Druhá Smrt - Incarnatium

Album: Incarnatium

Artist: Druhá Smrt

Label: Sombre Soniks

Catalogue no: SomSon129

Tracklist:

     1.      The Ground

     2.      The Event

     3.      In the Hoor Zone

     4.      Breakthrough

Anyone who is familiar with the output of the Sombre Soniks label knows that they specialise in musical explorations of a ritualistic and occult ambient nature, and that they’re mostly invocatory in expression – in other words, the focus is mainly on the ritual aspects. Czech outfit Druhá Smrt go beyond on this recording – creating a suite of cinematic ritual ambient, in the sense that this somehow goes beyond the phenomenological into something approaching a shared universal consciousness. This is the end result of the Great Work, the stripping away of gravity-bound material reality and ego, to reach the Ain, the state of consciousness before the ego/I intervenes and stains it.

To that end, the four pieces on here are made from a warp and weft of luxuriant layers, all of which intertwine in symmetrical and soaring harmony, never once touching the ground but instead inhabiting the clouds and the regions above. Up here, where the sky is clear and the air unsullied by the polluting effluent of mankind, boundaries do not exist and the paths between one and the stars are devoid of obstructions. ‘The Ground’ may be the starting point, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the earth we stand upon – ground in this case could mean the metaphysical and philosophical framework upon which the spiritual work is built. Once the foundations are erected, and all is in alignment, ‘The Event’ merely becomes a catalyst to set off the reactions needed to free the forces that will push us further.

‘In the Hoor Zone’ delineates the breaking of shackles, the renunciation of material imperfection, and the denying of gravity’s hold on the soul. But it’s also a prelude and a signpost, the depiction of a state less encumbered by crassness and banality. Rising chords and chiming bells presage a new beginning, an invitation to prepare for an act of final realisation and enlightenment. And ‘Breakthrough’, the concluding track, is the initiation into the Absolute, the ineffable union, the complete separation from what came before, both physically and temporally. From here on bliss is its own reward, and fulfilment has been attained.

Collectively, the four pieces plot the route of an inward journey, from base material to enlightenment, a straight line in effect from earth (Malkuth) to Union (Ain). Of course, the way is more complicated than that, but perhaps Incarnatium can be seen as the prototype of the spiritual being’s path, and a gazetteer of landmarks along the way. It’s both an invitation, and an encouragement, to participate. Let this guide you on your way.   

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Spiroboy - Why Don't You Do Right?

Album: Why Don’t You Do Right?

Artist: Spiroboy

Label: Self-released

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist: 

1. I Waited

2. I Could Never be Happy

3. Why Don’t You Do Right?

4. New Day

5. Cruel World

6. Tomorrow’s Fool

7. Along the Way

8. Alone Together. 

A word to the wise here: the quiet, introspective Eno-ish first track, consisting of a sparse piano refrain over gentle and distant strains of strings and susurrations might lead you to think that this eight-piece opus from Manchester’s Spiroboy is the sum flavour of this release. Not a bit of it – ‘I Could Never be Happy’ sets that fallacy right straightaway with a helicoptering oscillating burble which comes from the opposite end of the spectrum, an unnerving siren of encroaching danger, an alarm which fades in and out and finally segues into a high-pitched, teeth-grinding whine. 

These composition emerge stealthily from out of the margins, those liminal zones between the here and there, the now and then. They appear to exist in a constant state of flux, with sounds shifting in tone and perspective, ebbing and flowing, ranging from cold hollow winds, shimmering burbles, washes encroaching and then retreating, and things that pop in and out of existence like ephemeral fireflies. At times we are left wondering whether what we’re hearing is actually there, or just the product of our own imaginations after being in such unfamiliar territory. For all we know these are the ghosts of our own regrets, dreams, and lost loves. Perhaps they are indeed the reflections of the deeper self, the one we hide from ourselves.

These ghosts are insubstantial, and yet they infiltrate our minds and become much more than they appear. They rely on our own insecurities to magnify their power, and to exaggerate their effects. We become our own worst enemies. In these forsaken edgelands, far from the comforts of light and warmth, the topography becomes a danger and a nightmare, a shady world inhabited not by real creatures, but by phantasms culled from our deepest fears and uncertainties and given shape. They only exist because, in our ignorance, we have given them permission to do so. 

After careful consideration, I think this is a well-crafted album – even taking that first track into account. Fancifully I could posit that ‘I Waited’ is a deliberate ploy, an enticing come-on to lure us down the paths best avoided, the ones which either lead us to our doom or to a form of salvation. Either way we face a type of dissolution, exemplified by the barely audible winds blowing on the final track, ‘Alone Together’ – but alone together with what, exactly?

File under extreme isolationist ambient.

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Comicide - Moral Improvement.

Comicide – Moral Improvement (Live 1984 CE) – Cassette/download – Self Released  - 2019.

Track list.

A - Star Club, Birmingham.

     1.    Bloodmeat.

     2.    Bruised Organon

     3.    Muscular Jesus

     4.    Hatehouse

B - Eve Hill, Afro Hill Caribbean Centre, Dudley.

     1.    Bloodmeat.

     2.    Bruised Organon.

     3.    Muscular Jesus.

     4.    Hatehouse.

Comicide was an early Stephen Ah Burroughs industrial/PE project, later projects were Head of David, FRAG and Tunnels of Ah. There were two members, the other being Erik Jurenovskis, who was also a member of Head of David. This set of two live recordings were both played supporting Con-Dom in different venues in the West Midlands in 1984. The instrumentation used was vocals, manipulated synth and guitar.

The Birmingham performance doesn’t have vocals, it’s all instrumental. The synths add a suspenseful, anxiety to the work, the riffing gives a uniqueness and seems to melt into the synth work due to its repetitiveness, becoming noise in the process. The intuition of the guitarwork seems to convey emotion and add a layer of complexity to the work. Part of me sees this recording as Lynch like, it wouldn’t be out of place in Eraserhead or any of his other early works. In other parts, I feel it could fit in the Bladeruner, due to the futuristic synths - there was something cinematic about Comicide’s work.. The synths do become punishing and massive at times, this is where the Power Electronics aspect of the recording is.

The Dudley gig is edgier, there is more of an Industrial urgency to the work and the addition of shouting vocals is an added layer of intensity to the works and adds a further Power Electronics dimension to things. This is evident as there seems to be more volume at work to the point where it distorts and warbles things more. There’s some choppy noise communication going on, ticks and twangs create hallucinatory atmospheres, the esoteric aspects of future works, particularly Tunnels of Ah is demonstrated in its infancy here. The vocals distort and become noise as if in another dimension. The guitar work is even stronger here, as if more intuitive to what’s going on with the resonating synths.

This is a good, interesting document of the times and what was happening on the Noise live circuit back then and it can be complimented by the Con-Dom tapes of live recordings from that time. This can be bought at: https://tunnelsofh.bandcamp.com/album/comicide-moral-improvement-live-1984ce

Choppy Noodles 2019.

Onasander - Ancestry Reworked EP

Album: Ancestry Reworked EP

Artist:  Onasander (original)/Various (reworkings)

Label: Tipi Token

Catalogue no: TIPI005

Tracklist:

     1.      Orans (reworked by Ajna)

     2.      Arcadius (reworked by Klangbunn)

     3.      Trier (reworked by Xerxes the Dark)

     4.      Milvian Bridge (reworked by Hilyard)

This release (just like one of my previous reviews did) reminded me forcefully just how easy I have it today compared to how things were pre-internet when I ran a print ‘zine. This was originally released in 2016 by Onasander (Maurizio Landini – and there’s that Italian connection again [see my previous review]) and now comes this EP of reworkings. If this had been sent to me back in the eighties I would have had a mighty fine time attempting to track down the original in order to compare the two treatments, and probably would have had to review the newer release on its own merits. Thanks to the advent of the web, in particular the SoundCloud website, I can now make the comparison and it took me less than a couple of minutes to accomplish instead of weeks or even months.

The original interpretations are lean, cold, and distant, as if heard through a thick fog blanketing some ice-bound ghostly dream-region. The world is still, and any movement is so infinitesimal that it may as well be non-existent. And, more to the point, what hides behind those banks of obscuring fogs that swirl so clingingly close around one’s body? Are those exhalations merely the wind, or the breath of some species of creature not yet discovered by man? Are they friendly or hostile?

Each of these reworkings retains the spirit of the originals, taking aspects of the recordings and reshaping, redefining, and recoding them. Ajna’s (Chris F) rearrangement of ‘Orans’ is, if anything, even more isolationist ambient than Onasander’s, turning deeper and deeper into the inner self as it calls out to us to contemplate the deeper mysteries. Klangbunn’s (Marius Sortland Mykelbust) ‘Arcadius’ is a much more ritualistic affair, stripping back the resonance of the original and sending them into the background, then introducing rattles and whisperings into the foreground as if to invoke praeternatural entities into existence.

‘Trier’, in Onasander’s version, is a breathy cycle of inhalation and exhalation, like the breath of the Cosmos. On the other hand, Tehran-based Xerxes the Dark (Mohamadreza Govahi) scales it down the register immensely, metamorphosing it into a malignant and brooding leviathan, visible black winds and streamers emanating darkly from its gargantuan bulk. Onasander’s ‘Milvian Bridge’ begins with running water and then slides into hanging, shimmering bell-like tones and mid-range drones, sounding like some supernatural annunciation of victory. The Milvian Bridge itself is a thing of mythic foundation, as this is where Constantine the Great (who went on to found Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire) fought and won a great battle after a vision of a cross in the sky, a vision which was to have repercussions for the dominance of Christianity in later centuries. Hilyard’s (Bryan Hilyard) offering is darker and glowering, less about light and victory, and perhaps more about contemplating the heavy cost of pursuing what one believes to be a just cause. Remember though that this is just my interpretation and, having read a great deal about the Byzantine Empire from its founding to its ultimate demise, Hilyard’s exegesis resonates with that.

Ultimately though, I can only say that both releases are wonderful, showing that, if nothing else, reworking another artist’s primum materia can drastically change the original’s atmosphere and dynamics, transmuting it not necessarily into something better but different. The four artists here have done just that – the original compositions remain standing proud, while the reworkings stand alongside them with equal validity. In this case, this has been an immensely fruitful exercise.

Original: https://soundcloud.com/onasander/sets/onasander-ancestry-demo

Ancestry Reworked will be available from August 30^th from the following link:

https://tipitoken.bandcamp.com/album/ancestry-reworked

Psymon Marshall 2019

Sonologyst - Phantoms

Album: Phantoms

Artist: Sonologyst

Label: Unexplained Sounds Group

Catalogue no: USG054

Tracklist: 

1. Phantoms

2. Three Options Collided

3. Shamanic Rite Passing on a Table Equipped with Azzax and Trumpet

4. Memorex

5. Dahomey Kingdom

6. Fragments of a Winter with a few Other Cards to Play

7. An Index of Maths Philosophy

8. Codified

9. North-South Crossing

10. Orient Out of Tune

At this moment, there appears to be a lot of great experimental material emerging from Italy, and Sonologyst is no exception. Furthermore, whilst this is undoubtedly firmly in the ambient camp it’s also fair to say that it defies being put into any particular slot within the broad spectrum of ambient styles. There are elements of the dark, occult, ritual, isolationist, and industrial subcategories of the genre, but it’s all mixed together with such craft, skill, and attention to detail that it all melds together into one seamless whole. 

Above all, this is a discourse on the truly alien – using modes of sound and expression that are at once familiar and yet dissonant in some bizarre way. Noises that we hear every day, the constant soundtrack to our daily lives, form the substrates of these ten slices of ghostly surrealistic mirages, fleeting and illusory: voices, machines, natural environments, wailings, screeches, scrapings, and some eluding description. They’re the aural equivalent of fleeting memories flashing stroboscopically on the inner screen, or perhaps a series of hallucinatory snapshots of a distorted hypnogogic dream in disrupted time: before we’ve even had a chance to grasp their significance they’ve already dissolved and segued into something else. 

The beauty of this album is that it refuses to stay still, with sounds and images tumbling over one another in a rush of creation and instantiation. It’s as if this is the point at which everything came into being, with the ghosts of all that was, is, and will be suddenly blooming in one grand gesture, a singularity of focused ideation, an etheric collection of blueprints stamped with potential. It’s a flowering of overflowing chaos, a madhouse of colour, form, and shape, all exploding at once in an act of endless imagination. It’s all here – darkness, light, good, evil, bright, dull, natural and supernatural. In just the same way that we humans are microcosmic reflections of the macrocosmos, so too is this album – it’s a reflection of the all in the singularity, and the singularity in all. 

For people who want quality ambient that defies easy pigeonholing, that’s both uplifting and yet threaded through with hints of the darkly bizarre underbelly of existence, the plane where very few of us venture to explore. Also for those who, like me, ‘see’ music through images rather than as just sounds. A good place to find yourself, I think. 

Psymon Marshall 2019