Ain Soph
I

Ain Soph: "One of the three forms of nothingness, of non-being, of formlessness, the original undifferentiated state".

The Ain Soph project originated in the first half of the eighties. The first tapes, the result of home sessions for personal use only, were not initially intended for a listening audience. They were passed from hand to hand; a dense word of mouth would be the forge through which increasing interest seemed to envelop the Roman combo, both within and especially beyond national borders.

Ain Soph, an elusive and evasive entity, although destined over the years to become a legend, for many a true object of worship, if not, in some cases, outright idolatry, would certainly not be flattered, but would continue its path outside of all schemes, both artistic and, above all, commercial.

In truth, particularly regarding the very first works, it does not even seem appropriate to speak of art, since the project was born with "magical intents" even before it arose from a genuine artistic, and thus communicative, urgency. Instead, the goal is "to make clear and accessible [...] the term "magic", illustrating some operations associated with this term", where by magic one must understand, according to Crowley's definition, "the science and art of causing changes in conformity with the will".

"I", recorded in dusty 1984, is the first chapter of a trilogy with darkly esoteric overtones that placed the capital's collective among the pioneers of a movement developed precisely in those years in the wake of the arcane exploits of British acts like Current 93 and Nurse with Wound.

In my opinion, however, it is necessary to place Ain Soph at a proper distance from a certain dark-industrial tradition across the Channel. Rather than electronic geniuses, the Romans are real musical incompetents, a statement that should not bother Foraenovis and Atrocity Histerics (the original core of the project) too much, since their work does not arise from artistic needs, but rather for purely ritual purposes.

"The pieces may be musically sparse", is promptly explained in the inner booklet, and for this reason, the superior art of far more gifted Current 93 is a distant echo along the grooves of the sparse settings laid out. Loops launched to infinity, elementary electronic manipulations, true rituals captured in the raw, crossed by the rustle of an imperfect yet monstrously evocative recording. To judge "I" for its strictly content-based qualities is therefore misleading, where the magic (the true magic, not that of Aleister Crowley!) lies in the morbid atmospheres recreated by the duo, through rudimentary instrumentation, through the reverberations and disconnected beats of dark percussion, through the crawling and hissing of voices that are lost, rarefied, in the dark rooms where the ritual is consumed.

The first experiment of Ain Soph stretches over forty-one infinite minutes, where time is extended to the extreme, where the places described certainly do not belong to this world.

In the first part of the work, the oscillating and monolithic vibrating of a sound repeated in a loop generates estrangement, while deviated synthesizers and insane noise, which emerges only occasionally, destabilize the listener's senses: a deliberately sought monotony, precisely to allow the mind and imagination to make the leap that the track evidently intends to prepare.

As stated in the inner booklet, the track constitutes "a basis to facilitate the exact vibration (pronunciation) of barbara names", and the predominant vibratory cycle in the piece is meant to lead precisely to "a physical and mental state enabling this search". For human ears, it is an electronic boiling where the dark toll of bells and percussion reminds us that what we are witnessing is a true ritual (the piece, not by chance, is inspired by the ritual "Of silence and secrecy, and of the barbarous names of evocation" by Aleister Crowley, and is the result of studying S.L. MacGregor Mathers' work "The Magic of the Kabbalah").

The three movements that animate the second part of the work are far more interesting: a long excursion that, from a conceptual point of view, initially takes up the mantra of the "Cycle of Creation", always inspired by the reading of Crowley's "Magick"; the next portion, inspired by a text by Paul Hudson, constitutes the symbolic operation preparatory to the "search for hidden realities" [...], a method to free oneself from all the constraints imposed on man by his social (and especially) religious organizations"; the last part, finally, illustrates the various tasks that the "exempt disciple" must perform (as explained in Crowley's "Liber Cheth").

Musically, the three phases constitute a gallery of terrible and monstrous images, where monstrous and terrible settings follow one another, as if, door after door, one were penetrating a sinister and threatening passageway, step by step growing darker and more mysterious, along which to pace with breath broken by anxiety and step tremulous with terror. A cello played as if by a ghost, impastoed organs that soar into the air cleaving through rancid cobwebs, murmurs, whispers, tolls of macabre rituals (perhaps also indebted to a certain homegrown horror-prog background), and finally, the chilling scream of a possessed soprano. In a word: unease.

As for me, from my vantage point, I defend myself with a comforting agnosticism and a (fortunately) low (I would say zero) level of sensitivity, I cannot appreciate the work from a purely philosophical point of view (I also admit a bit of ignorance), but I can vouch for the suggestive, harrowing, anxiety-inducing effect of the ensemble that these two sound artisans have been able to shape. Although, musically speaking, we cannot certainly cry miracle, from an emotional and mere sensory point of view, it is undeniable not to recognize a high value to "I", the first step towards the occult that the Ain Soph entity was able to dig well twenty-five years ago.

Happy holidays to everyone, I'm off to the beach for a bit, we'll touch base again around September for the continuation of the trilogy...