mortuous and many more. She is delighted to join Cascadian Midsummer once again as an artist and community member.

Charlie Anderson (Panopticon, Laktating Yak, Transit Method) is a Houston based violinist. He is honored to be returning to the Sacred Grove for this year's gathering!

Ceremonial Abyss is an aleatoric tape artist, curator and writer based in the Pacific Northwest. He has toured the U.S. extensively in support of his releases 23, Betrayal, and Tape Study for Four Variants.

Hope & Failure is a Portland-based ethereal doom-folk band whose sound navigates
between delicate, atmospheric, and heavy/cathartic moments. Their lyrics explore themes
of death, rebirth, nature, connection with the unseen, and a desire to exist together
beyond the confines of the capitalist hellscape.

Society of the Silver Cross is a Seattle-based band blending hypnotic melodies, dark undertones, and Eastern-inspired textures, their sound is described as gothic Graceland and "yogic metal." Their latest album, Festival of Invocations, explores themes of life, death, and beauty, earning praise from Rolling Stone and SPIN. With captivating live performances, the band redefines Gothic music with mystery, romance, and spiritualism.

Blut auf dem Eis is a depressive atmospheric black metal band from Portland, Oregon, blending raw intensity with haunting ambient soundscapes. Their music explores themes of grief, mythology, and the human condition, creating immersive sonic journeys.

American black metal and original bouzouki songs. All instruments, vocals, mixing and imagery by Goriel the dark elf.

Formed in 2014 as solo project by Markov Soroka, Tchornobog is a bizarre black/death/doom metal project using Markov's variant of the slavic god's namesake as a vehicle for exhaltation of common human curses. The debut album, "Tchornobog" has been performed in strange and unexpected ways on various stages all over the world, and now the project comes to vomit black paint over this stage's canvas, accompanied by a live painter and a full band of 4 members. Join us at Cascadian Midsummer!

Friends of the Road is an experimental string band from Seattle, Washington exploring longform acoustic drones rooted in a melting pot of influences from american-primitive, drupad, and free-improvisation which coalesce into original arrangements of traditional folk tunes.

In Troll Hart Piano, the solo project of Troll Hart (Fleshvessel, Silent Temple), Troll unleashes the mythological storyteller. With operatic singing and narration in tongues somewhere between jazz-scatting and primal glossolalia, an ancient spirit is summoned to journey the harmonic halls of Troll's fantastical piano improvisations.

Covert Electronics from Katabatik founder Michael Buchanan. Previous projects include: Nommo Ogo, Abandoned Footwear + Seacrypt.

Pavor Nocturnus has been DJing for over 20 years, crafting hypnotic sets that blend darkwave, witchhouse, synth, and psychedelic influences into spellbinding soundscapes that will get the dancefloor moving. Based in Seattle, they host monthly dance nights and perform at special events like Portland’s Witches’ Ball and Crypticon, where they shapeshift themselves in  unique visual aesthetics that suits the occasion. Known for their haunting atmospherics and live remixing, they have shared the stage with artists such as  Soriah, Other, Tassel, and Dancing Plague and many others.

​Experience the daemonic debutant as she spins a sonic conjuration of witchhouse laced with fairy bass, darkwave and sublunar swagger.