Stretching from the Maeror Tri cassette years to the present day Troum incarnation, Drone Records founder Baraka[H] and Glit[S]ch have created some of the best drone work on the planet. First experienced their taste for the infinite through the excellent Tjukurrpa trilogy and have been partial to their wares ever since. Here dark ambienteers Raison D’etre have joined forces with the German duo for their follow up to 2015’s album of orchestral otherworldliness De Aeris In Sublunaria Influxu and I’ve got to say it’s a head-phonic pleasure from start to finish. Somali for teacher, Xibipho‘s textures are exquisite, and as masterful as its predecessor.
In “Den Wellen, Ein Sehnen” (” In The Waves, A Longing”) starts – a choral-caked yarn of a track that lights up your head in an occultist grasp of dark chromatics and brooding transience. A vibe that fits snugly with my mist-covered early morning commute, turns the key to possibilities hidden away from the slavish tick of the clock. An amputated thud of a mechanised something curves the next, spiralling drones following its decaying contours, repeats that en-rich and stretch to the humming tubulars of “Eigi Einhamr”, the deep rumbling couriers of the “Ārdaga” – a shadowy succubus of de-tuned symphonics constantly underpinning the emotive soup.
All rather magical, then “Hang’-E-Lah”‘s slow sinister vibrations take hold, woozy with Neubeaten metal as this superb sense of space and physicality occupies your headspace. A drama of compass points and dissolving washes that Sufi-sail, freight-train your thoughts in a bountiful baptism of surging orchestration.Like staring at a painting that’s constantly changing, or soundtracking a film that’s impossible to shoot, the ascendant celestials of “Dreiklang Aus Äther” burst across you in tidal ornates, those hazy curls of exiting voila setting you up for the ritualistic wows of “Ijä-Kyl”. A Chöd-like epicness of spidery bass cobwebs, horn-blown heralds and dulicmer trepidation, river-fled gravities that successfully milk the spine in noisy nuance.
This is like holding a light to something elusive, fleeting, like a bruised crimson sky falling into inky blue-black. A glance that buckles to a percussive pulse overtaken by the canker of tattooing needles, leaving the last (“Epõdós”) to tonally levitate. The void shaved in diffusing splinters, ravines ripe with suggestion. This opal opacity lingering beneath braised in a dispossessed drool of possibility that dissipates on waking. Pure medicine to this corrosive age.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
