Artist: Undumë
Title: Ring The Bells: From The Graveside
Type: Album
Label: Digital / From The Grave Records
Something a little different today. Firstly this is partly a re-recording of a work recorded and released by Sokol Keep in 2025, but secondly is also a very different approach to dungeon synth that absolutely has its place.
Here we have two tracks both a little over eleven minutes, both dark and foreboding music. But the first, ‘Ring The Bell – From The Graveside’ is a spoken word short story set to music. I am a real fan of this approach to both music and to storytelling; the spoken word BBC broadcasts of ghost stories at Yule are a big part of both my childhood and later life, and in a more contemporary setting From The Bogs Of Aughiska’s collaborations with the legendary Eddie Lenihan reignited by love of storytellers. And I’m probably one of the few people who still believes that The Axis Of Perdition’s sprawling narrated album ‘Urfe’ is an absolute, horrific and disturbing masterpiece. Here Undumë have woven something quite wonderful and dark and immersive. Firstly the narration by John Brown is simply brilliant; expressive, compelling and strangely soft tones that seem to be that perfect resonance that all true storytellers possess.
The music is slow and eerie, it slowly raises the pressure in almost unnoticed ways until it has you frozen. Dark, softly echoing to match the narration, flowing and with a stalking presence strait from the tale, of which I shall say no more. Suffice to say that this is the music of the season indeed. It has a Jamesian soul in both words and the superb music that together creates a place where you must listen to this; that place being dark, lonely and at the threshold of one world and the other…
The second passage, ‘The Sky Is The Pit’ flows directly from the tale. A tolling bell, as solitary as the central character of the tale begins, nudging you and freezing you to attention. It is the slowest and most deeply, and dark of ambient sounds. Minimalist? Perhaps but its presence is impossible to ignore. Placed after the narration it feels, like its title, that you have somehow remained in a world where things are simply… upturned, wrong and yet equally as they should be in this place. It also creates the most unsettling sense of travel as though unnoticed you have been walking deeper into wherever it is that you have stepped into. So distant from the world you know and yet all it took was a single step. Or the deceptive voice of the tale of the previous passage.
Perhaps it wasn’t just a tale. Perhaps it truly opened something, somewhere. And this is where you stand…
For me this is perfect October music to discover: Candlelit tales, the rich vocal tones and the perfect soundscape through which the words are allowed to breach the veil with their resonance. And then the music continuing the psychonaut’s voyage opening into a grey, still world where the emptiness becomes a presence in itself.
Storytelling in an almost perfect form it leaves you with the disturbing question; what is this that is coming…..
Gizmo
Undumë – Ring the bells: From the graveside | Undumë | from the grave records
