Posts Tagged ‘Ritual’

Codex Serafini – The Imprecation Of Anima

Posted: 30 May 2023 in Albums
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Riot Season Records – 23rd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having had something of a chuckle at Henge for their pseudo-space mythology and psychedelic psilliness, I find myself squaring up to purveyors of genre-straddling experimental doom, Codex Serafani. Their biography explains: ‘Their journey started a long time ago, some say on Saturn, some say in the subconscious of the human psyche, coming out in different manners through the ages, channeled by mystics, witch doctors, shamans, free thinkers, free spirits. But we do know that what has become Codex Serafini travelled here from their home world on Enceladus in 2019 and crash landed into the music scene of Sussex.’ Of course they did.

But what are the chances that a I’m writing this review, an article from The Guardian pops up in my news feed reporting on how astronomers have spotted a six-thousand mile plume of water vapour blasting from Enceladus – a small moon belonging to Saturn believed to be one of the most promising places in the solar system to find life beyond Earth? As coincidences go, this was an usual one, and one which befits this band.

With a name which references Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, an illustrated encyclopaedia of an imaginary world, written in an imaginary language, it’s clear these guys have a keen interest in the realms of fantasy and mythology, to state it lightly.

I suppose that the concept piece whereby the concept includes the artist as much as, if not more than, the album goes back to Bowie – but back in 1972, this was new and novel, and moreover, Bowie was unique and an artist whom you could almost believe was from another planet. But even then, however much the concept became all-encompassing, it was also clear that the concept was a persona. But to base an entire career on a persona – not a media or public persona, but a far-fetched one which requires the suspension of disbelief – can be somewhat limiting. Where do you go when you’ve explored the concept to its logical limits?

In creating such a vast and multi-faceted alternative universe, Codex Serafini have ensured an abundance of time and space in which to explore and expand their concept, and rather than it being self-limiting, the challenge will be to test the capacity of their imagination, not only conceptually, but also musically.

While the adage that you should never judge a book by its cover hold some merit, one can tell much about an album by the ratio of its duration to the number of tracks, and The Imprecation Of Anima has a running time in excess of forty-five minutes and contains just four tracks. We know we’re in ‘epic’ territory before hearing a note, and the first of the four compositions, ‘Manzarek’s Secret’ unfurls slowly with a long droning organ (which one suspects is no coincidental nod to The Doors) and chiming percussion. It’s not long before a thick, gritty bass and reverb-heavy vocal incantations are joined by some wild brass to burst into the first of numerous big, jazz-flavoured crescendos. At nine-and-a-half minutes long, it’s epic, but only an introduction ahead of the fifteen-minute swirling mystical monster that is ‘Mujer Espritu’, which brims with Eastern promise and sprawls in all directions at once.

Single release ‘I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust’ is perhaps the least representative song of the album as a whole: it’s snappy, exuberant, uptempo, jazzy, rocky, busy, climactic, and fairly structured – and clocking in at three minutes, it feels like a single when standing alone, but more like an aberrant interlude in context of the album ahead of the seventeen-and-a-quarter minute ‘Animus in Decay’. Now this is a wig-out! It’s heavily psychedelic and transitions through a succession of passages on the path to – what? Enlightenment? It’s certainly a journey, whichever angle you approach it from. It builds and grows in volume and tempo, then falls again and there are some expansive ponderous sections and shifts like sand dunes in a vast sonic expanse.

And so it may be that the concept is a little daft, but they deliver The Imprecation Of Anima – a work that’s as ambitious as it is immense – with absolute conviction, and the vast sound pulls you into Codex Serafini’s (other) world. Inventive and accomplished, it’s a truly mighty record.

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Amenra – De Doorn

Posted: 23 June 2021 in Albums
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Relapse Records – 25th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

With everything they do so heavily steeped in a deep sense of ritual, a new album by Amenra is not simply something that happens, it’s a happening, a grand unveiling to reveal something far greater than simply a set of songs. It’s something spiritual, cosmic, and even cataclysmic. And whereas some bands who aspire to such elevation are prone to presenting as pompous and pretentious, something about Amenra – and it’s not just their sincerity – transcends that.

On the subject of transcending boundaries, De Doorn marks a break from the linear sequence of the band’s previous releases, Mass I-VI. While bands conventionally eschew their native languages in favour of English in order to garner a broader commercial appeal, for De Doorn, Amenra have elected to mark another departure in being the first Amenra album to be sung entirely in Flemish. But in certain genres, at least, the language of sound and of music transcends the language of words, and as the press release suggests, ‘De Doorn imparts a universal power by digging deep into local customs. Not just allowing for a greater range of expression through the intimacy, allowances and layers of meaning granted by your native tongue, it takes inspiration from Flemish forms such as Kleinkunst, a folk-based musical wave driven by storytelling, and the passing of wisdom through generations’.

‘Ogentroost’ builds a slow, ominous intro, with slow, dolorous surges fading to silence like a slow-building tide. Colin H. Van Eeckhout’s vocal is hushed, a blank stage whisper against a picked guitar that in time replaces the doomy ambient tones: it’s fully four minutes before the first crushing power chord crashes in and the album’s first monumental, lumbering riff breaks out. But once it does, it’s all a fury. The pace picks up and Van Eeckhout’s finds his raw-throated anguished scream.

Excepting the interlude that is ‘De Dood in Bloie’, ‘De Evenmens’ is the shortest song on the album, clocking in at a mere eight minutes.

There is very much an evolving and emerging sense of formula present on Dr Doorn: the hushed, delicate intro, a long, slow build… and build… before the full-force guitars and howling anguished vocals crash in, pulverisingly heavy, crushing. ‘Het Glooren’ is a crawler – a majestic, lumbering crawler that has that grainy, organic richness of the best of Neurosis, with a picked lead guitar chiming and weaving textures over a dense backdrop of overdrive. Around the mid-point, everything drops out leaving just spoken words and sparse guitar picking an almost medieval motif… and then everything piledrives in, heavier than ever, and it hits like a tsunami, a soul-smashing blast of devastation. Van Eeckhout sounds shriller, more pained, more desperate, than ever, and it’s a hard, harrowing experience.

They really do save the best – and most fully representative – till last. ‘Voor Immer’ is another slow-building slow-burner that absolutely explodes. It takes around eight minutes for it to happen, but when it does, the guitars absolutely TEAR and SHRED and it’s a punishing blast. It doesn’t only touch your soul, it squeezes it, works it like a putty made of raw meat and emotion. And never mind that the words to the songs of De Doorn are inaccessible to any non-speakers of Flemish: even when singing in English, deciphering the words was difficult, and in such circumstances it comes down to the articulation oof emotion through voice in a way that goes far beyond language.

De Doorn is by no means an easy album and it’s not an album that one can dip in and out of. Similarly, there are no songs that stand out as particular highlights, or as having a memorable hook. Instead, what one takes away from the album is an overarching sense of a certain kind of experience, and it’s one that is defined by the contrasts – the lengthy quiet passages, which are melodic, contemplative, evocative, perhaps a little post-rock in orientation, pitched against the roaring explosive segments that are beyond immense. And, in this context of the fill breadth of the sonic and emotional experience that it provides, De Doorn is something else. Not an album so much to listen to, as an album to live through.

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1727 & Möbius – Burning the Black Candles

Posted: 22 February 2020 in Albums
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Panurus Productions – 31st March 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s always a pleasure to receive a new release from Panurus Productions, although that perhaps says as much about my perverse tastes as anything, since this cassette-only microlabel specialises in weird, obscure, dark and resolutely underground music. And this one’s a double cassette. So perhaps my pleasure is in torturing the self-loathing facet of my psyche, or perhaps it’s just that I’m wired to appreciate the way sound – and not necessarily songs, and not necessarily conventional melodies and structures – can convey meaning and be imbed with a subconscious resonance that taps into emotions by an alternative means. That’s the kind of pleasure I get from receiving a new release from Panurus: a pleasure that sets a certain churn in the pit of the stomach in anticipation of the dark delights it will offer up.

It’s also something of a pleasure to read the accompanying press releases, which are more or less reviews in themselves, brimming with descriptions not only of the sound, but the sensation. Here, we’re promised a work on which ‘pneumatic pulses crunch over electronic drones, as bestial grunts and gurgles wallow in the synthetic murk. Wordless siren calls weave through the textures, shifting between forlorn and beckoning. The vocal sounds of Möbius and electronics 1727 at times distinct and at others indistinguishable, giving us a sonic insight into something we are not meant to see. This is the soundtrack to grainy footage of cult activity – to newspaper clippings of strange happenings and missing persons.’ I feel as if my work is done, even though it’s only just beginning. It’s a challenge: where do you go from there?

Down, is the answer on this occasion. Down. And further down. Burning the Black Candles is a journey deep underground, and begins with a rapid descent into darkness, and a cold, paranoid space. You can no longer trust your senses: the very air will prod you and whisper painful truths and lies as you flinch and question your mind.

The title track leads the listener deep underground to a dark, dank place. Subterranean earthworks grind, slow-moving, tectonic resonance shuddering. Haunting, disembodied voices echo through distant caverns, echoes of lost souls enacting obscure rituals. It drones, groans, moans and grumbles on for a full twenty-three minutes.

‘A Censer Hanging from Chains’ continues in the same vein: so much so that the tracks bleed not one another in a seeping morass of swirling murk. Dank air gusts thick and heavy through shafts and tunnels, a purgatorial labyrinth.

It’s a low, slow, bowel-churning rumble of a drone that forges the fabric of ‘Smoke Slowly Filling the Chamber’: the title is evocative and the sound dense and suffocating. There’s a noise, far away, echoes of shouting, possibly torture, but it soon vanishes, and all that’s left is the buzzing low-frequency flutter. It’s an oppressive, chest-tightening experience, and by the end of its twenty-minutes, it’s slowed to a shuddering crackle, like a failing heartbeat. Then stops.

The final piece, ‘GinruB’, which isn’t quite ‘burning’ backwards is so barely there ambient it’s practically subliminal. And yet it radiates a dark presence that over the course of twenty-five minutes burrows deeper down, and into the listener’s psyche to unsettling effect. It rumbles, it crackles. It burns. Monastic voices and mournful drones rise and reverberate a way off, but the ceremony feels like a lament, a funeral ode, as the end draws closer. And closer. And then… nothing.

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Kadaitcha – Southern Phlegm

Posted: 23 June 2019 in Albums
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16th June 2019

Of course I was always going to be sold on an album with a title like Southern Phlegm. I mean, what’s not to like? Kadaitcha’s third release straddles ambient, drone, industrial, and power electronics to deliver four tracks driven by throbbing pulsating grooves welded to repetitive, cyclical guitar lines, and rent with the gnarliest, nastiest treble-shredded distorted vocals.

The first, ‘Phagocide’ pumps away for over nine minutes. The guitar and synths form a messy sonic fusion, a thick mass of distortion while wibbling space-rock blasts of analogue send blurred neon arcs through the heavily-grained backdrop like shooting stars. ‘Sewerbound’ is appropriately titled as it plunges deeper into impenetrable murk. It’s dominated by clattering percussion, the edges distorted and decayed, while screeding noise howls a vortex of sonic agony. Frequencies collide to create an endless flux of aural incompatibility. Everything is distorted, dirty, there’s malice in every note. The lyrics are impossible to decipher from amidst the sonic blitzkrieg, but there’s nothing about the delivery that suggests there’s any comfort or kindness on offer here.

Slow, brooding ambience builds an unsettling atmosphere during the opening minutes of ‘Datura’, before the overloading guitar crashes in. It’s got the low-end distortion of Sunn O))), but grinds away at a repetitive motif with the bludgeoning brutality of Swans. It’s a full-on kick to the diaphragm.

Closing off, ‘Vulpine Sacrifice’ arrives almost by stealth, a snaking bassline strolls in slow and slow, a stop/start stammer gives it an almost hesitant feel. Circuits fizz, crackle and hiss all over the place, before the final two or three minutes find the conglomeration of elongated hums coalesce to create something approximating ‘music’, akin to a swelling organ drone. But you couldn’t exactly call this brief moment of musicality that draws out to the fade the light at the end of the tunnel: it’s low, slow, and ominous and seems, if anything, to point toward another darkened door which opens onto stairs leading to an eternal abyss.

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Kadaitcha – Southern Phlegm

T.O.M.B. – Fury Nocturnus

Posted: 22 October 2016 in Albums
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Peaceville – 21st October 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Christ, this is fucking dark. The video which accompanies ‘Abysmal Channelling’ (the album’s bonus track, perversely enough), depicts scenes of an occult ritual, complete with burning incense, singing bowls, self-mutilation, frenzied bell-ringing, pools of blood, all against a backdrop of murky, mangled industrial noise.

Describing themselves as ‘blackened noise occultists’ US act T.O.M.B. (that’s Total Mechanical Occultic Blasphemy) have been going for 18 years now, and have, not surprisingly, remained deep, deep underground. Positively chthonic, in fact.

Fury Nocturnus is their thirteenth release, and while containing thirteen tracks (plus the aforementioned bonus cut), it contains no tunes, and the truth is, it’s very difficult to really establish what the hell’s going on amidst the dense sonic fog. Yes, they’ve fully embraced the

production values of early black metal classics – and it’s perhaps worth noting that Hellhammer, drummer of infamous Norwegian black metal trailblazers Mayhem is a key contributor to this album. This does mean, of course, that the guitars, drums, vocals and dark ambience which pervades every corner of the album is obfuscated by a thick, grainy coating of dinginess. A number of the tracks end abruptly, and there’s a distinctly low-budget, ‘cassette’ feel to this release. But then of course there is. And while occasionally grinding riffs seep through, there are no tunes, no overt structures and for the most part, it’s a seething morass of dark, dark noise cut through with tribal percussion.

Sometimes, there’s a very fine line between portentous and pretentious, grand art and derangement that borders on the dangerously deviant. It’s not entirely clear where T.O.M.B. sit, other than on a throne of bones in a temple hewn into some inaccessible rock face. They’re very much keeping it real in their approach to the music-making process: when creating the field recording soundscapes which feature on Fury Nocturnus, they report that certain necromantic instrumentation was used: human and animal bone, cemetery crypt doors, tombstones and coffins, and audio EVP equipment. I’m inclined to take them seriously if only because I don’t fancy the idea of being the next sacrificial offering, and crucifixion is, I understand, quite a painful way to go. I’m certainly not about to snort with derision about the cliché of the snarling vocals ranting about Christianity on ‘Hoards Rise Now, or any of the album’s many demonic invocations.

It’s not a fun or pleasurable experience, and protracted exposure to this dank, demonic, deviant, and deeply sinister noise feels like an act of self-flagellation. Needless to say, I’d take it over Justin Bieber, Kanye or Katy Perry any day.

 

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