Miranda Sex Garden
Suspiria

On the front of the stage, there are three: three slender and pale maidens.
Their long hair covers their faces, waving as if moved by a supernatural wind.
With their heads down, they move in a slow dance, clinging to their instruments: two violins and a viola.
Behind them, set apart, a drummer plays like those who kept time for the rowers on ancient Roman ships. A primordial pulse.
In a corner, a guitarist with noise tendencies torments the strings with a screwdriver creating an infernal screech.

Live, Miranda Sex Garden resembled, if you'll pardon the hyperbole, the eruption of Krakatoa.
I saw them supporting Depeche Mode on the "Devotional tour" and, as much as I love Martin and company, what I remember most about that evening are those three possessed who, with their violins, seemed to evoke not entirely sane deities.
That night, in a sports arena with terrible acoustics, pressed in a crowd scented with hashish, I heard for the first and only time the music of Erich Zann imagined by Lovecraft. Especially the finale, a sabbath of over ten minutes that grew, grew, grew with swirling violins, mad distortions, a hypnotic and increasingly powerful rhythm. Needless to say, the next day I scoured all the record shops in the area.

"Suspiria", a title that evidently pays homage to Dario Argento, is from 1993. It is their third work, the most focused. The Miranda Sex Garden clearly hail from spectral and ethereal territories not far from the world of Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, and 3rd And The Mortal, but to the medieval-esoteric climate, they add a "wall of sound" of disturbed guitars and powerful rhythms which makes them resemble, in the end, only themselves. The inlay of voices and strings is precise and impressive, with particular agility in climbing steep and sudden crescendos.

Among the most successful tracks, the archaic "Ardera sempre", the dizzying "Open eyes", a disturbing and dark version of "My funny Valentine".
But the track that makes the album worthwhile, the very one that closed the concert I talked about earlier, is the instrumental "Inferno" (our Dario must have really liked it...). A lava flow of sounds, a vortex of hysterical violins in which to lose yourself with closed eyes imagining falling ever faster into dark caverns, down to the burning heart of the Earth. More than a song, a sensory experience.

With an album like this under their belt and the notoriety gained from the tour with the Basildon boys, Miranda's sex garden seemed like a great promise, but it didn't turn out that way. Unfortunately, the next album, "Fairytale of Slavery", with fetish atmospheres and some good ideas but confused and ambitious, did not replicate the miracle. Thus, the Three Mothers sank back into oblivion, leaving us this sensual, intricate, and magical little gem of high craftsmanship.

Recommended for: pagan parties in moonlit clearings, Wicca gatherings in ancient woods, ritual orgies in Adamic costume.