Yrsel — Requiem for the Three Kharites
Named after the three Kharites (or Graces) of Greek mythology and comprised of a collaboration between black/doom metal project The Austrasian Goat< and dark ambient dude Ondo, Requiem delivers three long form explorations charting the territories and badlands of overdriven guitars and droning electronics. The last visions of Aglaea opens the record with a fug of feedback and analogue hum. The vocals (of the tortured animal type) linger ominously at the back of the mix, always threatening to break through, but maintaining a distance which allows the pure nihilism of the guitar drone combination to take centre stage. This not the sort of carnivalesque avant-metal of good old Arcturus or Sigh, structure is rudimentary, the drone and grind hold sway over a desolate landscape of commodified rebellion and alienated lives. The evocation of Greek mythology is both a clarion call to the long lost gods, and a lament for a culture that 2500 years on seems to hold greater solidity than our own.
Ondo takes centre stage at the opening of The Tears of Euphrosyne building low analogue drones against a backdrop of buzzing atonal guitar fuzz. At times each artists in this collaboration seems to play off against the other; Ondo’s sublime drones ruthlessly corrupted by the Goats libidinal violence and excess, a staging of that corruption of the old world by the ever advancing new. This is materialist music, each layer overthrown by it’s own contradictions; guitar against the void, the void of analogue electronics against the muscular grind of guitar. Yet each track individually, and indeed the totality of music contained, form a coherent whole.
The final piece is Thaleia’s Neurasthenia. Thaleia, a goddess of Beauty or Splendour, here reduced to a psychopathological state of abject dejection, anxiety; beauty is worn out. Slow dread filled piano chords rub against the ever downward spiralling electronics and panoramic drones, while far in the back of beyond there is the breathy exhaling of a whole civilization; sounding across aeons, signifying the death of an age. But in the midst of this fall, from that same place of the exhale, a choral refrain and a whispered voice. Life goes on, and from the broken carcass of this age sounds the first half-formed infant cry of the next. Technology and Will, which these two collaborators seem to represent, open up the void of possibility from this purely nihilistic music, the void becomes charged! In the unique particularity of these pieces you can find (if you listen closely) the expression of a new universal.