New items from the Polish Zoharum label.
The ORD project is one fellow, Alexey Shipilov from Voronezh in Russia, calling himself Ord Err. I see he’s been active under this name since around 2017 and aims to touch a lot of bases with his “ritual” styled music – both Buddhist and Shamanic religions, and a strange blend of ancient folk instruments with contemporary industrial noise. He loves nature but is also fascinated by “the secret conspiracies of the ancient”, by which I suppose he means books of esoteric lore illustrated with cabbalistic symbols. This, and the cover art with its tormented skeleton, may lead you to expect something more dark and harsh than we hear on his Withered Bones (ZOHAR 248-2) album, which is actually very delicate and wispy as it floats around the room forming eerie shadows and misty shapes on the walls. He realised it mostly with acoustic instruments, including Tibetan singing bowls (another link to Buddhism), lots of percussion, and his own voice; plus some effects, and field recordings. Unlike some on this label who like to create atmospheric vapourings through multiple layers and overdubs in the studio, with ORD it’s all in the performance; and he manages to sustain his well-crafted efforts for 15 mins at a time, never once losing his balance as he dances on his metaphysical tight-rope strung between this world and the next. The track titles read like the stages in a pagan ceremony, involving basic witchcraft using ground bones, ash, and earth, evidently in the service of a primitive regenerative rite. Oddly compelling; at times the music is so washed out and skeletal it barely seems to exist at all, yet it keeps manifesting like a very persistent phantom. Very good.
Themistoklis Altintzoglou calls himself “Theta” and his albums are issued using the Greek character for his name. Originally from Greece, he seems to be living in Norway just now, and evidently much of his music and its sound draws inspiration from the climate and landscape of the Nordic realms. His Vision Of One (ZOHAR 249-2) album is the second time he’s appeared on this label, and it arrives in a package printed with a gloomy grey landscape so bleak that even Edgar Allen Poe would have deemed it too extreme for his readers. Inside the digipak are a few printed lines of barely coherent prose, full of vague allusions, but cast in fairly extreme terms and invoking such abstractions as “purification” and “isolation”, while providing glimpses of “vast landscapes unknown”. The music hereon is equally lacking in focus, deliberately so; endless clouds of slowly-churning and formless murk, or evocations of stinging cold wind underpinned by depressing synth melodies. Theta has a convincing description of his working method; he claims to work to patterns and systems in quite a rigorous manner, yet also allowing the chaos of chance to rear its head and disrupt his pre-planned grids. A professed lover of both nature and technology, he likes to explore the areas in between these two poles, and he fatalistically assumes that everything will inevitably end in disaster as the forests fall beneath the axe. The label points out that he produces his dense sound using quite “modest means of expression”, which sounds encouraging; and they perceive traces of “Black Metal spirt” fleeting across his portentous, grey clouds of hideous, cold, drone.
The compilation WC ei8ght: Zona Electronica (ZOHAR 250-2) has been put together for the label by Rafal Iwanski (of Hati and Alameda 5). Although very varied, it doesn’t actually contain much in the way of especially good or unusual music, but even so there’s a lot in its favour. For one thing there’s a slightly better gender balance than we usually get from this rather male-centric label, even if there’s only two female contributors (D I D and Joanna John) out of 14 artistes. Secondly, it represents a move away from the dismal doom and ambient drone that’s pretty much the stock-in trade of Zoharum, and instead it’s quite lively and even playful. Concise, too. In this way we get a snapshot, smatterings of contemporary experimental-ish electronica from across Poland, all of them otherwise unreleased and all of them very new (recorded in 2021). Oh, and one American (Jeff Gburek) also. Plus there’s a track from a personal favourite Kamil Kowalczyk, where he delivers his customary “endarkened” take on Kosmische music. The sleeve notes contain some rather banal observations about modern technology and the potential of electronic music going into the future, which feels dumb enough to have been included on one of those dreary Sub Rosa “Anthology” comps from 20 years ago, but in this case it’s bolstered by a quote from Stanislaw Lem, the famed Polish science fiction writer who authored Solaris.
All the above from 14th March 2022.