Moloch Conspiracy - Baclou.

Album: Baclou

Artist: Moloch Conspiracy

Label: Eighth Tower Records

Catalogue no: ETR020

Tracklist:

1. Iridescent Lights

2. Bagne’s Nightmares

3. Fever

4. Baclou

5. In the Forest

6. Intermede

7. Signals

8. Fire in the Night

Baclou is a creature from French Guianese culture, also known as a Viscous Gnome (no, that isn’t a typo). Julien Lacroix, the light behind this project, spent some time in French Guiana and, judging from the snippet of information on Eighth Tower Records’ Bandcamp page for the release, the visit was a mixture of heaven and hell (mostly the latter, by the sounds of it). The general tone on this one is heavily oppressive, a weighty, thick miasma of murkiness and half-light swirling in an obscuring swampiness. It also feels uncomfortable: if Dante had been a dark ambient musician, then I have very little doubt his Inferno would have sounded something close to the opus Lacroix has given us here.

Like all cultures anywhere in the world, it possesses its bright spots in addition to its underbelly of dimly-lit practises and traditions, its beautiful stretches of untouched landscape and its desecrated fields and hills. The first track (‘Iridescent Lights’) does offer a small presentiment of both sides of the place: a light dusting of ringing, jingling bells float into view before a darkly shivering drone and bird sounds interlope, the layers massing in weight and concatenating into frenzied strings, pushing forward and retreating constantly, flying high and then diving back into the depths. Drones and bells compete for space, intertwining and twisting, leaping and swooping, until it achieves a shrill pealing before falling back.

Bleak squalls, accompanied by heavy downpours characterise ‘Bagne’s Nightmare’, the winds demolishing trees and buildings in their wake. This one paints a miserable picture, a flooded landscape awash with debris human and natural, broken and blackened. The atmosphere is oppressive and inhuman, a heaviness that pushes everything and everyone to their limits, taunting endurance, mocking our perseverance. In an environment such as this, biological systems fail and falter, and I am not just talking of the human body – the landscape suffers as well. Heat shimmers resound on ‘Fever’, drying out the thin skin of the soil, blackening, shrivelling, and breaking apart, disrupting the mechanisms needed to survive and prosper. 

‘Baclou’ is a murky, viscous affair, exactly as the mythical creature this album is named after is described, an elusive but potent and dangerous entity to be encountered at one’s peril. It eyes us with malefic intent, a glowering consciousness that means us no good. Heavy exhalations, growls, low metallic reverberations acting as a warning: the indicators are all there, and we should heed them. ‘In the Forest’: normally it would be a place of deeply calming spaces, but here the trees and flora of the understorey press inward, blotting out as much light as it can, leaving in its stead a dim veil as if the canopy has been covered in gauze. In this half-light, the mind wanders, small sounds are magnified, and the shadowed crevices become deeper and darker, hiding who knows what? The forest has eyes, and their owners’ intentions are as mysterious and unknowable as the creatures are themselves. Yet ‘Intermede’ shows its other side, a busy, chattering, noisy cacophony, an island full of life and activity as mesmerising, chaotic, and kaleidoscopically colourful as any paradise.

Distant sweeping drones open ‘Signals’, heralding a return to the undergrowth, a place of scuttling beasties and clandestine perils. Darkness appears to collect here, as if it’s hiding from the light higher up. Perhaps bright illumination is a reminder of its inhabitants’ true natures, an ugliness that by rights should remain hidden. Grainy crackling introduces the final track, overlaid with a single drum and reverberations, an age-old quimbois or voodoo ritual performed in the dead of night on some lonely beach, or deep within the forest, the trees sheltering the secrets laid bare in the celebratory arena. It’s as opaque and inscrutable as attempting to see the heart of a jungle by standing on its outside. 

Baclou speaks mostly of the sides of cultures and locations that the travel brochures would never dare to show and could never be shown in brilliantly airbrushed colour – the senses-sapping heat, the inhospitable and unforgiving climate and landscape, the fauna and flora inimical to humans, the capricious whims of weather and nature, the occult streams of culture kept away from prying eyes. It feels uninviting almost, a warning to stay away, or perhaps it’s a way of telling us to leave it alone to exist as it always has done and not to interfere. The canvas we’re shown here is depicted in muted and subdued hues, with only the occasional pinprick of light showing through – those sparse stars are indicative of life and activity but beyond that hint it doesn’t enlighten any further. 

Let me just reiterate by concluding that this is a dark dark ambient album, a recording where any kind of illumination is in short supply. It’s heavy, oppressive, limiting, depressing, and overbearing: needless to say I loved it.   

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Michael Bonaventure - In Tenebris Ratione Organi

Album: In Tenebris Ratione Organi

Artist: Michael Bonaventure

Label: Eighth Tower Records

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist:

     1.      In Tenebris Ratione Organi I

     2.      Galactic Weed

     3.      Morphodelic

     4.      Giant Silver

     5.      In Tenebris Ratione Organi II

     6.      Distant Madrigal

     7.      Love Transformed

     8.      Giant Gold

     9.      Doom Animal

Normally, when settling down to write a review, I only cursorily skim through the press/artist blurb that always comes with the recording, as I like to listen and react to the music unfiltered so I am not influenced by outside ideas; as a result I don’t often quote from the accompanying spiel but I will make an exception in this case because a very good point is made: “The organ: in popular association, both the ‘God Instrument’ and the ‘Devil Instrument’, a purveyor of myriad densities and shades of massed tone, elemental fire and inexhaustible air, capable of inspiring wonder, awe, profound mystery and sinister darkness”. Up until this moment I’ve never really thought about the organ’s associations but yes, certainly in cinematic terms the organ is portrayed as being representative of forces both divine and satanic. A good case occurred to me: in Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), a scene occurs when Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), who has been hired as a church organist, is seen practising the organ in her new church but the elevating hymnal music shifts to something less wholesome as time goes on. The minister, hearing it, decides that she’s no longer a suitable occupant of the position, and asks her to resign. Here we encounter both sides of the organ in a single instance.

The current offering under consideration, Michael Bonaventure’s In Tenebris Ratione Organi, is built around the complexities and manifold capabilities of the organ as the facilitator for an almost endless spectrum of possibilities. In many respects, and as pointed out in the blurb, it can be treated as a form of synthesiser, in that sounds and waveforms can be layered together to produce hybrid tones. And the end result of Bonaventure’s explorations fully underscores the pre-eminence of this majestic instrument as a means of expressing moods and atmospheres every bit as effortlessly as a digital synthesiser can.

And my word, the myriad ‘voices’ and textures presented here have opened my eyes to the spectacular breadth of tonal and abstract articulation that the instrument is capable of. In all honesty, my sole impression of the organ has been limited either to the sort of musical accompaniment to grand classical compositions or cheesy seaside entertainment of a certain period (so much for a broad appreciation of music!), but this goes beyond the boundaries of conventional interpretation and expression. This work places the grand organ in an entirely new context, an exemplary instance of a catalyst that helps to shift one’s perspective from the mundane to the fantastic.

I suppose in many ways Bonaventure uses the organ as any musician would employ a synthesiser, creating base sounds and then subjecting them to treatments and manipulations, in real time and post-production, to add nuances and colour to what is already a rich seam of material. Watching a cathedral organist manipulate the stops is exactly akin to how a synthesist would adjust and control the frequencies of the electronic instrument. In exactly the same manner he can add and subtract, alter and multiply the textural make up, creating a complex tapestry of sounds and vibrations to bedazzle the listener.

I have to say, with hand on heart, that this is a difficult album to describe in verbal terms and the most challenging review I’ve had to write (which is a good thing), but the pieces on here run the gamut of atmospheres and feelings from the elevating (‘Love Transformed’, ‘In Tenebris Ratione Organi II’) to the disturbing, sinister, and disjointed (‘In Tenebris Ratione Organi I’), via the fractured (‘Morphodelic’), abstract (‘Doom Animal’), and ambient (‘Giant Gold’), as well as the mysterious and the majestic (‘Distant Madrigal’). There’s everything you would expect from a full pipe organ, albeit some of the sounds have been pulled, elongated, cut-up, mashed, distorted, and put through further effects. Add on voices and a plethora of other artificial noises to create new flavours, textures, and colours, just like a chef would do to a dish, and what you get is an aural smorgasbord of delicious and adventurous sonic experiments that will enlighten and surprise.

For me, this has been a mini-revelation, in that the organ is an instrument I’ve not really paid much attention to in the past, and consequently Bonaventure’s pieces, by using an entirely fresh palette from which to conjure up new visions and vistas, have turned my perceptions upside-down. In a world where it seems that most people are content to tread well-worn trails it’s nice to meet someone whose ethos appears to be ‘what happens if I do this?’ – and that I find to be extremely refreshing and welcome.

The album, in a limited edition of 100 CD copies, is now available to pre-order here:

https://eighthtowerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/in-tenebris-ratione-organi

Psymon Marshall 2019

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. 

[ówt krì] - Primal

Album: Primal 

Artist: [ówt krì]

Label: Sombre Soniks

Catalogue no: SomSon135

https://sombresoniks.bandcamp.com/album/primal

Tracklist: 

1. Ceremony Pt. 1

2. Serenity

3. Obey the Healer

4. Past vs. Future

5. We, the Forthcoming

6. The Stream

7. Primal Rage

8. Ceremony Pt. 2

There’s obviously a certain something, a je ne sais quoi, about Scandinavian countries that inspires certain types of musicians to produce deeply felt ambient creations that reach beyond the merely emotional and into a region that’s almost occult in its effect. I suspect it has a lot to do with a combination of landscape, climate, and isolation, especially since the further north one ventures the less hospitable the land becomes (although it’s acknowledged that people have carved out good lives even in such adversarial circumstances). Much of what I term Scandinavian dark ambient tends to veer towards the lean and spare, often run through with a vein of chilling darkness that elicits shivers that make the hairs to stand up on the back of one’s neck.

So too does this quiet, contemplative work: [ówt krì] is Finnish musician Kenneth Kovasin, and this is the sixth full-length album to be released by the project. Unlike most dark ambient from his region of the world, the pieces here speak of both the light and the dark, existing within a liminal zone where it’s forever dusk. The overall sense is one of encroaching dark, but nevertheless there’s a hint that not all has been totally subsumed by night, and that light is still illuminating parts of the physical and mental landscape. This is a transitional point that occurs every day – the time when the diurnal gives way to the nocturnal, when the living prepare to sleep and the dead sally forth to wander abroad, and the time when the mundane becomes magical. These two worlds overlap for the briefest of moments and, within that temporal slice and if one has the sensitivity, a frisson of tension is sparked off. The world goes quiet, anticipating, expecting: reality is pregnant with all kinds of possibilities, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. On one side is the world of mundanity, our world: on the other is the world of our forebears, where magic and mystery lived side by side with the everyday.

We are treated to sonorous whisperings of winds and mournful washes of sound, swelling and tumbling, sometimes beginning in the subterranean belly of the earth and then escaping gravity and soaring, reaching to the heavens in quest of something intangible and indefinable. The music possesses that sparseness so characteristic of Scandinavian dark ambient, yet it still comes across as lush and detailed: it swirls and spirals endlessly, ranges high and low, and loops through both the bright and unilluminated spheres of heaven and earth. It speaks of possibilities that, in the twilit world, exist in recognisable potential but fail to manifest completely by the time darkness descends. They still exist in potentia, but need the nourishment of light to be fully realised. 

This is both angelic and demonic, a meeting place of the two natures of Malkuth and Keter, of the primal existences intertwining and communing with the purely sublime. For one side it’s a promise and an enticement, and for the other it’s a lesson and a reminder. It’s the past, present, and future all colliding and converging in a singular moment in time. It’s filled with ghosts and the souls of the living, of idea and manifestation, of intention and accident, and of the mundane and supramundane. It is all and nothing, of existence and non-existence, of what is and what is not. 

Perhaps it is asking us to step into that liminal zone ourselves, to observe and feel the stillness and quietude, to imbibe the mood of dusk and all the hidden potential that contains. This is, once again, a deeply spiritual work that from Sombre Soniks that implores us to set the ordinary aside and partake of something deeper and more real. Embrace it. 

Psymon Marshall 2019

Ghoul-Kin - Seesar

Album: Ghoul-Kin

Artist: Seesar

Label: Sombre Soniks

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist:

1.      The Time-Travelling Ghoul-Kin
2.      The Hanging Witch
3.      The Evil-Looking Boy
4.      The Disappearance of 1926
5.      The Eve of the Battle of Sarkomand
6.      The Negotiations with King Randolph
7.      The Coronation of the Chieftain

Seesar is an American musician and sound creator, now transplanted to Shanghai, China, after having studied music in London, UK. He’s always been interested in the Lovecraftian Mythos as inspiration for cycles of musical composition, and Ghoul-Kin, his second release on Sombre Soniks, is based entirely around a single character: Richard Upton Pickman. The name is most associated with the tale ‘Pickman’s Model’ (1927), wherein the titular character is associated with ultra-realistic painted depictions of strange creatures, which Seesar here denotes as Ghoul-Kin. Over the course of the tale, Pickman himself becomes one of the Ghoul-Kin, and disappears to parts unknown. He is encountered again in ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (also 1927) in which he has been transformed into a ghoul, and on this recording Seesar constructs a narrative connecting the two tales. 

Seesar categorises his compositions as Lovecraftian Futurist, embracing as it does the concepts of the Lovecraft Mythos and the ideas of the Italian Futurists. The music itself is created via the use of unfamiliar instrumentation (such as bicycle tyres and spokes, suitcases, hairbrushes and combs, and a television wall mounting bracket), which has the effect of forcing us to think of sound in new ways as well as stripping away any specific cultural associations. The overall effect is to tip us into an alien landscape, where dissonance and consonance exist in a state of nervous tension, where positive and negative are practically one and the same quality.

But, as noted by the artist, it isn’t necessary to understand the academic underpinnings of the compositions to get something from them, or to find oneself enveloped by the atmospherics delineated here. The music is slippery, in the sense that the sounds employed are organically-structured even though there is intention behind every note. And if we tap into the mindscapes of Lovecraft’s Mythos stories, these dreamlike assemblages, disjointed and freeform as they may appear to be, do in fact make complete sense – after all our ordered world is adapted to the mental and physical view we have of our reality and so it must follow that the worlds Lovecraft envisioned are themselves fully adapted to the mental and physical frameworks of the creatures inhabiting them. Outsiders will find them disorientating and perhaps sickening.

Having noted that herein lie works which very much stray outside the bounds of what most would define as music, nevertheless it isn’t cacophonous, atonal, or dissonant. In fact the squeaks, scrapings, screechings, percussive elements, crackles, and strange voices coalesce into something which is strangely beautiful and beautifully strange. The moods essayed here have the same goals as those of dark ambient, or noise – they’re meant to take us out of ourselves, to transplant us out of the familiar and comfortable, to a reality whose components and guidelines differ vastly from our own.

Being conversant with most of Lovecraft’s work, I can say that the atmospheres described in his work have been captured very closely by the seven tracks put forth here. I’ve heard other musical interpretations of Lovecraftian aesthetics, mostly dark/cinematic ambient, which paint a picture of brooding malice and poison, but for me Lovecraft depicted the utter banality of the monstrous and uncaring neutrality of the ‘gods’ inhabiting his imagined universe – these ‘creatures’ neither cared about us nor noticed our presence, and they merely acted out their natures according to their kind. Viewed in this context then, these compositions contain a kind of aesthetic whose definition is neither good nor evil - it just is as it is. For me, that is truly Lovecraftian.

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Akoustik Timbre Frekuency - Thee Dreamachine Sessions.

Album: Thee Dreamachine Sessions

Artist: Akoustik Timbre Frekuency

Label: Sombre Soniks

Catalogue no: N/A

Youtube Videos.

Tracklist: 

1. Soundtraks for Thee Dreamachine 01

2. Soundtraks for Thee Dreamachine 02

3. Soundtraks for Thee Dreamachine 03

4. Soundtraks for Thee Dreamachine 04

5. Soundtraks for Thee Dreamachine 05

6. Soundtraks for Thee Dreamachine 06

7. The Dreamachine Sessions (Mix)

Ritual has always been around but, rather than being static, it’s an ever-evolving practise, even if its basis remains firmly embedded in the past. Brion Gysin added to the paraphernalia of ritual by creating the Dreamachine in the heady days of psychic and hallucinogenic experimentation way back in the optimistic (and mystic) sixties. Roundabout 1961 Gysin collaborated with Ian Somerville, a mathematician and computer scientist at Oxford University, and together they created the device. A description of the ‘machine’ and it effects are outside the scope of the present review, but information is plentiful on the web for the intrepid and curious.

The six tracks elucidated on here accompany a series of six short films on the device itself and Brion Gysin, its progenitor, plus an hour long mix which is to be used in conjunction with the Dreamachine. Akoustik Timbre Frekuency here rely on very traditional ritualistic sounds – bells, cymbals, singing bowls, flutes, harking back to the very roots of ritualistic practise. In addition field recordings have been thrown into the mix, creating a sensory dissonance as it enable us to see the world in a different light. Without the context of the films however it is difficult place the pieces into some kind of framework that makes sense. But, taking it purely as an academic exercise, and taking the hour-long mix as a reviewing cue, I will be concentrating my focus on that track so I can present some kind of an overview. 

The aim of ritual, of course, is to release us from the physical and mental constraints of our mundane reality and call forth atavistic entities and manifest spiritual archetypes into being. It’s no exaggeration to say that what we’re presented with here not only achieves that, but practically throws us out of the normal and into the supernormal. And that’s just the music – if we wish to use the Dreamachine alongside it undoubtedly its effects will be more completely felt. Clearly, the limbic system, responsible in part for emotion, learning, and memory, is meant to be aroused and activated together with the excitation of our visual faculties, without or without the visual cues afforded by Gysin and Somerville’s device.

It’s actually quite remarkable the effect such stripped-back and ‘primitive’ music can have on the mind, its otherworldliness a passport to entry into a realm normally off-limits and hidden away from our senses. Also its ringing clarity clears the mind of all humdrum thoughts and images, propelling us into a dimension where everyday preoccupations play no part. Knowing this, and performed whilst meditating on the steadily flickering rhythms of the Dreamachine’s light pulses, access to the visual part of our brains (to say nothing of the deeply buried ancestral memories each of us carries within us) the efficacy of the machine can only be multiplied in manifold directions. 

Saying that, having a Dreamachine isn’t compulsory – this is music to help us reconnect with ourselves, or at least those parts of ourselves that have been inhumed by the detritus of the world we live in. Listening to this, the psychic traveller can leave this dimension behind, bending time, place, and being at will. Sit back, turn the lights off, and simply let the sounds of time immemorial seep into every nook and cranny of your body. Your mind, once attuned, will do the rest. More than that, it will refresh one’s soul. 

Psymon Marshall 2019.