Hermetic mysticism, alchemy, and past-life regressions bend into this, with the recent birth of a new life further elevating the esoteric thematics.
You could say this a labour of love, obsessively circling in tangled narrative and a brooding piano that empathically scaffolds. An instrumental centrifuge that percussively pearls your attention, ebbs the enigmatic itch of Mark Wagner’s words and their slipping meanings.
“Son Rise”’s hypnotic warmth worms right in there, bolstered by sparse electronics, subtly cicada-stitched. A journey heralded by his daughter Eko‘s in-utero heartbeat, then tonally poured forth on mutating meaning as that ceremonial curl daggers a strange clarity.
A dark-keyed delight that’s chaotically punctured on “Je Nais Dieu Que Pour Toi” as what seems like chandeliers fall around the narrator’s sombre saturation. The velvety vortex of the previous track harmonically aloof, words hugged in serrated melody and loose detentions, rolling and crashing key-lines kicking around the jaded dirt.
An attentive drama that opens out to the opalling optimism of the “What Do You Want From Life”, where questions are asked on a pebbling metronome and cascading keys, a gaudy cloak pulled round Mark’s echoic words, rain-dancing in resonant sparks. The album is a compositionally satisfying beast that only gets richer as it progresses into a trio of alchemic / metaphysically anchored numbers, the first of which, “Nigredo”, is singed in fragmentary invites, stretches then opens up to this imperial purple seamed in the autumnal coppers. A low winter’s sun banqueted in hollow beat and splashy sway, stained in a frosting of synthesised sporadics, flexing this silky sextant of melody. A guiding light that roulettes the emotive in swells to violin and spidering piano.Euphonious addictives that seductively weave in there, as the key-turning wordplay of “Albedo” raises into this majestic beast, a flamenco shapeshifter somersaulting in Agathe Max’s orchestral flourishes. A brilliantly realised roast that the conjuring crescents of “Rubedo” surf over in dappled light, has Hanna White duet-twisting with that Byronic other descending into a sweetened chorus, dramatically cut to trickling piano over which Mark philosophically interjects, coils your ear in ancient symmetries.
S☉N RISE / S☉N OF THE SUN is one of those records that stays with you, slowly unravels and cryptically deciphers some universal truth.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
