I’ve been tending to pass by a lot of these Vidna Obmana reissues that have been steadily appearing from the Polish Zoharum label, but I must admit this Dante Trilogy (ZOHAR 288-2) set has too much “presence” for me to ignore. A triple digipak with a spine as thick your index finger stares down from your shelf and won’t take no for an answer. Between 2001 and 2004, the Belgian ambient emperor Dirk Serries trading as Vidna Obmana managed to put out the original CDs on the American label Release Entertainment, at the time an imprint more readily associated with avant-garde noise rock and experimental metal.
I suppose there is a subtext running through the entire work that either refers to Dante’s epic poem in an oblique manner or attempts to retell aspects of the story of the descent into the ninth circle of Hades, and there are some helpful printed quotes from the Cantos on the artworks, but I feel all these things are kept on the back burner and remain merely as props or illustrative cues on which the creator can hang his assorted reprocessed experiments, looping beats, and dark ambient tones. To put it another way, this isn’t a “concept” story-telling album like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and certainly the curators at Zoharum evince little interest in the works of Dante, let alone the “infernal” themes – the sound of Obmana is pretty much all they care about. On 2001’s Tremor, there are references to tunnels, descent, and something rather menacing called the “insane brightness”, but these glimpses of the diabolical zone are just that, hazy impressions delivered through the miasma of reprocessed recordings of flutes, pipes, electric guitar, harmonica, and percussion. Matter of fact the rhythms and beats might be the selling point for Tremor for an audience arriving 23 years after the fact, since along with the troubling off-kiltre non-chords and foggy moods, they help the album induce a rather queasy trance-like state akin to delirium. To achieve that mesmerism, it also helps that most of Tremor stays much in the same area – the same pace, the same overall tone; in fine, it doesn’t help to speak of a musical range when there are no conventional notes to speak of, rather an array of layers and textures.
By the time of 2003’s Spore, there might be a subtle turning down another alleyway or corridor of Lucifer’s kingdom, although the aesthetic changes are so indiscernible we’d need new maps of Hell to locate where the shift took place. The same instrumentation was used, including the “Recycling & Abstract Mutations” credit that was printed on the original release. This part of the trilogy contains a shade more violence and hints at the kind of painful flesh-tearing antics that Clive Barker would approve of, which isn’t to suggest this subtle music would have served as a good alternative soundtrack to the Hellraiser movies – although the closing cut, ‘Resonant Gore’ lasts for some 17 minutes and almost manages to propose its own horror movie just by dint of its extreme length. Obmana isn’t using ferocious hammering beats on Spore, but there is an ounce or two more reverb somewhere on these backing rhythms that induces mild panic attacks and nudges the listener closer to that “shamanistic” condition that many American droners were also shooting for around this period. Collectors of this Belgian creator’s work will be glad to note that the original 2002 7-inch version of ‘Isolation Trip’ has been included on this 2nd disc.
Lastly there’s the 2004 release Legacy which originally surfaced in late 2004. This time there’s finally an explicit link to the works of Dante as the opening track is a sung-spoken recit of the Italian bard’s lines delivered by Steve Von Till, speaking as if wrenched from the grave. I had to look him up, but he’s the singer and guitarist from Neurosis, the Californian dark-ambient psych-metal industrial band who also had albums on Release Entertainment and their sister label Relapse. This Legacy one seems the least interesting of the three to my ears – more of the same limp “tribal” rhythms and pulses, and the wispy tone-paintings swirling together in a smoky basket of puff. Is it my imagination, or are there one or two fewer “layers” for this 2004 realisation of the theme? It’s pointless to look for guitar solos or keyboard breaks in this long-form, meandering music, but somehow the separate elements which our man blends together so seamlessly seem to be slowly unravelling at some point, leaving us with a stark canvas of emptiness.
If I’m reading the Zoharum press note correctly, it seems this particular trilogy was about where Dirk Serries reached the end of one of his tethers – they speak of his personal “frustration, disappointment and creative turmoil”, perhaps in the context of his place in the field or genre of ambient music, and sure enough, three years later, he decided to retire the Vidna Obmana project. From 25 April 2023.