Black To Comm — Seven Horses For Seven Kings
The new album from Black To Comm, Seven Horses For Seven Kings, was released by Thrill Jockey Records as a double LP, CD and in a digital version. All this is available for ordering on the label's website , & on Bandcamp page for the project
The album cover is an oil portrait of a some form of creature. On a brown background, we see the greenish head of a ghost, a zombie, or an alien. The picture is painted in broad strokes, in a somewhat minimalist abstract style, which gives it a certain unsettling charm. The name of the project, and the albums title are not presented on the cover.
The album consists of thirteen tracks and lasts just an hour. In general, the style of the project can be defined as a mixture of Drone, Ambient and several other genres of experimental music. But, staying within the framework of these styles, for Seven Horses For Seven Kings Richter has released such a rich and difficult to understand album that it would make it hard for me to write about each track separately. As there are so many different variations of sounds and instruments present in each track.
So, ambient and glitch are almost absent on this album. But the basis of much of the album is very saturated low drone, which, as it seemed to me, was made using analogue synthesizers. Lots of different instruments move around this drone centre. You can hear orchestral brasses playing something like improvisation, violin discordant passages and much more. However, the focus is on avant-garde brass and woodwinds, which, to be honest, sound a bit scary. Much attention is paid to various effects, which sometimes resemble Space bound-effects, but more often they add to the overall sound a large share of the industrial component, which can transfer to the territory of Noise, which can sometimes be quite harsh. There is a rather large amount of percussion on the album, both acoustic and electronic. Acoustic percussion is represented mainly by cymbals. Electronic percussion is mainly made in a rather brutal manner, reminiscent of the work of the Finnish Industrial / Ambient project In Slaughter Natives, which gives the atmosphere of the album a slight ritual tinge. Also, the album uses a large number of processed samples process. These may be musical fragments, some specific sounds and, possibly, Field Recordings. In some compositions, we can hear vocals. So they also could be processed voices, whispers or a female soprano.
For such an album full of different sounds & textures, there's a prefect mixing balance present through-out. I can hear every instrument and every effect in crystal clear definition . It’s hard to imagine how much work was done during mastering. I usually listen to albums made in the experimental genre as a whole, ignoring the separation of tracks and their names. And in this case, the album Seven Horses For Seven Kings seemed to be absolutely monolithic and solid work, for which the separation into tracks is a convention. This album could well sound like a single complex and rich composition.
With regard to this album, I cannot evaluate Marc Richter talent for melody as there are no obvious harmonies and melodies on this album. But there is a clear understanding of the composition and sound balance, which is more suitable for sound collage and musique concrete. However, the use of large instruments, sometimes sounding like an orchestra, turns the compositions into real music. This is a frightening, chaotic, sometimes dissonant and surreal sound canvas, which gives the feeling of being in the centre of musical chaos created by violent demons and ghosts.
Of course, I can not finish without comparisons, in order to make it easier for the reader to understand the whole picture. However, these comparisons are rather arbitrary. Imagine a mixture of works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, John Zorn with a high degree of industrial, noise and drone, as well as Richter’s personal vision of music and composition.
As mentioned, the duration of the album is just over an hour. And with such a sound richness and diversity, I began to get a little tired of listening closer by the end of the album. The last composition of the album, "The Courtesan Jigokudayû Sees Herself As A Skeleton In The Mirror Of Hell" (by the way, this is the longest track on the album - it lasts just over nine and a half minutes), it seemed to really loose my attention, and to be honest I found it rather boring.
So, with Seven Horses For Seven Kings we have a very serious, strong and rich album made at the junction of many experimental genres, which feels different from the previous Black To Comm albums. I think you’d say this album can be considered some of the best work from Marc Richter and Black To Comm thus far