NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM - Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu

Recorded in 2023 at the church of St John’s On Bethnal Green in London, for the Judgment Hall Festival, “Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu” is a colossal sonic liturgy, a shamanic journey carved out of time and space. The Belgian collective Neptunian Maximalism, long devoted to exploring sonic and spiritual depths, spent four days immersed in a session liturgical, forging a mystical bond with its architecture, its energies and its history. The result is a two-hour composition that reinterprets three ragas from the Indian classical tradition (Marwa, Todi, Bairagi), filtered through the band's usual radical, shape-shifting approach: a hybrid of cyclopean drones worthy of Sunn, boundless cosmic psychedelia, Eastern suggestions and metal power.

“At Dusk: Raag Marwa” is split into four parts. In the first, the last glimmers of the Sun flicker in the form of amorphous, sepulchral vibrations, before a galactic night bursts in majestically, taking shape at the end of a sacral tension. The electric guitar becomes the cyclopean messenger of the ritual's beginning through its boundless drones, adorned with brass and synths. It's a slow unfurling that concludes after almost nine minutes, when drums and an Indian melody introduce the second part, 12 minutes long: the pace gradually accelerates, in a crescendo that midway also incorporates distant ritual voices and psychedelic flourishes before a blues solo of stellar proportions. The third part is more akin to a hymn, to the idea of a song proper, even though it sounds like a march built from zeuhl and metal, somewhere between Electric Wizard and Tangerine Dream. Dream, instead, is the realm of the fourth and final part, eight minutes of otherworldly chords and tellurian drones, blockbuster-movie orchestrations combined with reverbs and echoes straight out of a sonic hallucination, evoking the Vladislav Delay of “Anima” joining forces with the more unsettling Angelo Badalamenti.

“Arcana XX: Raag Todi” is divided into three parts. The first, running over 16 minutes, builds around the traditional sounds of Indian music, recalling Stephen Micus's “Implosions”, but heading toward contact with other dimensions, with instruments imitating voices and laments, suggesting trumpeting elephants and dirges amid tense tolling bells. What follows is an assault in the form of a superhuman war chant, a dance where the drums drive the charge of a black-metal track with ascensions worthy of Glenn Branca and free vocalizations, as well as an obsessive, labyrinthine finale leading into the last part, a dark tension in the shape of psychedelic fusion metal.

The more homogeneous “At Dawn: Raag Bairagi” is far less tense: in the first of its four parts it lingers in a long psychedelic blues solo, before the priestly voice arrives to lead the invocation, dwelling a little too long in the jam; the third part is broken up by a suffocating guitar riff, otherworldly screamed vocals and fresh spatial hallucinations; the final part closes with eleven minutes of tolling bells, boundless reverb and traditional instruments.

“Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu” is a monumental, spiritual work in which the pursuit of sound becomes transcendence. Compared to the Belgians' previous releases, there's less jazz and less prog-rock, along with a new centrality given to Indian tradition. It demands patience and concentration, an almost sacred listen: you have to surrender to the journey, step outside the frantic pace of everyday life for 98 minutes and contemplate the inner cosmos. You might even come out of it a little changed.

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08/05/2025