Various - The Black Orb.

Album: The Black Orb

Artist: Various

Label: Distorted Void

Catalogue no: [DV-9]

Tracklist:

     1.      Infinexhuman featuring Scythralisa – Burial Rhythm

     2.      ABBILDUNG – Dwellers of Dark Earths

     3.      Alphaxone – Silent Highlands

     4.      Uzbazur – The Witches Ritual in the Wood

     5.      RNGMNN – Euforia

     6.      Adonai Atrophia – Yliaster

     7.      Endless Voice of Entropy – Path into the Nothing

     8.      Jeton Hoxha – Bowed Metal

     9.      Seetyca – Limbs Bent and then Broken

     10.  Chris Russell – Coronium Ore

I find that compilations can be troublesome creatures, mainly for the fact that most times it’s a bit of a lottery. On the other hand, of course, they can also be the gateway to a wonderful assortment of unknown treasures, introducing you to projects you might never have encountered otherwise. Another drawback for the reviewer is that only the highlights are the focus of the review, unintentionally giving out the impression that the other acts aren’t up to scratch.

Infinexhuma’s contribution, assisted by Scythralisa, crashes in on a wave of cymbal-like sounds upon the shores of death, before the transition to another existence is essayed by a floating, hanging refrain, a physical litter made of particles of light heading upwards. Following that, ABBILDUNG’s (‘Dwellers of Dark Earths’) track takes the opposite path, travelling downward into subterranean realms, where the traveller meets with brooding, Hadean silences and the sighs, wails, and laboured breathings of the dead. It’s a mournful, empty composition, indicative of the anguish and grief-stricken state of this depressing place.

We ascend once more, this time to scale the heights, to fly amongst the lofty wind riven highlands in Alphaxone’s ‘Silent Highlands’ – the only inhabitants here are raptors and quarrelling corvids, and the peaks are perpetually blanketed with snow. Nevertheless, the mountains are still magnificent in their isolation, majestic in their ice-clothed flanks. It’s an exhilarating flight, the wind carrying us onward, and the landscape below rushing towards and away from us with astonishing rapidity. At some point though, Uzbazur’s ‘The Witches Ritual in the Wood’ draws us to a dark clump of trees, and our imaginary airborne flight swoops downwards into its midst. Here we find a gathering of the wise-women, enacting an age-old ceremony of connecting with the powers contained within nature and the earth. Spirits abound here, animated by the fires and incenses of the celebrants, whose voices call forth the secret beings behind all creation. Ultimately, as in RNGMNN’s ‘Euforia’, the ritual’s amassing of power results in an ecstatic climax and connection through release, bringing with it an acknowledgement of the reciprocal nature of the transactions, that one side cannot exist without the other, and that the lines of power flow in both directions. ‘Euforia’ speaks of the quiet strength behind the processes of the natural order, and that as a whole nature cannot be trifled without detrimental consequences.

‘Yliaster’ shatters like glass and breaks into millions of sharp pieces: Adonai Atrophia’s offering is the splintering comedown after the high of communion, the reintroduction of the consciousness into the reality of the everyday. It has its advantages: we see things with renewed eyes, the colours are brighter, the scents more beautiful. Yet again, on Endless Voice of Entropy’s ‘Path into the Nothing’, the realisation that nature is alive, ever-present, and always fulfilling, sends our souls onto the trail of separation from the material, the egoless state of non-being, where nothing is just as meaningful and substantial as the matter that composes our existence. A prolonged and sustained carpet of shimmering noise propels us to the point, the ultimate singularity, which encompasses all in nothing.

‘Bowed Metal’, meanwhile, is that moment when one realises and senses the movement within this state of no-thing. Jeton Hoxha proposes here that perhaps activity and inactivity are just alternate perspectives, viewed from different angles, on the same quality, and that they should be viewed as the same thing.

Seetyca’s ‘Limbs Bent and Then Broken’ veers away somewhat from the prevailing ambiences of the preceding pieces, but it’s sparseness and bell-like ringing qualities interspersed with quiet notices of some kind of activity nevertheless feel right at home here. This is an elevated kind of ambience, a diffuse and particulated essay in the experience of achieving an exalted state, the acquaintance with a stage of spiritual attainment above the normal. It’s an act of breaking away from encumbrance and constriction.

Finally, we come to the last track, Chris Russell’s ‘Coronium Ore’. A prosaic title for a lilting, glimmering, scintillating piece of music, a dive into the perfect union of all things, material and spiritual, the reconciliation of opposites, and the reunion of all negative and positive qualities. It’s timeless and dimensionless, is limitless and boundless, and yet it occupies a space that is immeasurably small.

I have written far more than I intended to, however, upon listening to it as a whole it dawned upon me that there was a narrative thread binding it all together, and that if I omitted one piece then it would remain indecipherable and obtuse. It flows effortlessly, the compiler perhaps knowing that compilations must possess a rhythm and flow of their own, and that that aspect of it is as essential as the music itself. Let me end this exposition by saying that this is immensely worth your time and extremely rewarding.

Available as a download only from here:

https://distortedvoid.bandcamp.com/album/the-black-orb

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Various Artists - Mysterium Lunae: A Requiem for the Invasion of the Moon

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:

https://auroraborealisrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/mysterium-lunae-a-requiem-for-the-invasion-of-the-moon

Psymon Marshall 2019

The Mannequin Factory.

The Mannequin Factory – ST – CD and Digital – Sonic Entrails Records – 2019 - https://sonicentrails.bandcamp.com/

     ·        Mad as Hell 19

     ·        Feast.

     ·        I Found God.

     ·        Sentient.

     ·        Abdicate.

     ·        Black Stork.

     ·        The Wheel That Never Stops Turning.

     ·        Prisms and Palettes.

     ·        Carbon Jackboot.

     ·        Subliminal Sledgehammer.

     ·        Agents of Change.

The Mannequin Factory is made of musician John E. Smoke and Punk Poet Adam Probert. This is their debut album as Manequin Factory, Adam Probert has done several solo albums for the label and John E. Smoke has recorded for years as part of Flesh-Eating Foundation.

I’m immediately reminded of the story interludes on the Small Faces ‘Ogden Nut Gone Flake’ album, but with impressive social commentary added, this tends to be about the Austerity Cuts, Unemployment, Violence, Wars and the effects of Capitalism around the world. The warped electronics at an odd atmosphere to the already odd, expressive voice of Adam Probert, they provide a bleak landscape of sound for the vocal to build, models of our society on. I also find this a lot more persuasive than a lot of the Anarcho Punk I love through the clarity and sharp delivery.  As punk goes the vocal delivery is up there with Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys and Cruckifucks Doc Corbin Dark, this is rapper level articulation and rhythm.

At times the vocal and noise seem to explode to work together to create convincing expressions of hell, Feast is a prime example of this, the vocal rants at speed on the build ups to explosions. Vocalist and musician often seem to fire off each other. I found God allows Industrial beats and Blasts to do the work, the vocal is more affected here and doesn’t work as hard as it did on the previous tracks, it works better when it really takes the lead. The approach on the album is varied and the vocal does later adapt to the style and structure of each track to move from being purely spoken word to almost sung, the rhythm and timing are excellent. What sounds come from the voice also changes frequently.

There is an otherworldly surrealist approach to the album. The punk perspective seems to sit in the same world that the weirder parts of Crass came from via its’ experimental leanings with a Rudimentary Peni like lyrical, absurd view into other realities. I would call this a punk album, it incorporates Noise, Rhythmic Industrial and bits of Power Electronics, but it is the best punk album that I have heard in years.

Choppy Noodles 2019.