Lucifaere (Jim Kirkwood)
Embracing the Dark
A church bell rings out and is joined by a half percussive half ticking clock sequence. Add to this effects that sound as if someone is trying to unlock a door and you have a typically atmospheric and Gothic start to ‘Down The Crow Road’. Even though the music is highly descriptive there is constant movement and rhythm. We then get female Gothic chants which are answered by the male equivalent. This call and answer chanting is certainly a new twist on a tried and trusted theme. The main sequences start to build one rhythmic and the other high register. Nothing stays still for long however. The drums die away, the remaining sequence builds and things become even more tense. One atmospheric texture after another enters and leaves. This is Jim at his most unique. All manor of strange juxtapositions of sounds and sequences are used.

Things become a little more tranquil but no less atmospheric as we drift into the second track ‘Relics From A Future Age’. Female voices low in the mix say something in a strange language and as before are answered. On ‘The Dreamtime of Rust’ an Alquimia type wordless vocal sighs over a repeated motif and another strange, half rhythmic, sequence joins it. All sorts of other drum lines then come in. We are getting into a sort of cyber ethnic passage here conjuring up images of a post nuclear mutated tribe dancing round some sort of sacrifice. A flute comes in making a marked contrast to the orgy of sounds backing it. Ethnic yes, but I can just see the New Agers being appalled (which must be a good thing). This is certainly fairly extreme stuff and won’t be to everyone’s tastes but fans of Jim Kirkwood (like myself) know to expect the unexpected and the unique. ‘Asylum of Trees’ carries on with those strange cyclical, rhythmic and effects loops. This CD is one to be played many times before you start to comprehend what is going on. Fans of Electronic Music tend to have rather adventurous sonic tastes and this is an album that is even more adventurous than most. The tension builds still further as the drums gradually become quicker and louder but then instantly disappear, momentarily leaving the sequence but then we are left with tranquil atmospherics, but with that on the edge of a dream quality. ‘Forging the Rose’ starts with massive slow hammer blows over vocal pads punctuated by bursts of crashing rhythm. Enter a sequence that could have been from one of Jim’s early albums and an the scene is set for the final bludgeoning number. Subtle mayhem reigns again.

This is the most extreme and rhythmic album that Jim has yet been associated with (unless one of his many early cassettes sneaked passed me without me noticing). Brilliant of course but not the place to start if you are sampling Jim’s work for the first time. (DL)

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