Visions - Temples.

Album: Temples

Artist: Visions

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: 119^th Cycle

Tracklist:

     1.      Traces

     2.      Murmur

     3.      Lamentation

     4.      Ultima

     5.      Temples

     6.      Aura

     7.      Continuum

After an extremely deceptively quiet start, this album opens out into a glorious essay on sustained dark atmospherics and esoteric visions, taking the listener on a mind-expanding journey through the inner recesses of our own thoughts and dreams. Of all the music I’ve heard and reviewed recently Temples is my standout album – deeply meditative, inviting us to look inwards rather than outwards, speculating perhaps on the idea that the spaces inside our minds are as infinite and beautiful as the vastness of the universe around us. After all, didn’t Carl Sagan say “We are made of star stuff, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself”? The reflection of the macro contained within the micro – in effect, ‘as above, so below’.

Deeply resonant chords ebb and flow in continuous cycles, the very breath of the cosmos itself. Perhaps, too, these are the thoughts of the macrocosm made material and intelligible, so that we can be a part of the myriad cycles and evolutions it undergoes. And, contained within each piece, are hints of boundless and illimitable spaces, hints enough for our finite brains to comprehend without breaking apart. The vistas alluded to here are both staggeringly exquisite and devastatingly terrifying. They are simultaneously savage and edifying. We are witness to both the dance of colour and light, and the stately encroachment of darkness and gravity.

Beyond that, however, is that this set has shades of what I term the Deepsoul – a resonant frequency that jibes with everything contained within the definition of divine kinship with the universe at large. It is spine-tinglingly simple in construction yet deeply affecting in effect. There is complexity here but it is simply delineated and expounded. It goes beyond incense and paraphernalia, fire, chant, and ritual, and on into true communion. Try the title track for starters, ‘Temples’ – a ringing, siren-like invitation to divest oneself of material notions, to leave the fleshly body behind, and to become united with the very star stuff that is both inside and outside us and to make those essential – no, urgent - connections.

I can honestly say that I actually had shivers running up and down my spine whilst listening to this album. Every one of these seven tracks is consciousness elevating and soul-enriching, cutting through the dross of the everyday to reveal the dangerous beauty that lies within our grasp if only we’re brave enough to reach out despite the perils.

Ratings are meaningless, but if I were to assign it one it would be 10/10. 

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Dødsmaskin - Ødelagt.

Album: Ødelagt

Artist: Dødsmaskin

Label: Malignant Records

Catalogue no: TumorLP125

Tracklist:

     1.      Svart Tundra

     2.      Jernguden

     3.      Det Som Ødelegger

     4.      Isolasjon

     5.      Kaldere Nå

Dødsmaskin, which translates to Death Machine, is a Norwegian duo, and this is their fourth full-length album, and here Ødelagt (Broken) is not so much about in your face industrial chaos as it is about stealthily creeping doom and death, first glimpsed from afar – and it’s about the quieter gulfs in between just as much as the noise itself.

This vinyl LP is divided into two very distinct halves, atmospherically-speaking. Side One leans more toward industrial/death ambient, starting with ‘Svart Tundra’ (Black Tundra): vast, cavernous echo chambers secreted somewhere away from the prying eyes and sensibilities of brightly-lit daylight normality, a place where the minutest of clicks, scrapes, and crackles take on an intensely black, malignant immensity and weight, soul-crushing and life extinguishing. Rats scurry, insects squirm amongst filth and decay, and the air is a miasma of disease and corruption. ‘Jernguden’ (Iron God) begins scratchily, before a dark rain pours down heavily, drenching us in decomposition and disintegration. Ending the first side we have ‘Det Som Ødelegger’ (That Which Destroys) which announces its intentions by warning us with a shrill whistle right from the start – which then evolves into a hovering death, inches away from our heads, its whirring blades looking for a taste of blood, flesh, bone, and sinew. What makes it even more terrifying is that we’re engulfed in a putrid darkness, a black-hole so dark that not even light can penetrate, and we can only detect its presence from the fetid stink these machines exude.

Side Two is a different creature altogether. The emphasis here is on a lighter atmosphere, but nevertheless the darkness hasn’t quite fled. It’s more structured, less reliant on abstraction and more on a sweeping sense of the cinematic and visual. Indeed, on the opening track ‘Isolasjon’ (Google translates it as Insulation, but perhaps Isolation would be better) we’re treated to shimmering ringing tones carrying an actual tune on its back before degrading into an endlessly-building seismic wave of granular noise that threatens to overwhelm. Just before it breaks, it abruptly disappears totally, leaving a ringing, deafening, wondering silence in its wake. As a finale, ‘Kaldere Nå’ (Cooler Now) brings us short, spooky, repetitive guitar phrases which sound as if they’re ghostly voices out of the distance – are they being sung by someone or are they merely recordings from the past, a past consigned to the past like ashes in a wind?

This wonderful album is awash with dankness, decay, filth, and degradation, even in its ‘lighter’ moments. What it says to me is that death doesn’t have to come for us in the dark – it can claim us on the brightest of days, at the happiest of times. In short, just remember to keep your eyes open.

Psymon Marshall 2019.