Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows
The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller

Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows: “The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller”.

Or also: technical tests of isolation.

Isolation from others, isolation from oneself, isolation from everything.

From Everything.

Little is known about Anna-Varney Cantodea: the impression I've formed from listening to her music and reading the few interviews she's given over the years is that of a person with a crappy past. And a lot of problems. Many problems.

Today, however, I have the impression that, although much remains unresolved, several problems have been left behind; that finally Anna-Varney Cantodea has accepted her outward appearance as unchangeable, that she has partly constructed her own sexual identity: fleeing from that surgical operation that could have artificially aligned her with the psychic essence so distant from reality, though putting the artist against her credo of Truth painfully pursued. I might be simplifying, but the feeling is that Anna-Varney Cantodea, although her reach for mental equilibrium is still in progress, is a person essentially different today from what we can hear in her early works.

The artistic journey of the Sopor Aeternus entity has gone through various phases, and, as if following a circular pattern, from the lugubrious “dark” found in the early demos, a connection with the beginnings was reestablished through the quirky “electro-goth” that took shape starting from the explosive “La Chambre d'Echo”, however passing through the inconceivable abyss of the middle masterpieces, indescribable.

"The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller” represents the missing link between the first full-length “Todeswunsch” and the works of maturity, which launched Sopor Aeternus towards a path of a very personal form of chamber music relatable to very few other references in the broader world of dark music. In this work, the musical medium retains the marks of a painful self-analysis (and how could it be otherwise?), the outcome of which, however, carries the flaws of that inexperience directly suggested by its title: that inexperience soon condemned by the artist, who will not hesitate to repudiate the work by defining it as a hybrid, the result of a blurred vision of one's being.

Not that the subsequent arrival at the phase of artistic maturity brings who knows what Lights and Hopes in the dark musical exploration of Anna-Varney (that will rather be the case with the very latest works, more catchy, but above all bearers of more relaxed tones and a heightened self-ironic verve). No, maturity will instead be the reflection, not of acquired serenity (far from it), but of greater awareness and a more defined understanding of one's identity, personal and artistic.

"The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller”, released in 1997, draws from the album that preceded it, but it is not its logical continuation: “The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller” is an enigmatic album, half instrumental, and in it, one can read all the fear of Anna-Varney in showing herself to the world. It is for this sense of incompleteness that the album probably doesn't appear in the eyes of its creator as her best creation. Here the artist seems to want to hide in the coils of music that mainly constitutes a screen for her tormented and fragile personality. Understandable: at the time, Anna-Varney was still a weak being, overwhelmed by fear and delusion, called to gather in her own pain, in her secluded life, in the dark, in a non-place far from everyone's gaze, even far from her image that repels her, in a non-place where the absolute negation of auto-eroticism necessarily leads to esotericism. A dimension bounded by the walls of the mind but at the same time a dimension as large as the entire universe.

The music that arises from such premises retains the disturbing neo-classical coordinates and the intricate baroque arrangements of “Todeswunsch”, but almost entirely abandons the reminiscences borrowed from the dark-wave universe that had characterized the project's first hesitant steps, to settle on the faltering sounds of popular folk tradition, with distinctly ethnic influences, halfway between the mud and the plague of a dark medieval village and the star-studded mantle of Middle Eastern nights, where learned scientists observe the stars to draw the deepest teachings.

"The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller” thus turns out to be an ambitious work, the sounds explored in it are more than ever outside of contemporaneity, time, and the known world; the trajectories traced look at a distant past, an almost pre-prehistoric past, the past of another planet, a past that takes on a universal hue, so much so that the sounds describing it delve into the depths of the soul. Cosmic pessimism becomes astral, therapy turns into a mystical rite, the alchemist dons the garments of a poet or a fine literate.

Since the experience within Sopor Aeternus is an inevitably solitary journey, even in this circumstance, Anna-Varney shoulders the bulk of the work, while still allowing herself to be aided by an ensemble of accompanists (the lute of Costanze Spengler, the cello of Matthias Ender, the violin of Una Fallada, the guitar of Gerrit Fischer) called upon to give body to the disarticulated sound evolutions of her creature, inspired as usual by the “Ensemble of Shadows”: a circle of Presences that constitutes the raison d'être of the project itself (it is precisely the airs suggested by them that pushed Anna-Varney, in her deep solitude, to project from her mind her inner turmoil in the form of music).

But “The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller” is also an exhausting journey (fifteen tracks for over seventy minutes), and its main flaw, besides showing a “tarnished”, weak, terrified charisma, and not shining for sounds worthy of the ideas, is nothing but its prolixity. Yet, if this work deserves to be in your collection, it is for the way it opens and the way it concludes, as if to prove that class is still no water.

Let us consider the beginning: the album opens with drones and tinklings (the five minutes of “nothing” of Sylla' Boreal”), and it is already capable of immersing the listener in a sensation of cosmic void that inspires one to stop and open the curtain of their soul. A “nothing” that is swallowed by the strings and winds of the visionary “Question(s) beyond Terms” (another instrumental), one of the airs I've found myself humming the most in my life, one of the “musical images” that most vividly allowed me to open the doors of perception and push myself far away, towards fantastic and desolate worlds, vast, infinite worlds, filled with eternal solitude.

The album will unfold in a succession of small animated pictures by the bustling folklore of village bands, funeral processions and clowns playing death bells, sketches interspersed by dark acoustic ballads, where the characteristic voice of Anna-Varney seems to settle on heavy and suffering timbres, abandoning the shrill tones that had characterized more than one episode of “Todeswunsch”, but above all not attempting the theatrical climbs that will instead characterize the future. Noteworthy, among others, are the rhythmic “To a loyal Friend” (fourth track, first sung piece), the muted “Memalon” (an enchanted folk lullaby with guitar and flute) and the revisited piece from her early days, the engaging “Memories are haunted Places” (formerly known as “Birth – Fiendish Figuration”).

But let's get to the end: the mist of dark drones returns to envelop us, a floating, suspended guitar arpeggio like the rings of Saturn weaves a halting litany. It feels like being on the furthest star from our galaxy. A meditative rasp speaks to us from who knows which alien worlds, a voice that could be that of a wandering spirit in the vastness of the Universe, as that of a deceased returning to tell their tragic story, or that of a soul compelled to an exile of eternal suffering. It is “May I kiss your Wound?”, the absolute peak of the first artistic phase of Sopor Aeternus (later re-proposed in piano version in “Songs from the Inverted Womb”), the piece that will aptly pave the way for the hallucinated scenarios of “Dead Lover's Sarabande”, part one and two. The piece flows harmoniously into the final bacchanal of “Ein gutige Lacheln auf den Gedichtern der Toten...”, another crescendo of cosmic, festive, apocalyptic (though not apocalyptic folk), that pairs with the tragic and majestic atmospheres with which the journey had started many hours, perhaps centuries, millennia before.

In conclusion, what can I say: it's certainly not a bad album, this “The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller”, and I personally remain very attached to it, as it was the work that introduced me to the entity Sopor Aeternus and made me fall in love forever: just like all the other works (I mean ALL, including the first rough recordings) it MUST be listened to by those who appreciate this suffering entity that has managed to transform its existential discomfort into something wonderfully unique in the wider context of dark music (and beyond).

Good journey.