Elend
A World in Their Screams

Oh you, Misery! Come and take me away with you one last time!

In 2007, Elend releases the third and final chapter of the new cycle - the "Wind Cycle" (based on a poem written by the two main composers, Iskandar Hasnawi and Rénaud Tschirner, initially envisioned as five parts but then reduced to three due to budgetary reasons), the darkest, most violent, and apocalyptic of their career. In this final fresco, Elend extremizes the lesson learned from avant-garde contemporary orchestral music composers like Iannis Xenakis and Giacinto Scelsi, tinges it with black with strokes of fire, multiplying the interweaving of noise and orchestral elements, making everything damnably dark and fatal, drawing oases of dark ambient, raising a single immense and terrifying sonic tower. «A World In Their Screams» is indeed just as the title declaims: a vast world created from the screams of instruments and the damned, powerless witnesses to the coming of the Abyss.

The peculiarity of this album lies in the absence of vocal parts: everything is entrusted to a narrating voice and the use of the mother tongue - French - amplifies the sense of seductive darkness that this work generates. The only exception to this constant is the opener ("Ophis Puthôn"), where we can hear the gentle crystal-clear voice of a female soprano singing verses in ancient Greek. After an otherworldly calm, here comes the approach of unease, the wavering of our stability, the fragmentation of reality as we perceive it. And the baritonal mantra «Ophis Puthôn» - the Serpent Python, ancient guardian of the Oracle of Delphi, later dethroned by Apollo - heralds destruction, but also the eternal return. Thus begins the transfiguration of the world. "Fear, fear the coming darkness! Woe to virtuous men, for they shall be the slaves of slaves. The fire invades everything, the infernal Hermes awaits the harvest".

It is impossible to resist the magnetism of this sonic apocalypse, our human forces cannot resist such greatness. So be it: let the cutting winds capture my body in this relentless dance of destruction. "The serpent, lord of the sun, remained still. And the earth began to tremble from the echo of its wrath, its coils echoed with a thousand voices. And the serpent of discord rose and devoured the sun, to establish the Kingdom of Death". The moment has come. Rivers of strings submerge me, drowning me in a river of death. "The infinite River of the Dead. I see dead swans and understand that I am approaching the Infernal Realms. And here I am at the Sea of Oblivion. I search for your remains, reassemble your limbs". Death. There is only death. The piercing scream of the Earth, the upheaval of the Universe: and let there be chaos. The storm: demonic, chaotic orchestrations, yet subject to inviolable laws. The relentless winds burn the flesh. Here then is the Cave of the Shadow. It is the end. "I return, surrounded by darkness, through woods of snakes. And here my journey ends. Everything is bloodsoaked: the ground is blood-colored, the sky is blood-colored, the sea is blood-colored. The center of the Earth screams. Come, for such is your Realm".

Forgive, forgive if all this seems madness. But the forms of human language cannot describe all this. You must live it, feel it on your skin. Beyond common perception. You will taste the terror of the End. And then, perhaps, you will understand. Forgive, forgive...