Drawing on an ancient word for witches across German-speaking Europe in the Middle Ages, Lukas Feigelfeld‘s film Hagazussa is a gloomy feast for the imagination where plague and paranoia paint an atmospheric treasure-trove of unease. A gothic feast for the eyes that Greek band MMMD have successfully encapsulated in intense (supa-amplified) bowed drones.
A slow burning focus that soaks up the ominous murk, clings so perfectly to the lingering malaise of this film set in the Austrian alps back in the superstitious fifteenth century. A sound that wraps its moody (almost wordless) cinematics in a processional purr, a saturated symphonic that, like a window wound-down on the motorway, singing demonic in your ear, streams with illusive whispers and moans. There’s a vaporous carnality that seeds sinister over the implied impressionistics, reflects the mushroom-fuelled delirium on screen.
The score starts to a suitably black screen and a booming percussive that slowly sours on a granular drag as images reel in and a singular note sombres. A sustained weighty tone that captures a slow trudge through deep snow as the low frequency gurgle tidally falls to loom back, reprises an unexpected tenderness that is all too fleeting.
This is dark and foreboding and not for everyone. MMMD have created an intense inquisition that drowns all hope of salvation in the darkened obits of a martyr’s yellowing skull.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
