Aethenor
Faking Gold & Murder

An attentive observer of the multiple cultures and subcultures that animate the complex landscape of more or less popular contemporary music, I increasingly realize that what appears innovative is often just a ripple on the surface, while those who truly sow the seeds of change are the monstrosity, perceived as such through the opaque lenses of contemporaneity, destined to become standard in the years to follow.

Stephen O'Malley, playfully and jokingly, has today become a reference point in the realm of Extreme Avant-garde of the third millennium; in a sense, it's as if he has taken on the cultural role that John Zorn held until a few years ago. Who would have bet, after all, that the sound abominations penned by Sunn O))) or Khanate would become over time not only something acceptable to the ears but even something credible and worthy of a following? Today, very few remain who still believe it is a loud prank at our wallets' expense, while I am convinced that tomorrow it will be clear to everyone how this sonic devastation constitutes a further step beyond the boundaries of the comprehensible.

With "Faking Gold & Murder", the trio composed of O'Malley (guitar and electronics), Daniel O' Sullivan (electronics, rhodes), and Vincent De Roguin (electronics, organ), brings forth their most cultured and refined work.

Let's forget about Sunn O))) first of all: poised between cosmic settings, free-jazz destabilizations, and dark occultism, this 2009 work (undoubtedly the most successful) by the Aethenor project sets aside the excesses of O'Malley’s mother band, to leverage the spiritual kosmische of pre-Hosianna Mantra Popol Vuh, and then soar into the empyrean of ritual music, bolstered by the contribution of the master of existential discomfort par excellence David Tibet.

And precisely through the voice of the restless chanter of Current 93, the entity Aethenor ends up combining the arcane with avant-garde, ancestral fears, and the psychoanalytic nightmare of contemporaneity, into a coherent, formally impeccable, enthralling sonic unicum from the standpoint of content.

The guitars play the role of rusty taps dripping putrid water into pestilential swamps. Meanwhile, the percussive incursions of Alex Babel and Nicolas Field prove providential, as they destabilize the path (thirty-five intense minutes), shattering the silence with the roar of thundering cymbal explosions, background mumblings, and lopsided jingles set in the dark: touches of unhealthy vitality animating the bubbling of an electronics capable of evoking the ghosts of a Teutonic avant-garde forged at the dawn of the seventies (to underline, in this regard, the kraut-like cluster phrases of the guitar of another guest, Alexander Tucker).

As happens with the creakiest Sunn O))) or the most stripped-down Khanate, the expansive and disconsolate art of Aethenor is a play of shadows and absences, only occasionally erased by bursts of balanced noisiness, and magically illuminated by the hallucinated poetics of the minstrel Tibet, whose voice, real, vibrant, lost in the void of a massive ebony labyrinth, builds rituals that delve directly into the sphere of the unconscious, even before the esotericism that characterized the early terrifying albums of Current 93.

Fear, delirium, hypnosis, meditation; dreadful waits in empty and dark corridors, trembling steps on burning coals, slow, mysterious gestures that recall arcane symbologies; and again: droning serpents slipping in stagnant water, the sparkle of precious diamonds buried under the sludge, in O'Malley and Tibet's alchemical laboratory real gold is forged, not false!

History probably doesn't even pass through these parts, but what a masterpiece this "Faking Gold & Murder" is! A work that manages to be more monumental and significant than the latest efforts published these days by Sunn O))) and Current 93. The seed has thus been sown, the monstrosity advances, it is uncontrollable, it assumes clear as well as catastrophic forms: yet another step forward is finally taken in the darkness.