"Funeral Liturgy" - 11.15.2011 - Black Circle Records 8
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Tracks:
1. Funeral Liturgy 11:15
2. The Funeral Sermon 11:20
3. An Order Of Committal 12:20
4. Burial Of A Child 14:35
5. The Wind Whispers Never 12:09
Total Length: 1:01:39
I'm personally excited for this release because it marks my 40th release! This year has been an extremely productive year, with new sounds, new directions and a lot of new people. I have to extend a heart-felt thank you to elizabeth Veldon for being willing to release this on her new label, and also to James P. Keeler of WILT. Had it not been for his timely release of "Harsh Fields" [WILT, MARAX & GOOSE] none of these releases this year would have even happened! Seeing that "Harsh Fields" had been released, sparked something in me to get back to recording, and since February 2011, I haven't stopped. So thank you to you James and to all who continue to listen deeper and hear more in these sounds.
Reviews:
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Rexington Steele
Heathen Harvest
"Funeral Liturgy", I am happy to say, is a Marax work that is easily on par with the very eerie and profound "Black Veil of the Sanguinarian", what I consider a definite classic Marax work from a few years past. While there is no noise in this one, Eric Crowe somehow managed to create something just as deeply black, something that I personally would have trouble listening to in unfamiliar places with little to no light. This is by no means a light entry. It is by all means exceptional. What Eric has wrought here is among his crowning achievements, and he did it with sonic simplicity, and a solid and unflinching theme: mortality and its finite nature, as experienced through the glass of centuries of tradition with regard to faith, and built as a electronic stare in the face of the Reaper himself.
This EP takes on the color of Western attitudes toward, and rituals of, death. There is no enlightenment here, no acceptance of death, only an auditory representation of the bleakness that engulfs a mortal soul when the soul of another passes on. The entire album feels like a paralysis amidst an unceasing wind of fear itself. The majority of the work consists of drones that are just as cold as corpses, tinged with very palpable solitude and desperation, even anger. It is something of a story that no one wants to hear, but one you can only run from. This has little to do with grief, but is a very concise representation of what we perceive as the injustice of death, the terror of the unknown, the bleakness of the fact that there is no return, and that sooner or later, YOU TOO shall be no more…
A track like "The Funeral Sermon" is a puzzling one to me. I know and hold Eric very dear to me, and I know he is a man who holds faith close to his heart sincerely, and it is that sincerity that makes me celebrate his faith, or at least, his capacity to feel it set so strongly within him. Having said this, what puzzles me is the way he chose to deliver it. The song itself is brilliant without a doubt, being made up of a continuing, almost suffocating ether of sound consistent through the work [broken only by the equally stunning and even glorious "Burial of a Child"], and a Marax trademark that is the down-tuning of a male voice. This time, it is that of a preacher, and the very morbid nature of this sound-manipulation seems to be an affront to what is supposed to be the comforting nature of such words from a spiritual leader. Some who hold the same faith may even consider it blasphemous, but to people like us who have the fortitude to meditate, and even base our arts heavily on the universal certainty that is death, it makes those words a bit more sincere. After all, it is told that ghostly beings sometimes sound that way. So that, at least to me, gives it a sort of transcendence, a blending of life and death.
Stunning.
Almost overwhelming when one becomes pensive in its grasp.
Not for the faint of heart.
Not in any way
This EP takes on the color of Western attitudes toward, and rituals of, death. There is no enlightenment here, no acceptance of death, only an auditory representation of the bleakness that engulfs a mortal soul when the soul of another passes on. The entire album feels like a paralysis amidst an unceasing wind of fear itself. The majority of the work consists of drones that are just as cold as corpses, tinged with very palpable solitude and desperation, even anger. It is something of a story that no one wants to hear, but one you can only run from. This has little to do with grief, but is a very concise representation of what we perceive as the injustice of death, the terror of the unknown, the bleakness of the fact that there is no return, and that sooner or later, YOU TOO shall be no more…
A track like "The Funeral Sermon" is a puzzling one to me. I know and hold Eric very dear to me, and I know he is a man who holds faith close to his heart sincerely, and it is that sincerity that makes me celebrate his faith, or at least, his capacity to feel it set so strongly within him. Having said this, what puzzles me is the way he chose to deliver it. The song itself is brilliant without a doubt, being made up of a continuing, almost suffocating ether of sound consistent through the work [broken only by the equally stunning and even glorious "Burial of a Child"], and a Marax trademark that is the down-tuning of a male voice. This time, it is that of a preacher, and the very morbid nature of this sound-manipulation seems to be an affront to what is supposed to be the comforting nature of such words from a spiritual leader. Some who hold the same faith may even consider it blasphemous, but to people like us who have the fortitude to meditate, and even base our arts heavily on the universal certainty that is death, it makes those words a bit more sincere. After all, it is told that ghostly beings sometimes sound that way. So that, at least to me, gives it a sort of transcendence, a blending of life and death.
Stunning.
Almost overwhelming when one becomes pensive in its grasp.
Not for the faint of heart.
Not in any way
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