Ain Soph
II

In 1985, less than a year after recording the tapes collected in the brilliant debut “I”, the Roman collective (expanded to a lineup including Foraenovis, Claudedi, Crucifige, A.E.R.D., Emma, and Katia) gave birth to “II”, the most intriguing chapter of a trilogy that would conclude in the same year with “III”.

Whereas “I” was a dark collection of rituals mostly inspired by the philosophy of occultist Aleister Crowley, “II” is a true symphony of horror, of enormous proportions (nearly seventy minutes!), divided into four movements, in which the sound ingredients remain the same as the raw debut but are orchestrated with greater attention to the coherence and compactness of the whole.

The untrained ear will find itself in front of the same horrid sequence of chilling settings, but a closer listening undeniably reveals in this second volume a further effort in the catalyzation of sounds and in the construction of more complex layers and the building of a more coherent and better amalgamated sonic corpus.

The collective's esoteric industrial sound remains basic, technically primitive, undoubtedly below what was forged in the same period by the forefathers Current 93, whose music Ain Soph's work recalls - the more ambient works, more influenced by Steve Stapleton, mind and hand behind Nurse with Wound.

But it's important to remember that we're talking about non-artists lent to a non-music, and that the first works of Ain Soph originated as sound experiments aimed at executing specific Kabbalistic-derived rites: a comparison with the industrial geniuses of the British scene is not only pitiless but also misplaced, since the music of Ain Soph does not confine its genesis to the idea of establishing a rational communicative flow with the listener.

Without going into details of the individual compositions, “II” digs an abyss filled with terrible images: blurred and liquefied images where the mind drowns, reason perishes little by little until the forces of the unconscious and irrationality emerge. A placid leaden and dense sea whose hypnotic undulation wearily drags pebbles and debris adrift, an indistinguishable magma animated in the background by the incessant buzzing of underwater beings weaving macabre litanies.

Haunting choirs and sorrowful narratives sink into the nodes of an electronic ferment often generated by the bubbling of sounds repeated to exhaustion. Dry blows of ritual percussion and ominous bell tolls mark a non-time where the categories of space and time dissolve, leaving free rein to the dark part of the psyche. Or it is the elephantine step of a gong entangled in who knows what electronic devilry dictating the pace of an obscure psychedelia of the afterlife. Indecipherable electric guitar phrases also appear, called to thicken the sonic corpus, while the singing, mostly male but also female, is more present than in the past: ingredients that, on one side, slide Ain Soph's proposal towards the risky territories of Current emulation (losing, in part, the gloomy originality and intriguing ferocity of the debut, blossomed outside of every compromise); on the other, they constitute further steps of an evolution that will lead to the band’s absolute masterpiece, that “Kshatriya” from 1988, still remembered among the most intense and inspired works of the entire esoteric-industrial movement.

From a conceptual point of view, the music collected here represents a ritual directly evoking the tablet depicted on the cover, also known as the "Ritual of the Call" or more succinctly "Enochian Key": a ritual "formulated with the Enochian language revealed to John Dee and Sir Edward Kelly towards the end of the 16th century by an angelic entity" (!!!).

As happened in the previous work, the opera does not aim to represent a single concept but to review various themes related to the world of the Kabbalah, such as that of the metaphysical love between Nuit and Hadit, from whose union "every thing is created, duly sustained and duly ended in the return to the undistinguished whole, the sum of all possible things". Or the theme of "will and how it is forged by suffering, […] will understood as the guardian of one’s temple, thus forming the pillar of severity in support and protection of the pillar of mercy."

It’s difficult, for those who don't partake in such practices, to fully comprehend a work of this kind. It remains legitimate, especially for those who love these sounds, to try to scale the insurmountable wall that Ain Soph’s music represents for every human ear.

Surviving and triumphing in a context of non-communication is the undeniable suggestive force of an architecture of elusive and impenetrable sounds in their essence, in which to sink, leaving behind brain, reason, and common sense...