Artist: Resinator
Title: Ritual Bath
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Realm & Ritual
I have to admit a couple of things at the outset here. Firstly the download code from this hitherto unknown to me project fell into my lap with a couple of cassettes I ordered from the US. Probably Weregnome or Realm & Ritual, but I genuinely forget. But an artefact is on the way too as this was so good I had to order it.
Secondly it probably doesn’t really qualify as dungeon synth under Whiteman Scale scrutiny (which I know got some peoples’ backs up but for the record I loved his reasoning, and explanation even if I might take issue with some aspects but I’ll essay my odd relationship with genre and sub genre definitions somewhere else when I’m feeling brave) so maybe its as well this is Mausoleum Monday. Their bandcamp page says, simply ‘high grade low frequencies’ too which I love the ambiguity there. And of course there’s the spelling to note too.
But what it absolutely does qualify as in anyone’s book is just superb instrumental, ambient and strangely esoteric feeling music. And I’m all about that. That is the absolute point of reference for any music; quality.
It is presented as an unbroken 45 minute piece which did worry me but…well, I was unaware I was in the hands of a master. It begins delicate and sparse, dark ambient in feel, that slow wave of keyboards that can both press in and open up a space or a world to you. Delicate sparse keyboard notes dance upon this like tiny points of light and nearly five minutes in a strange voice begins to teach us. Oddly difficult to hear but it ends on the perfect thought to make you stop and begin to ponder. “There are no new stars…”
From here the keyboard wash becomes deeper but the swell of light becomes stronger. Notes begin to dance pulsar like, in and out, and we are in a place of thought and wonder.
The way that Resonator smoothly raise the intensity of the music to suit the journey is just phenomenal. The emotion these steps forward create within me is just breathtaking. I genuinely feel as though I have begun upon some important, cosmic path of ancient presences on the grandest of scales though the portal I entered by was small and unprepossessing, made by human hands.
New layers rise, old ones slip away unnoticed. Twenty minutes in, a moment of stillness emerges but then we get a cymbal. A drum. A guitar sound. Slow but strong. In those few minutes we are gradually passed to the hands of a strangely more earthy intelligence. We have focus and a point to stare at not the endless circling beauty of waves of dark and light.
This is now a place of some bleakness for me. The presence of design seems to cast shadows from perhaps ruins or derelicts. Something that could age and die unlike the endless light at the beginning. And yet as it pick up momentum, smoothly, and we pass through a treatise on sleep and the expansion of the soul it becomes part of those glorious waves of life and as the deeper sounds return toward the finale it is simply to show the resonance of the sights around you.
It is a quite wonderful piece. It is uplifting as its journey takes you along, it offeres wisdom at points along the path but it moves ceaselessly, earnestly and deliberately.
I now have to explore Resinator’s other work as something this good cannot be a stand alone moment. This is the work of purpose and incredible touch.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 