CD – Ici D’Ailleurs/Mind Travels

Massimo Pupillo (Zu, Ardecore) and Timothy Lewis, aka Thighpaulsandra (Coil) already worked together last year on December 2017, with Leave A Silver Trail Through Blackness for Consouling Sounds. The same dark ambient sensitivity is in this Mysterium Coniunctionis, whose structure, if possible, shows even more drones and post-apocalyptic weaves. The sounds are dark and sibilant, as if they were softly scraped in the first part, “Spagyria”, a millimetric suite where cyber-cinematic industrial loops come alive. The second composition, “Solve Et Coagula” lasts twenty minutes, as does the former one. The duo here more or less follows the same pattern about atmosphere and narration coherence: almost imperceptible audio emergencies, dilated aria and romantic shocks. The photos by Francis Meslet chosen for the artwork offer a valid visual representation, imbued with an elegant “ruin porn”. The “abandoned castle” setting is a good framework for the dreamy aria performed by the two experimenters, who finally seem to find their own style code. The title too plays its part in this personal mythology: it refers to the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and his “alchemical thoughts”, a seminal text rich of forms, symbols, concepts and images, a sort of conceptual passe-partout which evokes what the separation and the composition of the psychic opposites involves. In this case, the extreme points are the different music structures, that seem to be irresistibly attracted (just as alchemical proto-chemistry can entrap and inspire a very rational thought). There are many contemplative passages and many noisy sequences, in between digital and analogue. The electronics is beating, fluid, full of syntex sounds and space effects. The precise mix of the elements seems to be a ritual form of knowledge, a dense and involving substance crossing different genres and evoking immersive atmospheres, cloudy, ghostly and full of tension.

 

Uruk – Mysterium Coniunctionis