Ain Soph
III

With "III," an ideal trilogy concludes, aiming to collect the first recordings made by the capitoline band, when probably they themselves did not yet consider themselves as such.

Recordings that, it is worth remembering, were made for magical purposes and were not initially intended to be distributed as "musical products." Hence, all the limitations of enjoying a non-amateur music crafted to be the appropriate background for the practice of cabalistic rites: only the growing interest, word of mouth, and increasingly widespread distribution of tapes, inside and outside the Italian borders, would lead them over time to see themselves as a "musical entity."

"III", created in the same year as "II" (1985), is a double album and contains about an hour and a half of material. However, this abundance does not match with high quality.

In "III," Ain Soph is solely Crucifige: lacking the collegial approach that characterized the two previous volumes, "III" deviates more compared to previous offerings (since "II" had represented the ideal continuation of "I"), and in my opinion, we are faced with the least convincing chapter of the trilogy, either due to Crucifige’s compositional and executional limitations, tackling the entire work alone, or due to the stylistic choices that see a progressive alignment with the dictates of the masters Current 93, a point of reference for anyone wishing to endeavor in dark-ritualistic settings.

The first part of the work includes "Rituale 00", which, as explained in the sparse booklet, "was usefully created as a base for a Bhakti Yoga ritual" and "is also usable as a base for ritual concentration". We will agree that, untied from the purposes indicated above, about forty-five minutes of synthetic and reverberated sounds laid on an environmental carpet of dark synths is not the best for our ears. Despite being terribly lengthy, the composition nonetheless holds a certain charm and represents the most genuine and original side of Ain Soph, an entity capable of alienating the listener with a hypnotic flow drawn out for tens of minutes. At the end of the tape, a voice explains the necessity to repeat the experience from the beginning, as if it were an infinite circle: we can only wish a loud good luck to those who wish to attempt the feat!

The second part, apparently free from a concept, is divided into three chapters: "The Failure of Jesus", "Visible Darkness", and "Garbage, the City and Death". The tracks take on somewhat "more musical" contours but end up too often evoking the ghost of Current and certain experiments by the very early Coil. Notably, "The Failure of Jesus", the most intense and dramatic episode of the lot, directly recalls the cornerstone "Nature Unveiled": proportionately, the voice of Crucifige, manipulated and structured in overdubs, aspires to retrace the gasps and hisses of the unsurpassable David Tibet or, at best, to exhume the acidic and angry singing of John Balance. A poor pronunciation of the English language and a recording done very poorly do not help.

In particular, the sound quality, even worse than in previous works (certainly not formal masterpieces), makes the following episodes weaker, and at times laughable if not irritating, with the voice completely out of sync with the backdrop, while the solemn orchestrations of "Garbage, the City and Death" represent the most melodic production by Ain Soph in this early artistic phase.

The last twenty minutes of the work are instead a sharp return to the hermetic ritual settings so dear to our group: what appear to be volume games of the electric guitar, manipulated and sped up during the mixing, strip away minutes of our existence without providing great thrills, while the murky reprise of "Rituale 00", accompanied by a dark recital played in reverse, as the best subliminal tradition demands, sends cold shivers down the spine, yet doesn't fully satisfy the listener's mind.

Therefore, "III" is not an indispensable purchase unless one wishes to complete the trilogy started with the more than good "I" and "II": a trilogy that, in its rawness, represents the first steps of a fundamental reality in the dark-industrial scene of the eighties, destined to become a cult band, more abroad, in truth, than at home.