ISENGRIND/ TWINSISTERMOON/ N. SNOW BUILDINGS - The Snowbringer Cult

Available for a few months now on the market in a run of a thousand copies, the double "The Snowbringer Cult" is the ideal, exhaustive and revealing compendium, the most exciting and restless of all the projects by this duo of troubadours from across the Alps, him and her: Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte a.k.a. Isengrind, Twinsistermoon and Natural Snow Buildings. Projects under which they've released and self-produced, in limited editions and every possible format – from CD-R to vinyl, from mini-CDs to cassettes – a huge amount of music across 8 stereo tracks.

Theirs is a highly distinctive instrumental weird-folk, cosmic and spiritual, airy and instinctive, hippie yet austere, broad in scope. A ritual steeped in moods, stretched between dream and timeless tradition; a thunderous procession cloaked in a surreal, hallucinated aura, bearing and dripping with both joys and afflictions.

Broad drapes of drones and funereal drums rise up: paintings in harsh, blazing hues, applied with wide, violent brushstrokes, but equally rarefied environments take shape, in which dense streams of folk strings (from banjo to tampura, from mandolin to acoustic guitar) stretch out into endless hymns, comparable to the cosmic ceremonials of a "Jenseits" drawn out and twisted into infinity.

A touching sense of pain, oppression and transience seeps spontaneously and uncompromisingly from every track and every soundscape, conjured like a mystical, absurd spell. The rare female voice mimics, alongside the instruments, humanity's eternal tragedy in a perpetual, wordless, anguished poem, through calls, echoes or chants that ramble sweetly, evaporating endlessly, in languid, distant and sinister resonances.

Solange weaves her web of ghosts through piercing oneiric expansions. In the distance echo the sighs of dying harpies layered over synthesized vortexes reminiscent of Schulze ("His Winterbed"), mixed with ecstatic Indian folk touches, bristling with disenchantment and sulphurous splendor ("Cat's Cradles"). With Isengrind we witness the prayer of a shaman lost in his most restless isolationism. The intent is to evoke the spirit through the formulation of organic scores, coagulated deep within one's own soul, pushed outward by shimmering whispers and sacred distortions ("Anima Sola").

In the central part of the album, in the fiery heart reserved for the Twinsistermoon creature, Mehdi clearly embodies a lacerated Medea, who pays for her anguish while soaring through mellifluous, cathartic chants. Nonetheless, a Vashti Bunyan emerges before our eyes, lost in a limbo, moaning helplessly before us, resigned in ecstasy, stretched out in nostalgic torment; a torment in drops of strings, shaken and marked ("The Spears Of The Wolf", "Kingdom Of The Sea").

The broad and sprawling panorama then entrusted to Natural Snow Buildings, in which this saga, this sonic cosmos, turns and sets, relies both on long, ravishing flights such as "Salt Signs", "The Desert Has Eyes" and "They Do Not Come Knocking There Anymore", and on suffocating harmonic dirges, turned to vapor at the end by the penetrating heat of an electric blast looped endlessly ("Bear Hunting"), and on the glow emitted by a series of calm acoustic floods of positive Karma ("Inuk's Song"), offering, in this sense, an exhaustive "complete picture" of an exotic and pagan art, now radiant, now bleak.

On "The Snowbringer Cult" we find, more than anywhere else, the two architects, Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, in full. "The Snowbringer Cult" is a vivid, imaginative apparition, the vision of an ancestral musical expressionism that is evocative and violent, wild and rebellious; a powerful, obsessive mantra, like magma flowing downhill, archaic and inexorable.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

14/01/2009