from ThePhanastasio (Halloween trade) sorry for being late
Sephiroth - Cathedron (1999)
Wow, this is really something. I knew I was in for a real treat from the moment I heard the opening track and it didn't disappoint. Sephiroth is a dark ambient project of a Swedish musician Ulf Söderberg, who had also released material under his own name as well as two Sephiroth albums on the Cold Meat Industry label, specialized in industrial and dark ambient music.
What can be heard here is a very deep dark, monumental ambient, very evocative of some long lost heroic, mythological times. There's also quite a bit of mysticism coming through the music itself and suggestive titles. For example, sephiroth are emanations of the divine in kabbalistic mysticism and Cathedron seems to be taken from William Blake's wild mythology, representing the feminine principle of the church, seen as a womb, but with sexuality as the path to salvation.
The album opens with a very powerful and intense track
'Wolftribes'. The omnipresent foreboding tone is set, after which some bone chilling, extremely deep, long sounds seize us, reminiscent of war horns. When tribal beats burst in, almost like a modern dance, we're already heading to some inevitable, world changing battle. This fatalistic feeling is present throughout the album, but here it's especially colored with images of northern, dark forests that hide ancient secrets, like the true nature of Wolf tribes, perhaps some long lost race.
The second track
'Cathedron', I feel, is the beginning of a journey. It has four pieces with very descriptive titles: 'Spell Of The Eastern Desert', 'The City Of No Name', 'Bone Drums' and 'Dream And The River'. The music itself is also descriptive and it does what every good ambient should, it puts images in our heads. The pieces are interwoven and especially the first two are hard to distinguish, as they have the same Eastern, droning, seductive melody. Some mysterious enchanting sounds can be heard and background ethereal voices, evoking the workings of magic spells. After the very intense tribal drums, reminiscent of some ancient ritual, it all calms down again with a wide, dreamy piece that still maintains the foreboding feel that infuses the whole album.
It flows uninterrupted into the third track
'The Moongate', just as this enchanted passenger cannot get the rest from the excitement of what lies ahead. Here he's invited into a garden of delights, it seems, beautiful and frightening at the same time.
'Abyssanctum' is another track with sub titles, three pieces this time: 'Awakening Of Lilith', 'Night Demon Of Late December' and 'Churches And Asylums Rest Under Eternal Ice'. Is this the Great Abyss, a bottomless pit, the Chaos or the Sanctuary where Lilith waits her awakening? The first piece is very solemn like a real, long anticipated ritual. I can't help but feel that Lilith, represented in some ancient mythologies as a female night demon, or in others a symbol of feminine free sexual energy, or a seductress, set to lead men astray, is somehow connected to Cathedron, in the album title, an ultimate female principle. Powerful, tribal, addictive drums burst again in the second piece like a life force. The contrast that the third piece makes is striking as everything is calm here, frozen in time, like the title suggests, under the eternal ice.
Beside the feeling of dread and foreshadowing that prevails in the album, there's this sense of inevitability of death and of the crushing power of time. It comes in full force in the last two tracks: 'Heliopolis' and 'Dark Father'.
'Heliopolis' has that specific sterile solemnity and monumentality, buried under the decaying ruins, that can only live in our tricky, always idealizing memory. It seems that it was inevitable from the start that our journey must end with the
'Dark Father'. And this last track is, maybe not so surprisingly, very melancholic and sad. The image it evokes in me is that of the ancient Greek's Hades, the Underworld, a sad place with only shadows of past lives and memories of past glories.
This album is a great experience, like I said, a journey through sounds and visuals. The special strength is in its ability to be a background music and at the same time it can demand your attention inspiring the imagination. Listening to it, you become a participant in searching for this esoteric, lost world.