Awesome …
Adamennon, the Italian solo artist and multi-instrumentalist wholeheartedly devoted to misanthropy and dark music (refresh your memory here) entered this year with a new album conceived and elaborated during 2012 and named MMXII. The album was aactually released in its digital form on December 12th 2012 on Bandcamp. All this is a totally solo, self-supported and also truly solid hand-made project. So no wonder that the physical birth of the album in its unique, limited edition features, ended up taking place during March 2013. Ready to poison springtime and the rest of the year … The album was actually released in its digital form on December 12th 2012 on Bandcamp. All this is a totally solo, self-supported and also truly solid hand-made project. So no wonder that the physical birth of the album in its unique, limited edition features, ended up taking place during March 2013. Ready to poison springtime and the rest of the year …MXII is an experience starting before putting the disk into the reader. It involves a ritual that almost parallels the religious attitude while unfolding a vinyl disk, laying it on the deck and listening to it while being captured by the spires of the rotating disk. Almost …As written on the rigid silvery paper sheet listing the tracks, Adamennon’s opus MMXII is officially “devoted to Nothing and to the End of Everything”. But don’t expect an album filled with depressive black metal or the noisy dark ambient that has been a typical feature in Adamennon’s early production. Adamennon is a continuously evolving artist who has been doing much independent and boundless research into any field of music, and not necessarily restricted to metal. This lead Adamennon to getting inspiration from and incorporating many different components from different sources, last but not least the historical tradition of the Italian gothic, dark prog rock. Adamennon likes to practice extreme, crushingly heavy and gut-tearing metal while playing with doom-death metal band Black Temple Below ( SEE HERE ) and/or interacting with funeral doomsters in Fuoco Fatuo ( SEE HERE ). Other projects involving Adamennon are Habitantibus in Terra, Adahmer, Locomotor Mortis. Recently a split between Adamennon and Beta, a.k.a. Mike B. from the experimental grind-post/sludge metal band Viscera///, was released by he US label Auricular Records.
As generally in Adamennon’s artistic production, track titles are in Italian, are often self explicative and sound like titles of chapters in a vintage horror novel where shivers come from expectation more than from revelation. In sequence we have: L’inizio della Fine (= the beginning of the end), Arriva il Buio (= here comes the Darkness), Presenze Occulte (= occult entities), Al Cospetto del Male (= in the presence of Evil), Abbandono della Lucidità (= loosing the clarity of thought); Il Sentiero Oscuro (= the dark path); Visione (= vision); La Grotta (= the cave); La Metamorfosi (= metamorphosis), Il Rituale (= the ritual); Il Limbo degli Specchi (= the limbo of the mirrors), L’ultima Traghettata (= the last crossing of the river) and L’Atto Definitivo – La Fine (= the closing act - the end).
The hallucinating tale narrated in the album is going to last for 47 minutes via rather short (2-3minutes-long) tracks acting like effective portraits of feelings and ambience, alternating with a few longer tracks or “suites” lasting between 5 and 7 minutes and marking some key moments of this evil tale. This trip into horror and alienation will develop by plunging into totally vintage, sinister darkness depicted by the combination of organ and keyboards occasionally coupled with a deep pulsating bass (like in Arriva il Buio and in Abbandono della Lucidità). Electronic effects are employed to deform and reverberate sounds and, thereby, to impart an impressive dynamic dimension to sounds while making them vibrate and wobble like ghosts moving swiftly across our solid body. This ectoplasmatic effect is particularly tangible in track Presenze Occulte where keyboards provide some surprisingly acute notes for depicting occult entities like restless souls (while one would expect dull gloomy sounds while dealing with occult things …). But Adamennon will set things in the “normal” way, as soon as suite Al Cospetto del Male starts. Evil is evoked by a deep, monotonous low growling feedback noise which sounds ancestral in spite of its being electronic and industrial. But this is just one of the “voices” of Evil, the primitive and most obvious one. Indeed Evil possesses another voice, seducing and keyboard-driven. The fresh crystalline-clear voice of piano emerges from the low industrial growl like a blooming flower, whose petals smell of the rot and incense evoked by the sepulchral, ceremonial voice of the organ swallowing everything up.
Melodies may be simple, plodding and hieratic (like, for example La Metamorfosi or in track L’ultima Traghettata) or else they may possess a complex, multifaceted structure, like in the intriguing jazzy-proggy track Abbandono della Lucidità, where each instrument (piano, bass, keyboards, electronics) follows distinct and apparently contrasting patterns organized in braided combinations. In this apparently inoffensive track Adamennon is able to inoculate terror via a vibrating noise simulating something halfway between the rotating barrel of a gun and the hiss of a rattle snake. The suite Il Sentiero Oscuro duly starts in a dark and supremely menacing way in spite of being driven by a remarkably simple melody: a single bass chord slowly vibrating in the silence and coupled with an insect-like, oscillating ghostly sound. A fake relief may come from tricky, soothing melodies like those heard in Visione, although the incursions of the snake-like hissing noise are poisoning the benign atmospheres and the light beams accompanying the Vision. Adamennon’s pictorial skill is further proven by track La Grotta (= the cave) where the sense of wet darkness and solitude evoken by noise samples of unremitting rain is coupled with the almost painfully echoing sound of the crystal-clear piano. Track La Metamorfosi is the quintessence of esoteric music: hieratic sepulchral organ, rants, sinister vibrating noise, bells, funereal blows, electronic effects … everything is echoing like across the vaults in a deconsecrated cathedral or in a secluded crypt where a final scary rant hints to some terrifying transformation taking place in the darkness. Piano played with remarkable energy is often competing with organ in this album and actually acts like a narrating voice, like in track Il Rituale.
Adamennon’s music is instrumental, although vocals are not completely absent. Actually vocals are normally added like noise, be it either hinting to occult religious chanting (like in Al Cospetto del Male), sudden sigh of shock or deadly rants (like in Metamorfosi). Or even voices can be introduced as sounds of children playing, like in the amazingly odd track Il Limbo degli Specchi. The samples of childish voices are patched up and repeated in a crazy loop meant to merge and reinforce the relentless rhythm of the retro-sounding sinister keyboard melody. Sick …Track L’Ultima Traghettata goes back to slow, plodding and hieratic music by reintroducing the beloved organ but the passage towards the final track, duly baptized as La Fine, is via the beating rhythm of a living heart. Living? Well, the ghostly hisses starting the final track would cast some doubts about the nature of the living things at this point of the evil tale. The last word is for the interplay between the ringing notes of piano and the bleak organ feedback …
Well, if you like to experience archane, horror-filled atmospheres in music, if you like the ambience of doom but you are open-mined and/or just like to be surprised by intense and truly pictorial music, Adamennon’s art in general and MMXII album in particular, are not to be missed. You can get the tracks via Bandcamp, but get in contact with Adamennon and see if you can get hold of one of these marvelously evil-looking, handcrafted esoteric objects …
Words: Marilena Moroni
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