PYUR - Oratorio For The Underworld

Here we go again: just when nobody seems to worry anymore about the death of God, every artistic discipline reveals new yearnings toward a sacred or quasi-sacred imagery, reopening the question of the relationship between a maximally chaotic world and the looming “unknown”, between immanence and transcendence.

But especially within the Subtext catalogue, from the very beginning, this tension has always been voiced through the distinctive voices of a tormented electronic experimentalism, sometimes explosive in its sonic forms (Roly Porter, Paul Jebanasam, Fis), and at other times ritualistic and contemplative in spirit (Ellen Arkbro, Cevdet Erek, and the latest from Joshua Sabin).

The ambitious and expansive second effort from PYUR, the German-born Sophie Schnell, seems to pursue in its own way the process of spatial and temporal collapse carried out (with different means and aims) by the other debut artist of this year, UCC Harlo, who on “United” appropriated Baroque stylings and suggestions only to fray them and explore the harmonies hidden within their digital simulacrum.

Following “Epoch Sinus” (Hotflush, 2016), the evocative and overflowing “Oratorio For The Underworld” gathers the ghosts of ancient choral music, the apocalyptic fanfares of fin de siècle avant-gardes and the electronic trance of our present, channeling them into an unstoppable whirlwind of sonic layers that collide and devour one another.

Nearly all of sonic knowledge seems to find room within the density of these eleven tracks: fragments of Renaissance polyphony (“Flowers And Silvers”), seductive voices and distortions of acoustic elements in the manner of Andy Stott (“Towers Of Nebula”), gazes from the edge of the abyss and atomic accelerations (“Delphos”), heavy dubstep pulsations dislocated at will (“Rose Born”) and sinister Reznor-style shadowing (“Cheperer”). A “requiem without rest” for the many, and only seemingly irreconcilable, creative impulses that run through the history of the sacred and the profane, the product of a demanding exercise in “inner archaeology” through which Schnell, over two years of gestation, emptied and amalgamated every resource at her disposal within her own creative maelstrom.

“Oratorio For The Underworld” stands out as one of the most eclectic, complex and demanding releases to come out of the prestigious workshop of James Ginzburg. Although it would be premature to speak of a revelation, given the still rough and “targeted” results, one cannot help but praise the broad perspective and the visceral scale of PYUR's efforts, bearing a potential that will probably not take long to materialize.

The digital version available on Bandcamp includes seven additional tracks, a further glimpse of a truly vast and all-encompassing corpus, hard to distill into the classic long playing formats.

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17/10/2019