Album: Aeturnum
Artist: IrisLight
Available at:
Tracks:
1. Novus
2. Infernum
3. Spatium
4. Aeturnum.
5. Damnum
6. Transitum
7. Cecidimus
Deep, cold, isolationist
drone ambient from the artist formerly known as Generic, broadcast from
somewhere between the lightless abyssal depths of a vast ocean and the deserted
streets of some cyclopean Lovecraftian ruin. And in that enormous space betwixt
lies a complete geography of loneliness and madness, spiced with the utter
meaninglessness of existence. It’s all coloured in the deepest hues of
emptiness and desolation, and yet, its shimmering coruscation and scintillation
holds the purest of frosty beauty, and that beauty is a wonder to behold.
In the context of these
seven tracks, darkness is a relative concept. Ever visited an old building that
even on the brightest of days appears to be hiding something malignant within
its walls? This is the nearest description that comes anywhere near distilling
the essence of the compositions here. Resonant bells and gongs, stretched out
into timelessness, cutting banshee winds that penetrate deep into the marrow, and
frigidity that not only steals warmth but also all thought. There’s nothing
here but unbroken and unchanging landscapes, a place where a second lasts as
long as a millennium, and simultaneously where a millennium lasts as long as a
second.
A couple of examples will
suffice. The album opener ‘Novus’ sets the tone being painted here, assailing our
ears with ringing tones and wails the sources of which are obscured by a thick
veil of mist. ‘Spatium’ is the slow subterranean heartbeat of this frozen realm,
and album closer ‘Cecidimus’ (Latin for shrivel) is the logical endpoint –
dissolution and disintegration of self and existence, the scattering of
everything we were and have known to the cold reaches of the ends of the
universe.
From a personal
perspective, I connected on so many levels. That suspicion that there’s far
more to reality than what we’re able to perceive with our senses, that perhaps
there are forces of which we’re unaware shaping everything around us, and that
furthermore we have no control over those forces. We’re reduced to tiny
insignificant specks smaller than the atoms which compose us. Salvation and
redemption are beyond us and impossible to grasp: we live in an entirely
neutral universe that neither cares if we live or die. If we destroy ourselves
as a species there will be no one to mark our passing, nor anyone to remember
us.
Closest thing to an
exposition on the beauty within futility I’ve heard in a long time.
Excellent!
Psymon Marshall Jones 2019
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