Aurora - Project Pitchfork - Gothic Fairy Tales from Germany

Among the leading figures of the "gothic" revival of the Nineties is also the German duo Aurora, namely Peter Spilles and Patricia Nigiani (both already in Project Pitchfork). Their shadowy lieder are built on a dark, dramatic sound, at once pervaded by that arcane "tribalism" and those ancestral suggestions that made the fortune of Dead Can Dance. In their romantic compositions, themes dear to Love Is Colder Than Death and Ordo Equitum Solis also return. But compared to many other bands of the so-called "gothic ambient" movement, Aurora can boast an extraordinary melodic gift, which allows them to free themselves from that movement's main "vice": the tendency to wallow in "atmospheres" at the expense of actual songs.

Their debut album The Land Of Harm And Appletrees (1993) is also their masterpiece. Steeped in the most crepuscular atmospheres of baroque gothic, the nine tracks manage to perfectly combine classical-medieval melodies with electronic settings. The opening "Regression" leads straight into this enchanted world, built on a delicate interplay of keyboards, trills, choirs, drones and percussion. The poignant romantic mini-symphony of "Posen 1793" unfolds over the icy drive of the percussion, dusting off an obsessive tribalism worthy of Dead Can Dance: Nigiani slips into the role of Lisa Gerrard, surrendering to angelic vocalizations that heighten the dreamlike, surreal mood. The title track unleashes a sinister music box, while the singer intones a tender, medieval-flavored melody over a crackling bed of keyboards. On "Hereafter", instead, it's Spilles' spectral voice that declaims a sinister motif over a drive of percussion and synthesizers, immediately followed by Nigiani's increasingly disorienting vocals.

The visionary quality of their music perhaps reaches its peak on "Floating Dolphins", with distant noises and echoes of dolphins from a dark, unfathomable ocean, accompanied by ever more mournful and menacing choirs, and by Nigiani's ethereal vocalizations. The pompous finale of "Crusaders" seems to almost fuse Wagner and Dead Can Dance into a triumphant, hallucinated symphony.

The following Dimension Gate (1994), a concept album on the history of human evolution, heightens the mystical, solemn hues of their repertoire. The underlying theme is once again the relationship between man and nature, rendered through sounds that are even more apocalyptic and at the same time ethereal, combining classical arias, sacred themes (Gregorian chants, sung masses), medieval music (from saltarellos to madrigals) and electronic pulses. The record opens on the anguished notes of "Solar", which unfolds over a tangle of feverish keyboards, with Patricia Nigiani's theatrical, disorienting declamation sharpening the sense of impending drama. "Legend Of Our Origin" rests on the contrast between the dark rumblings of the mellotron and the ethereal tones of the soprano, between the gravity of the Gregorian choir and the softness of the female counter-vocals. "Garden Of Temptation" is an incursion into the most fairy-tale-like atmospheres of medieval tradition, while "Egypt" and "In Search Of The Unity" mix "ethnic" spices and tribal percussion.

Then comes the turn of a journey into Renaissance "Florence", to the sound of flute, viola and percussion. The ode "Shadow Land" and the grim "The Marriage Of Heaven And Earth" are existential meditations marked by the purest lyricism. In this cosmic journey to the roots of humankind, there's also room for an interesting cover of "Hide and Seek", the (only) electronic gem by Howard Jones. The album closes with the instrumental suite dedicated to the four elements, “Fire/ Earth/ Water/ Air”, in which ambient watercolors and techno pulses follow one another, in a crescendo of mysticism and pathos.

The story of Aurora comes to an end in 1995, the same year that marks the end of the relationship between Peter Spilles and Patricia Nigiani, later "celebrated" by Spilles with the love songs of Project Pitchfork's Ep Corps D'Amour (1995). Although it was a side project of the latter, the Aurora experiment ended up reaching even more ambitious and exciting heights, pushing beyond the borders of classical music and the avant-garde.

Electro-dark pulses

What achieved major international success, however, was precisely the electro-dark duo Project Pitchfork, made up of Peter Spilles and keyboardist-programmer Dirk Scheuber. Digging into the guts of gothic, industrial and techno music, the two set a hugely successful and influential standard for the German scene (and beyond), at the crossroads between Killing Joke, Front Line Assembly and Nine Inch Nails.

After the demo tape Killing Nature Killing Animals (1990), the album Dhyani (1991) already delivers two biting tracks such as the anti-militarist "Vietnam" and the single "Psychic Torture", while the following Lam' Bras (1992) brought their first hit single, "Conjure", which took German clubs by storm. The hits from that period would later be collected on the compilation Early Years '89-'93 (1996), released in the United States.

Entities (1992) heightens the esoteric tones, but also the rhythms: the atmospheric dance of "Souls" coins a new danceable-gothic genre that would take off in Germany's alternative clubs. An evolution that, according to Spilles, wasn't the result of a deliberate plan: "We didn't plan anything," he explains, "we just make music for our spirit. The result may unconsciously be a combination of the first two albums. The only idea was to emphasize the electronic counterpoints and make the sound harder."

Adding to the album's dramatic weight is the interlude "Mirror".

A minor-key album follows, Carrion (1993), featuring a cover of Human League's "Circus Of Death", and then the more convincing IO (1994), which spawns the new hit "Renascence" and consolidates their fusion of typically Teutonic industrial beats, rock progressions, gothic-tinged keyboards and Klaus Schulze-style electronic magic. Project Pitchfork keep drawing crowds, especially live, with gloomy, incendiary performances that whip audiences into a frenzy.

But in the studio their inspiration starts to run dry: Alpha/Omega (1995) merely rehashes clichés that were already stale, the only real novelty being the first track sung in German, "Endzeit". "We were often asked why we didn't sing in German," Spilles recalls. "The truth is German wasn't suited to representing our music. But it was interesting for me to try to hear how my voice could sound in my own language." Chakra:Red! (1997), with an unlikely cover of Jon Anderson/Vangelis's "I'll Find My Way Home", adds a metal touch that largely undermines the magic of their sound. And not even Eon:Eon, a concept album on the theme of a future world where humans are manipulated by machines, manages to halt the downward spiral. The formula remains the same: tediously apocalyptic lyrics (".the happiness of death.the sky is black.the pain goes to deep."), aggressive synthesizers, an increasingly dark voice and the typical atmosphere of the trendy songs in vogue in German discos. "Carnival" and "Wish" offer the only interesting moments. Accused of "commercial choices" even by their own fans on the German cult magazine "Zillo", Pitchfork respond through Dirk Scheuber: "We arrange our own tracks and produce them ourselves, with no grand sales strategy behind it. For us, music comes from deep down, from the gut. That's what matters."

After those two missteps, Spilles and Scheuber bounce back partially with Daimonion, graced by the excellent single "Timekiller", while Inferno (2002), the first chapter of a trilogy that also includes the mini-CDs View From A Throne and Trialog, is an ambitious 14-track concept album, some of whose songs ("Momentum", "Lead and feather", "A Cell", "Awakening") revive sounds worthy of their golden years. That same year, Project Pitchfork received a nomination in the "Best National Alternative Rock Group/Artist" category at the German Echo Awards.

Should anyone try to convince you that the present of Peter Spilles and his brightest creation (we're in the thick of paradox here, talking about one of German electronic music's darkest projects), Project Pitchfork, draws directly on the past, don't let them get any further — stop them right there.

Continuum Ride (2010) may carry within it a few seeds of Alpha Omega, the odd quick ballad reminiscent of Io: Peter Spilles remains the master of ceremonies of the sound, but Continuum Ride is in truth a direct descendant of Dream, Tiresias!, continuing its evolution, amplifying it into the tones of a total synth "empire" (guitar has by now vanished entirely from the sound), and speeding up its beats to drive the goth crowd to exhaustion on the dancefloor.

One might well ask who Peter Spilles actually is today. He's not just a singer, or rather a vocalist, and even "musician" feels like too tight a garment for someone who is, today, a total expression of voice and composition — he embodies instead the charisma of a satyr, a sardonic demon devoted to entertaining and to his own enjoyment, a demon with the soul of a joker who bewitches and steals the soul.

We don't think there's much room for argument here, and falling under the sheer spell of Project Pitchfork's frontman means surrendering to a dark alter-ego that each of us carries inside, one that's often not as bad as it's made out to be.

He's never hidden, in recent interviews, that the Imatem side-project served a double purpose: enjoying new compositions driven by irrepressible instincts, while drawing on the collaboration of synth heavyweights like Ronan Harris (his majesty of VNV Nation) or Der Graf (Unheilig), to name two of Imatem's main partners, who allowed him to open up new compositional visions — not subversive ones, but ones that shifted the centre of gravity toward alternative moods.

Continuum Ride, then, is a plunge into the most aggressive electro-goth of recent years, even darker than its predecessor and in some respects veering toward the electronic infernos dear to Suicide Commando (just listen to "Stacked Visions" in that regard), or, for comparably intense emotions, the Covenant legacy of the "United States Of Mind" era, as heard in the opener "Way Of The World". A synth legacy that, through its web of digital notes, builds up the sound's power; Peter's voice is glassy and Mephistophelian, as on the cursed ballad "The Dividing Line". In this context, the title track — perhaps deliberately, and tactically, placed at the heart of the record — is a twilight dance interlude, a slow downward path through sound that gradually, without much mystery, heads toward the depths where Spilles's voice awaits, low and hostile, emerging from a throat that is pure cavern, all granite tones.

The ending is much the same: "Full Contact" once again rides hypnotic, insidious dance rhythms, within which the synths play off each other, pairing up and intertwining to weave a web of beats from which it's impossible not to get caught.

Simple formulas: each member runs his own sound machine, the notes pour down on the listener like a downpour, the rhythm stays constant and charged to keep the dancing going — textbook alchemy for an apprentice composer, and yet this is exactly the winning recipe of Project Pitchfork's new direction, which has by now settled into a rough, dark-toned EBM.

Quantum Mechanics (2011) confirms the tone of their recent albums, ending up recalling the work of Suicide Commando or Wumpscut. Pitchfork's sound is now marked by a clear homogeneity that was missing from their early records, when the band tended to cram far too many ideas into a single album. That homogeneity, however, has also brought a general flattening of the sound. Moreover, what was once a particular gift for catchy melodies has in recent years been replaced by a pronounced lean toward easy dancefloor rhythms, impoverishing their musical exploration in the process.

What's missing is the "slap" to the listener, even though the album still holds plenty of "scratches" within it, with Spilles's voice almost always distorted, dominating a decidedly dark, harsh context. Here and there, that exquisitely sci-fi flavour resurfaces in the sound palette, most notably in the instrumental "tails" of the tracks: genuine outros that close out the songs, setting them within an ideal alien soundtrack.

Martial and anthemic, the album's ten tracks represent a safe bet within their own genre: a safe bet perhaps not strong enough to win over newcomers, but more than capable of satisfying longtime fans.

In 2013 came Black, which confirmed the shift toward territory bordering on harsh-EBM, without bringing anything new to their sound.

Blood, from 2014, ventures into occasional synth-pop digressions and nods to their electro-industrial past, largely following the trend set by the previous record.

The difference lies in sheer craftsmanship, and in that sense these are undoubtedly carefully made records, though recommended above all to die-hard fans and completists.

Look Up, I’m Down There came out in 2016, marking 25 years of activity and ushering in a sort of new era for Project Pitchfork. An introspective work, even more steeped in synth-pop elements, as if to soften the rough edges of a sound that nonetheless remains "square," as per their trademark.

It's a direction that continues with the next two full-lengths, both released in 2018, the first two parts of a trilogy whose completion was planned for 2019.

Akkretion, released in January, confirms the aforementioned pop elements ("Gravity Waves," "This Collision"), pairing them with dark-wave touches ("Good Night Death"); there's still room, however, for heavier tracks, like the powerful "Circulation."

The second chapter, Fragment, came out in October, marked by an energetic, at times upbeat charge running through Project Pitchfork's typically — and always — dark sound.

The band emerges renewed from it, yet hasn't forgotten the dancefloor, crafting a few potential hits like "In Your Heart" (distinguished by Spilles's clean vocals) and the steady, measured "There Is Much More."

Pitchfork's hyper-productivity shows no sign of slowing down, then, accompanied by the release of alternate editions of their records, enriched with substantial booklets and numerous remixes.

Contributions by Nicola Tenani ("Continuum Ride") and Lorenzo Pagani ("Quantum Mechanics," "Black," "Blood," "Look Up, I’m Down There," "Akkretion" and "Fragment")

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