Hybryds — Mythical Music From The 21st Century

It’s always nice to finally hear material from a band/project you’ve heard mentioned in reference to other acts you like, and that brings us to the Cd in hand Hybryds Mythical Music From The 21st Century.  This was the Belgium bands first release from 1986, and it finds the project mix of ritual ambience, industrial tape loops, weird chanting, and genreal sonic unsettlement at its most primal, strange, disorienting, and surreal.

This CD reissue appeared on Poland’s Zoharum label in 2013, and it comes in a six panel digipak.  It takes in the 13 original tracks from the tape version of  Mythical Music.., along with four extra unreleased tracks from the late 80’s-to- early 90’s. And like with most reissues, these extra elements are interesting additions…but really they add little to the impact of the original release, and in some ways they do slightly detract from the original releases strange & fairly unequal impact.

The original release was built around sonic matter that was captured between 1983 & 1986, and this takes in a whole host of: tape loops, ritual percussion, male & female chanting, field recordings, and all manner of strange sonic matter…and all of this was recorded/captured in a very lo-fi & raw manner, so like the best stark & grim under produced black metal, this adds really another  atmospheric edge to the proceedings. The whole thing really does feel like its some strange & odd recording from another reality, which runs along side our own. or possible it’s a weird dream putting into sonic form. Most of the elements are hazed & morphed, with the only urgent & fully clear elements being
some of the tape loops & percussive textures, but even these have an odd & alien feel to them.

The albums original tape release of course split the tracks in two- so on side A you had the Morning Side, and on side B you had the Evening Side…but now I think it flows better as one long trip. Each of the  original thirteen tracks runs between around a minute & a half, to near on eight mintues. And each flits with a series of different loops, but also there’s a nice feeling of free-ness too, so sometimes the tracks  loops just stop, switch, or we drift into weird texturing or field recording dwells.

The extra four tracks take in a few shorter tracks, and one long twelve minute plus live recording from the early 1990’s…and as I've already said these ok, and of some interest, but really I could have done with out them…as I felt they broke the mood of the main body of the release….anyway all told the CD has a total runtime of just over seventy five mintues.

All in all I’m mighty glad to have finally heard some work of this distinctive & original sounding project, and I can safely say that Mythical Music From The 21st Century will appeal to anyone who enjoys strange and surreal sonic fare that hovers somewhere between ritual ambience, 80’s lo-fi industrial, and generally dark psychedelic music.