Allerseelen — Frühgeschichte IV-Lacrima Christi
As with the other releases in this series the cd comes in the form of a glossy four-panel digipak. This features shadowy pictures of blue flowers, water drops, and wooden floorboards. On the inside cover, we get a write-up about the release from Allerseelen's key songwriter & constant member Gerhard Hallstatt.
Lacrima Christi is an eight-track affair that was originally in 1989 released as C60 cassette on Arany Kor- one of the early labels that Gerhard run. This CD is the first time this album has been released since it’s an initial release- and comes in an edition of 300 copies.
The eight tracks that make up the release run between six and seven-minute mark, and apparently were created pretty much solely with the use of bones & sparse vocal samples. As with the other releases in the Frühgeschichte series- the sound of Lacrima Christi is a long the way from the layered & often fairly genre complex sound of Allerseelen today. The whole fifty three minute album is decidedly sparse, often eerier, and crude in it’s feel.
The release opens “Lacrima Christi 1” which finds a skittling blend of flitting & barren percussive hits, eerie wailing female voice like yodling, & lo-fi/ organic industrial rattling. By “Lacrima Christi 2” we’ve moved onto rapid marching loops of percussive bone play & wailing-to-wavering ambience- all creating a track that’s both urgent yet rather haunting, which is a difficult mix to get right. By “Lacrima Christi 7” we moved onto a blend of cascading loops of ritual percussive bone play, errier breathing samples, and sour-yet-creepy harmonic tone hovers. The final track “Lacrima Christi 8” is the longest track at the seven & a half minute mark- and here things begin with a lost & hazed female wailing texture- this is slowly but surely added to by a building mesh of more haunted ambient tones, and very subtle bone knocks & rubs.
Lacrima Christi is certainly one of the more errier & creepy early releases from Allerseelen- that still today manages to capture a feeling of unsettling sonic arcane-ness. If it sounds like your type of thing, I’d advise picking it up sooner than later- as I’m sure the 300 copies of this won’t hang around long.