If you are searching for obscure music, music that explores sounds off the beaten metal paths, I, Voidhanger Records from Italy is a good place to start looking. Among the many releases and the wide spectrum of genres you are sure to find something that agrees with you. However, it might involve a bit of trial and error to find your favored kind of obscurity. I remember albums and artists that I reviewed that were rather challenging to listen to, but I also remember LPs that took me down unforeseen, highly unusual and truly original musical paths; paths, I probably wouldn’t have explored otherwise; paths, that opened up whole new worlds. What more can you ask?

The album at hand, I am excited to report, falls among the latter category, and it drew me in with its cover design already. The patinated, old, broken and cracked coloring of the deep blue circle or sphere, a whole in any case, gave away parts of the album’s story; a story of beauty and class, age and scars, relationships and suffering, change and fading.

SOL is a long-term project of Emil Brahe, a Danish multi-instrumentalist, with a long and far-reaching career in music. Promethean Sessions is the band’s ninth full-length studio album and my first encounter with them. Starting out as a one-man project, SOL released their first LP Let There Be A Massacre in 2007 via Van Records. For the most recent long player, I have learned from the PR blurb, Brahe “surrounded himself with a large ensemble of talented musicians” to “accompany him in his folk doom ruminations”.

The credits list is impressive indeed and involves altogether 17 people contributing with their performance on a likewise varied and respectable number of instruments, some of them, like the marxoline, rather uncommon. Since so many people were involved in the creation of the six-track album, it may come as no surprise that the LP went through multiple “versions, atmospheres and songs before finally being done”. Nine years it took them, altogether.

Whatever drove the meticulous creation process, I can attest to abysmal depth having been reached, as well as a special, unique atmosphere. As soon as you press play on the album’s first track, Praying for Rain you can feel the abyss turning its black gaze at you. An ominous, fluctuating, humming, levitating sound, produced on synths and organic instruments, accompanies musing, almost whispered male vocals.

Of the albums six songs, some are sung by women, some by men. This taking turns between male and female vocals and the differing characteristics of the soundscapes suggests a male-female dynamic, a relationship as the generator of the abyss. Songs with female vocals, like A Choir of Teeth and My Words Made Nothing, feature, for example, a trickling piano sound and the cling-clang of various instruments and bells alongside foreboding synths sounds. This reminded me of early Lingua Ignota albums as well as the subject they concerned themselves with. Songs with male vocals, like I Bred a Sun From A Golden Moon and Paranoia Sunrise, feature heavy bass and guitar riffs. The divide is not as strict or as simple as I have described it now, and in fact no song on the album is like the other, but there is a certain chasm that can be heard and felt.

Paranoia Sunrise, track number four, function as the album’s climax and its center piece. It is absolutely glorious in scope and sound. After a complexly woven net of various bits of music, the paranoia rises with a loud, dominant bass, disturbing, attention seeking, churning and turning and self-replicating, providing a drive that is impossible to escape.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus was the great trickster who did things he shouldn’t have done and who was cruelly punished by Zeus for his transgressions. Chained to a rock, with an eagle tearing away and feeding on his liver, with the liver growing back at night, only for the torture to begin anew come daylight, he spent half an eternity suffering before being freed. Promethean Sessions explores the minutiae of this suffering, in a different setting and a different context, but similarly unending, similarly relived.

Folky doom, deep, gutsy and stirring. A varied, eclectic musical journey that defies categorization, a trip you shouldn’t miss.

(8.5/10 Slavica)

https://www.facebook.com/soldoom

https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/promethean-sessions