Artist: Θ
Title: Elysian
Type: Album
Label: Digital
I feel as though this album should have been brought to my attention via some hand written, wax sealed parchment letter found beneath my hand when I awoke from some laudanum induced reverie. And in its way, perhaps it was. An unnamed artist, a mysterious album simply there when you find it. Why, how I was led to it is a dark tale of hitns and whispers never to be revealed… but here that trail led indeed.
‘Within My Dreams I Find Nothing’ begins with a slow, repetitive and eerie guitar melody, a steady pulsing bass, the occasional brush of cymbals and then the drums drive forward into a world of hazy light and gorgeous echoes. Vocals move behind the music, not quite in reach like the memory you have on waking. It is genuinely so dreamlike. It has that sound I will forever associate with the roots of what tends to be called blackgaze; Amesoeurs. Music that conjures crepuscular light, thoughts fogged by sleep, the incessant pressure in your skull when sleep becomes a force that will not let you go. A little of Solefald circa ‘The Linear Scaffold’ too in it sense of travel and keen intellect. This is mesmerising, strange, utterly beautiful and inescapable.
‘Forever Searching For Elysian’ encourages you forward with a soft, almost scampering bassline, that goth feeling coated in velvet. An intermittent guitar intrusion like golden coins, then the harsh vocals closer this time. They snarl and bite, the hidden teeth in a dark place. The bassline here is superb; it dances and pulses and is the spine upon which this journey walks. Somehow I feel lost in this place. Perhaps its the suggestion of the title, perhaps the music, but when the sound broadens out with sheet of sharper sounds, a louder presence it is as though the realisation of futility has taken hold of me and I fight the panic and despair. It eases, somehow, and as it falls back into the softer sounds I wonder if perhaps I have accepted that I am lost and simply continue as it is apparently where I live now. The gentle fade is the final calm.
‘Solace Amongst The Stars’ has a lonely beginning. A melody on guitar of gentler but almost still notes with little stutterings that somehow do indeed suggest something cosmic, the sounds of space. Even the harsh vocals in the background do not so much cause me fear as simply part of the sound of spaces in between. The melody is somehow welcoming; it builds into lush layers on a gentle tempo, each one passing with a serenity and a grace. It rests and rebuilds, the vocals seemingly pushing it on, higher. I feel a sense of light here, of movement towards. There is the fear of excitemnt but so much of this feels… strangely, eerily welcoming. Strange is not always menace, sometimes it is beauty and it is wonder.
‘Et Tu, Brute’ closes the mystery. A coda of sorts. A few minutes of also and relaxing ambient despite the title. Bright notes strike, but still more gentle than threat. It is the quiet, slow relaxing end, the waking perhaps Rising back up through the layers of reality until you break the waking surface once more.
This is an album of beauty, of awe and, yes, of wandering in dark places but always somewhere a source of light, hazy or bright, fading or pulsing, exists. It it breath taking in its ability to hold you safely in its world and lead you through.
I have walked through this mystery of perfectly blended ambient, blackgaze and black metal and I can only urge that you do the same.
Masterful music, Θ, masterful dreamscape.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 