Artist: Caerdroia
Title: Abyssal
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Cassette
Another in a series of reviews that begin with apologies. This released a couple of months ago and whilst I keep telling myself I can’t be up to the minute as a one hamster enterprise, I still feel guilty when it takes time to get to something. Especially something this good.
I have waxed lyrical about Caerdroia before of course, the project of I.M of Electric Dragon and Vallenfyre fame, so I always look out for what hass inspired them next. Their last release, the single 26 minute track The Voyage was based on a story by weird tales writer Clark Ashton Smith and this time, with that wonderful image of a kraken, is two lengthy passages inspired by the Yorkshire coastline, an often wild and unforgiving place I know well and will always be close to my soul, and the myths and folk tales that writhe within the seas.
Those seas roll front and centre as it begins; a restless rolling against the shore and the cliffs though far from stormy as an acoustic guitar plucks a melody that with its softly echoing notes genuinely makes me feel like at any moment the sound of the waves will cease as I slowly sink beneath them. It is welcoming, though. Thoughtful. It brings a sense of the wonder and the mystery of something so close to us and out lives yet so unknowable. Men and women who have lived upon it may know the signs of weather turning or have thoughts on the shoals, but they respect rather than know it.
The music changes into a strange and mesmerising lilt of softly bubbling synths and then the crackle of a dry fire.
Perhaps returning home at night? Perhaps sitting up the beach staring into the distance. The weather and the music turns; it shifts into something darker. Something haunted. Strange sounds creep out below the wind. It is an eerie and, yes, frightening place. The waves are ever present and the foghorn sounds, or is that something else? Something alive. A drum beats. Worship? Supplication? Or the one thing to hold on to as the night and the mysteries out on the water hover.
The music can grow louder. It can bring an intensity. But perhaps only in my mind it also brings a sense of age and tradition with the drumming, the lyrical harp sounds and the calming feel. The sound of people whose lives are bound to this mystery maybe.
Part one ends in darkness and with the first crackle of what may be voices, the first real sound of isolation and dread amidst the ebb and flow…
Abyssal Pt II. The opening moments, the swell of a vast keyboard sound which is a dark, but never ending blue turned turquoise. I know. But sometimes music makes you see colours in your mind. And here it is a still, empty depth. A trench with the last fading rays of sunlight illuminating the space less and less until below me I see only the dark. Bubble ripple around but the music holds me, boyant, neither rising nor falling. And something watches with mild curiosity and vast age.
The music shift to a lighter sound, harpsichord like, piano and synth wafting by. It rocks, gently, in the swell and the wind come in cold and persistent but no storm. It is beautiful, careful, graceful music. The deep synths paint the depths below, the metallic string sound the human world.
A sound akin to a chant, a haunting and resonating sound. A strange flatering to the wash of synths as though sound is twisting through some hidden undertow. Is that the sound of a distant storm or a disturbance in the deep? Uttler gorgeous music; haunted, atmospheric and painting with mystery and intrigue a world we should never take for granted. It falters, an unsettling drone, a distant drum beat, or the clank of something against a hull.
We get a little Tennyson woven to the music next, sombre music as the words of the inevitability of death are woven into the image of setting out to sea.
And then a little light… gulls calling, a tune to smile to as bright as the light on a gentle sea. A whistle playing its dance as new energy fills us. Perhaps the season has been good, and the work has kept us fed. It has a dance like quality. The sound of a breeze in music; light and flitting from note to note as the waves lap gently.
The abyss waits though, at the end. Still there. Still lurking. And whatever calls it home and whatever capricious moods take it, we must accept that it simply is.
Utterly marvellous. You can almost smell the fresh seaweed, the tang of the salt and the cold, clean wind as the boat rocks and rise at the whim of the sea. The drawing of the darkness in the music is perfect; again that way of describing the differences between malevolence and simply the raw trught of the wild.
Buy this and stand on the cliffs at Whitby on an autumn evening and let you mind drift far out, and deep into the Abyssal world.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 