Aurora Sutra
The Land Of Harm And Appletrees

What is music?

Mainly a source of emotions. An emotion has a thousand facets and varies depending on the circumstances of place, time, and mood. Music has the gift of being able to create an emotion or radically change it. In a certain sense, it is also intrinsically fleeting.

It eludes any exact definition, like love, pain, passion. This is as true as the fact that some albums cannot be discussed in a conventional manner. A technical description would be as useless as trying to define an emotion with trivia. “The Land of Harm and Appletree” by the German duo Aurora Sutra cannot be the subject of a rigorous and pedantic critical analysis but must be experienced in all its fullness; one cannot break its listening into this or that song. It seems to tell you of an epic story, amidst medieval atmospheres yet at the same time spatial, between the cold decadent gothic pathos but not definitive and the melodic progression of accompanying synths, in a kind of sound concept structured around the narrating voice of Patricia Nigiani who whispers to us of cybernetic landscapes transplanted into ancient times and, at the same time, of Celtic places from a distant future. All of this traversing tribal sounds, new age echoes, Gregorian backgrounds, and industrial depressions.

This album overturns the lesson of Dead Can Dance, chewing up their ethnic and gothic medieval rhythms and spitting them into the most remote cyberspace. The resulting mix is intimately engaging. It's curious to think how certain works, even though they are now dated (Anno Domini 1993), prove to be so ahead of their time. Who knows, perhaps in a hundred years, this album will be considered a classic.

But, given the premises, why not anticipate the times?