Arcaïde - Solve & Coagula

Album: Solve & Coagula

Artist: Arcaïde

Label: Sombre Soniks

Catalogue  no: N/A

Tracklist:

     1.      Solve (Part 1)

     2.      Solve (part 2)

     3.      Solve (Part 3)

     4.      Solve (Part 4)

     5.      Coagula (Part 1)

     6.      Coagula (Part 2)

     7.      Coagula (Part 3)

     8.      Coagula (Part 4)

The phrase ‘Solve & Coagula’ (or ‘Solve et Coagula’), for those not in the know, is a Latin phrase meaning ‘separate and join’, and is most frequently encountered in the Royal Art of Alchemy. In the context of this eight-track release, we’re talking not about the popular definition of the physical act of alchemy ie., turning lead into gold, but the spiritual process: the refining of the lead of earth-bound material man into the divinely attuned and cosmic man, with particular reference to the work of Carl Jung.

I won’t pretend to be au fait with Jung’s analysis of alchemy (although I did once read an abstruse series of lectures on the subject by his daughter many years ago), but I am a little familiar with the theoretical magical underpinnings behind the practise and I think this music has to be viewed in context. In essence, in layman’s terms as we are now we’re enmeshed in materiality, given that we are born into a materially-constituted world. In spite of that, every human has a spark of the divine contained within, and spiritual alchemy’s aim is to slough off the shell of the earthly man and become divine (or enlightened) in order to reach the Godhead. In other words, a journey with the aim of creating order out of chaos, and attaining divine knowledge to free us from ignorance. A work wherein opposites are reconciled and understood as basic necessities in the dual universe we exist within. Sounds simple, of course, but it demands a lot of work and self-sacrifice.

In terms of the work presented here, how has Arcaïde (a French-based project) translated this complex process into sound? Given my limited knowledge of the practical minutiae of alchemy, it’s fair to say that we begin in chaotic darkness: ‘Solve’ parts 1 – 4 evolve from the primum materia of noise and structural anarchy and dissolution into something resembling cohesion, although not fully so. As suggested by the unresolved and unrefined essences the work has to start with, we’re initially presented with a chaotic mélange of random cacophonic outbursts, grating high-pitched whines and scrapes, sharp metallic explosions, bass pulses, crackling static, distant knockings, and much else. The first four tracks are never allowed to coalesce into something too coherent for too long, but one does discern a gradual and slowly creeping sense of order finally asserting itself. Ultimately, Part 4 announces this with a loping bass sequence, staccato percussion and distorted vocals before breaking apart into a miasma of hissing and glitching until an equilibrium of sorts is reached – we’re not quite there yet, but much has already been accomplished.

The second set, ‘Coagula (Parts 1 – 4)’, presents an entirely different tone. The work is beginning to have its effect, and the cohesion is more apparent. Shimmering ringing tones lead us into the second stage of the process before metamorphosing into something creepier and sinister, perhaps preparing us for the real purpose of alchemy (and occultism in general): confronting ourselves with ourselves (aka the ‘dark night of the soul’). This is particularly apparent on the following track – even creepier and sparser atmospheres, brooding and oppressive, interweaved with silences that are just as heavy. The theme is expanded on Part 3, and the silent voids are squirming with all our fears combined. And then, finally, a magnificent conclusion is reached, the breaking of the bonds that tie us to an earthbound slavery: the chains break, the divine spark has been ignited, and the soul flies free.

This release is an example of how truly affecting music can be, be it melodic or, as here, unstructured but coherent. It’s even better understood when the context is known. This is what dark ambient means to me: a music that takes me on an inner journey, atmospherics that allow my imagination free rein, and sounds that metaphorically disengages me from the burden of gravity.

Excellent.

Psymon Marshall 2019

Circular - Ghostwhite

Album: Ghostwhite

Artist: Circular

Label: Loki Foundation

Catalogue  no: LOKI 69

Tracklist:

     1.      Initial Texture

     2.      Spectrum Unfolding

     3.      Golden Amber Shades

     4.      The Iconic Circle

     5.      Abstract & Vertical

     6.      Deep in Red Contrast

     7.      A Wideness

     8.      Slight Variation

     9.      A Visual Rhythm

   10.  The Glowing Shapes

Recorded over the last three years, this is Circular’s fourth album and the ten slices of audio sculpture on display here define the project’s sweeping, elevating cosmic stylings. Here, though, I use the ‘cosmic’ advisedly: this isn’t the ‘everything is lovely, isn’t it?’ type of new age blandness the word often conjures up, but rather an admixture of the yin and the yang of universal processes: for as beautiful as a supernova appears to us, for instance, we have to remind ourselves that lying behind such an awe-inspiring sight is a tremendous catastrophic event whose magnitude and dark destructive power we can’t even begin to comprehend. Circular achieve a delicate balance between opposites, the light and the dark, using high and low registers equally. Mood is everything here.

Resonant chords sweep in majestically and swell in grandiose loops, leaping and sparkling over deep bass frameworks, grasping the listener and pulling them on a journey to regions both turbulent and static, where heated bow-shocks from the remnants of supernovae are travelling at unimaginable speeds, or where universal forces have shaped and sculpted clouds of dust and gas into beautiful columns and nebulae light-years in vastness. What’s more, what we imagine overwhelms us with its sheer magnificence and inhuman scale. This isn’t a physical journey, however - instead it’s one where the ‘spaceship’ is merely a mental construct, a psychic vehicle projecting us into uncharted territory. We’re at once reminded that the universe is vast and illimitable, and even though we’re insignificant in scale compared, we are still a part of this mighty edifice.

Some music is easier to encapsulate verbally than others: the only way to do justice to Ghostwhite is to buy and listen to its ambitious scope and breadth of vision. Standout tracks for me are ‘Initial Texture’, ‘Spectrum Unfolding’, ‘Golden Amber Shades’, ‘Slight Variation’, ‘A Visual Rhythm’, and ‘The Glowing Shapes’. This is a release of imagination and one which utilises imagination to create its fullest expression. It’s a deeply meditative opus that deserves to be listened to without any distractions.

Psymon Marshall 2019

Moljebka Pvlse - Komuku

Album: Komoku

Artist:  Moljebka Pvlse

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue  no: 118^th Cycle

Tracklist:

        1.      A Repetition Without Origin

        2.      An Emptiness of Language

        3.      The Functioning of Remembering

        4.      And the Farewell to All that One has Lost

Moljebka Pvlse is a long-established experimental outfit from Sweden, known for utilising both electronic and acoustic instruments in combination with field recordings and found sounds. It’s a palette of strong textures and colours, that when mixed together produces a dish of dark majesty.

If Circular’s Ghostwhite album (see my review of that release here) treads a middle path to give us a balanced overview, then this exegesis falls heavily on the side of darkness and the infinitely incomprehensible forces at the heart of roiling creation (with a small ‘c’). Here are the minutes and seconds before the catastrophic moment that triggers the supernova, or the dense timeless interval between stasis and sudden inexorable collapse to a singularity. It’s also the slow millennia of matter coalescing into discrete systems: planets and moons orbiting suns. Equally it’s a story of the immeasurable spaces between stars, planets, and galaxies, seemingly empty yet still filled with the diffuse and infinitesimally small components of star- and galaxy-stuff.

Here are prodigious sweeps and swathes of bass and mid-range rumbles, the granulated aftermath of long-dead stars, and stretched out gong- and bell-like tones, along with abstract noises, raspings, hootings, and processed voices – in fact anything and everything that could be commandeered to depict the viscerally immense stretches of time and mechanisms necessary to both creation and dissolution, has been. If one can extend a metaphor to its logical conclusion, within the span of this album we see and feel the birth, expansion, life, contraction, and death of the universe. The experience is at once exhilarating and terrifying.

This is darkly magnificent, sumptuous, sublime, and chilling. On a personal level, this is another essential dark ambient album of the year.

Psymon Marshall 2019

Wet Nurse -Thanatosis

Album: Thanatosis

Artist: Wet Nurse

Label: Malignant Records

Catalogue  no: TumorCD124

Tracklist:

      1.      Focal Point

      2.      Sacred Spring

      3.      A Promise was Made

      4.      Sexual Vertigo

      5.      Liminal Flesh

      6.      The End of a Rope

      7.      Glove Anesthesia

      8.      Divisible Organs

      9.      The Opening of the Mouth

    10.  Stitched Nerve Drapery

    11.  Tapeworm Finds its Host

    12.  The Exit Anthem

    13.  Salvation Comes in Waves of Pain

Once in a while an album comes along and grabs you by the throat. This latest from Canada’s Wet Nurse did just that for me – thirteen tracks of condensed malignancy, pain, and trauma, utterly bleak and uncompromising. The starting point is painted in black, and the endpoint is an even deeper shade of black. And what you get in between is a soul not merely laid bare, but ripped asunder.

Thanatosis, or Apparent Death, is the state that resembles death. It occurs in nature as a defence mechanism in some animals and insects, but it can also appear in humans who have suffered extreme brutality and abuse beyond the pale. If ever there was an apt title for an album of harsh, obtuse, and bitter inhuman paeans to affliction, mental collapse, and agony, then this is it.  

What happens when you don’t have much left, but you still want to scream your rage? You chain that rage to stripped back, sparse, grinding and pulsing stabs of electronics, garnished with both distorted, indecipherable lyrics, and the unalloyed, untreated spoken word. The very fact that each of these pieces is composed of very little structurally means that their power is all the more pronounced– spite and venom don’t have to be shouted to be raw and immediate. All that’s needed is the torture chamber assortment of power tool sounds that we have here to experience the filth, grime, and cesspit swamp of personal degradation and social debasement.

This is grim at its grimmest. From beginning to end there’s no let-up, and its maladjustment never rises above the dungeon floor. This isn’t a criticism, but praise – its sparseness and relentlessness, along with the frigidity and emptiness at its core, is what captivated my attention. And perhaps the most pertinent aphorism in this essay, the one possible escape route, is contained in the title of the final song, ‘Salvation Comes in Waves of Pain’ – shades of the film Martyrs and the nihilist philosophy that runs through it, perhaps. Anger has never sounded so sharp, so precisely surgical, or so relevant.

One to bludgeon myself with again and again - every man has to have a hobby.

Psymon Marshall 2019

Askablot Leidungr

Album: Askablot

Artist:  Leidungr

Label: Self-rleased

Catalogue  no: N/A

Website: https://leidungr.bandcamp.com/album/askablot

Tracklist: 

1. Askablot

2. Askablot II

Describing themselves as a Nordic Ritual Folk outfit, I fully expected this to be neo-folk. Instead, what we have is two lengthy pieces of atmospheric ambient created to ‘honour the old Northern Gods and to awaken[ing] the spirit [of] the ancient Nordic culture’. And you know what? I loved it.

In a bit of total irrelevancy, my grandfather once told me our family has Scandinavian/Viking blood running through our veins. Whether it’s true or not this species of Nordic ambient has an ability to seep right through my skin and become completely absorbed into every cell in my body. Listening to both these pieces instantly brings cold Northern wastes, with only a dancing aurora lighting our way and the stars circling around Polaris our sole means of finding our rightful direction home, to mind. The emptiness expressed here is practically tangible; we are in the beating heart of the arctic realms, where we’re surrounded by fields of snow and rugged mountains, and with nothing but the sky over our heads, a place where the light and the dark take turns in reigning over.

But it isn’t just the physical place that the music instantiates, it’s also the spiritual nexus between place and time. This is the realm of gods, trolls, giants, and heroes who are ever-present in the past and who are presently returning to the here and now. This is the time of their reawakening, to bring us back into the arms of the nurturing land and our ancestors. They’re enjoining us to slough off the ways that separate us from our earthly roots and seek out the spirits and guardians of our everyday environment. 

It’s that portrayal of emptiness that really gets under one’s skin, just like the biting winds of the northern lands do when they blow. Hidden, mist-bound susurrations sweep majestically as if coming to us from over vast stretches of ice and snow, providing a contextual backdrop, superimposed on which are sparse rhythms and melodies (if I can call them that) – perhaps they’re messages from Valhalla, brought to us via the cascading curtains of auroral light. Perhaps they’re saying “We’re here, come and join our feast”. 

Throughout the second track, the glacial tectonics clash noisily, ice grinding against ice. The invitation to enjoy the company of the Gods isn’t something given freely, however: one must earn that right to sit beside Oðinn and Frigg in order to share their food and wine. The completion of the journey, both physical and mental, over ever-shifting ice and through frigid winds and obscuring blizzards, is the price of admission.

This is one of those recordings that can be heard in any season without losing any of its splendour and efficacy but I can guarantee that it’ll be far more effective and more deeply affecting if listened to on either a late autumn or early winter evening, especially from around the time the first stars show their faces. Find a darkened room, plug your earbuds in, lie down, and let the frost crust over you so you can feel the chills.  

Psymon Marshall 2019