Album: Mysterium Lunae: A Requiem for the Invasion of
the Moon
Artist: Various
Label: Aurora Borealis
Catalogue no: ABX079
Tracklist:
1. Hawthonn
– The Curse (PYAX JWA)
2. Burial
Hex – O’ Crescent Shedding Queen!
3. Sutekh
Hexem – Læk¬
4. Anji
Cheung & English Heretic – Sancta
5. Moon
Mourning Earth – Devour Us
6. Tenhornedbeast
– How the Stars Wept for the Rape of the Moon
This concept album (for
such it is) takes as its premise a new perspective on the first Moon landing
fifty years ago – calling it an ‘invasion’ which, technically and stretching
definitions a bit here, is correct in a way. After all, we were never invited
to go to the Moon and, for the sake of argument let’s stretch things a little
bit further still, do we really even ‘own’ the Earth-orbiting satellite in the
first place? I’m playing around with semantics here, of course – it’s a fun
little exercise in looking at a situation from a standpoint we might not have
thought about before.
Anyway, I’m not here to
argue about the right terminology that should be applied to this momentous
historical event – instead I want to discuss the music. Let’s be honest, no
one, not even the astronomers and scientists in the Apollo program really understood what the phrase ‘outer
space’ meant in actuality – a vast emptiness, devoid of anything bar planets,
stars, galaxies, and a host of other celestial objects, the distances between
which are barely comprehendible. Opener Hawthonn, through the use of a sparse
drone, a voice, and string-like passages, manages to convey the bottomless
loneliness and feelings of insignificance that must have confronted those first
pioneers. ‘Space’ takes on a whole new meaning out here. And then, with an
increasing sense of awe and wonderment, the object of the exercise hoves into
view, getting larger with every passing day.
Burial Hex’s ‘O’ Crescent
Shedding Queen!’ begins in a billowing of dust, the dust of aeons which has rarely
been disturbed in the totality of the Moon’s history. A voice fades in, echoes
perhaps of all the myriad dreams of previous generations of Mankind as they
gazed up wonderingly at the satellite in the night sky, fantasising about one
day visiting it. Drones, free to vault and hang suspended in the weaker
gravity, spring up out of the rock itself, pause tantalisingly for long
moments, chase each other endlessly, catch the solar winds, and then fall back
down as grains of powder. From the human perspective, these arid plains, as old
as time itself seemingly, defy any familiar human connection and merely
emphasise the very definition of alien. Towards the end of the track, that very
alien nature becomes unsettling – the monotonic landscape, the lack of flora,
the emptiness, the lack of sufficient gravity, and the unending blanket of
night hanging above their heads, must have warped and distorted the astronauts’
perceptions.
The next in line to
grapple with these conditions is Sutekh Hexen, whose ‘Læk¬’ creates an even
deeper impression of the loneliness those three men must have experienced.
Looking back at the sunlit earth with its billions of inhabitants hanging
ghost-like just above the Moon’s distant horizon could only have underscored
just how far from home they were. Snippets of the astronauts’ voices set
against a background of quiet susurrations, perhaps the song of their home
240,000 miles away being sung to them, linger spectrally in the diffuse vacuum
of emptiness between.
Following on the heels of
Sutekh Hexen come Anji Cheung & English Heretic, who take a slightly
different tack on ‘Sancta’. A lilting drone lifts weightlessly to soar above
the scarred surface and take flight, upon which rides a serene female voice as
of some celestial spirit. Accompanying it are strings and shimmering planes of
sounds like bowed metal, sounds which fan out in all directions, sparking and flickering,
shining brightly for the briefest of moments before fading away. Eventually, it
all meets the cosmic winds to splinter and disintegrate, and dissipate into
nothing.
There’s nothing left
after that, as Moon Mourning Earth’s doleful ‘Devour Us’ elucidates, potent
chords massing into the aether along with a lamentation. It reminds me very
much, at least initially, of Dead Can Dance and Brendan Perry which, far from
being a bad thing, brings us back to the very human aspect of the whole
enterprise. The mission has been accomplished, now what else is there to do?
Finally, it’s
Tenhornedbeast’s turn, and it doesn’t disappoint – if anything it only serves
to emphasise what I’ve been talking about above: unfathomable emptiness, the
vastness of what is essentially an infinite quality, and oppressive loneliness,
plus the insignificance of the human insect and the negligible moment when we
touched down on the surface of another world. Significance and importance can
only be judged against an appropriate scale – for us it was an event of some
magnitude, but seen in a cosmic context it amounted to very little. It didn’t
matter to the universe, only us.
Much of the music on here
can be classified as unassuming, but it certainly isn’t meaningless or trivial.
It just turns things upside down and challenges us to see things from a
different viewpoint. In that context, certainly for me, it shifted things, and
prompted me to realign my thought patterns to perhaps look at other situations in
a different light. Whether those viewpoints contain any kind of truth or
otherwise is irrelevant, but to start participating in the exercise helps put everything
into context.
A quietly magnificent
album.
Available as a digital
download, a CD with a 44-page booklet in an edition of 185 (2 left as I write
this!), and an edition of 13 with booklet and talisman (SOLD OUT!) from the
following link:
Psymon Marshall 2019
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