- Joined
- Aug 8, 2024
- Messages
- 14
- Reaction score
- 100
- Awards
- 1
Surely many of our readers know the early music ensemble Hesperion XXI, and especially the albums from the 21st century, released by the label Alia Vox, mostly dedicated to the meeting between Eastern and Western music. Golden Temple of the East can represent the dark side of these manifestations of high artistic quality that cultivate the taste for beauty.
Well, this new album by the Romanian project Alone In The Hollow Garden immediately awakened in me a state of delight associated with the spiritual immersion in the musical space created by the artist. Just like the hallucinatory story from the novel L’Oeuvre au noir by Marguerite Yourcenar, the music lets grow inside a unique and absorbing experience, nonetheless the songs should be listened to on several levels.
On the one hand, the dreamy world created by oriental sounds calls the poet in us to reveries and self-loss (Nigredo), then you feel transported to the area of sweet electrification of the body destined to live in the digitized present on a berlin school melody (Ignis Fatuus). As if through a gate of time we are being transmigrated to the epoch of the Egyptians, as we suspect the mediating people between the two great civilizations, the great two horizons (Bakhu and Manu), symbolized by the god Aker. Alone In The Hollow Garden raises an enigmatic Hymn to Aker composed on a great variety of indigene rarely heard instruments.
The subtle flowing of the music can influence and alter altogether body and spirit in the great tradition of the transformational substance of alchemy (Azoth). The project integrates modern means represented by various synthesizers into the archaic formulas of music composition. This connection with the past or with immemorial traditions is rendered subtly through the allegory of his ritualistic music. Like the universal solvent this is the kind of musical composition that transgresses geographical boundaries and also religious or esoteric speech which finds the particular expression of the artist on the main title, Golden Temple of the East, perhaps a connote to Aleister Crowley’s (Ordo) Templi Orientis. Needless to say that the music accompanying this calling is of a sublime strange beauty, a magic office of purification needed to proceed in the search for the hidden stone (Occultum Lapidem) through another excellent multi-genre encompassing melody. The album closes with an uncanny title and the track (Mons Veneris) of elusive vibes and echoing drones, sculpting a flesh-statue that let us hear all its fluids oozing through us.
The last album by Alone In The Hollow Garden marks an important stage in his process of musical and philosophical research, re-creation of archaic and modern sounds, reflection on mystical subjects, or self-taught interpretation. Golden Temple of the East is entirely produced by the Romanian interpreter and can be found on his Bandcamp page.
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self-released
Cdr/Digital 2023
