Saturday, June 6, 2020
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Artist: VV.AA.
Title: Aural Hypnox - Underworld Transmissions
Format: CD
Label: Aural Hypnox (@)
Rated: *****
On the occasion of the issue of this precious release - or rather a sort of re-release actually! -, some members of the Helixes collective performed some transmissions at Les Voutes in Paris, where they performed some transmissions for the listening and maybe spiritual pleasure of the people, who managed to take part to such a rare event. A certain secrecy, maybe related to banal geographical reasons, considering that the centre of their lodge is in Oulu in the icy region of Northern Ostrobothnia in Finland - is far from any big fancy city, and maybe as they're not really interested in large audiences, made some of their material not so easily accessible also due to the strictly limited editions of the stuff under the imprint of Aural Hypnox. This CD (in 150 copies coming in an awesome package) is the collection of the remastered versions of a series of even more limited (just 50 for each recording) cassettes called "Underworld Transmissions", rare improvised recordings filmed and captured on tape in their subterranean lodge, made by different artists of the Helixes collective, differently combined in different seances. Those boxes of cassettes, including six sessions recorded between February 2014 and April 2015 were sold out quite quickly, so that this edition sounds like a bargain for all those listeners who got trapped by the impressive quality of the output of this mysterious imprint. Some sessions (in particular "Seance II/2014" or the entrancing "Seance III/2014") feature opening stages that sound like preparatory for the transmissions that the artist gradually forge, but it can be normal and I'd say it's the fascinating aspect of any improvised recordings. My personal seances are the opening and, if they are in chronological order, the elder one "Seance I/2013", due to the ancestral fascination of the combination between a sort of sinister horn and a dark choir, supposedly recorded by some techniques adopted for binaural recordings, considering their heavy hypnotic power, and the last two recordings "Seance IV/2014" and "Seance I/2015", mostly for their dynamics whose ascensional crescendo runs parallel to the saturation of the sonic spheres, but the remaining three sessions are likewise catchy. If you're a lover of ritual dark ambient, but simply if you're relatively new to these sonorities (maybe cause you got fascinated by some performance of projects like the one by Phurpa) grab your copy, if you don't have to wait until another re-release.