?Alos – Yomi, L’Oscura Terra Dei Morti

…there’s an element that sounds fresh and original, despite the fact that serious types indulging in recording industrial noises and whipping guitar samples within an inch of their life are a pound to a penny these days.

…there’s an element that sounds fresh and original, despite the fact that serious types indulging in recording industrial noises and whipping guitar samples within an inch of their life are a pound to a penny these days.

http://www.panyrosasdiscos.net/pyr067-alos-yomi-loscura-terra-dei-morti/

Ah… “difficult” electronic noise, don’t you just L.O.V.E. love it? This blast of desert-baked Gothicke fancy is from (I think) Sardinia and is the work of Stefania Pedretti aka ?Alos. Pedretti is – to put it simply – looking to take her sound over the Styx and record the dead for us, as a metaphor for rebirth. This is – both in word and deed – sublimely Gravesian stuff, let me tell you now. The EP’s name is Yomi, which is the Japanese land of the dead: and apparently ?Alos sees this record as a mark of passage from one sound to another. But this release, lasting a shuddering 18 minutes or so, far from being a difficult record is not as dark as the descriptions of Yomi or the explanation of Panas, (in Sardinian culture, the spirit of a woman who has died in childbirth) suggest. It’s actually incredibly bracing and pretty life-affirming.

There’s something incredibly exciting when music is approached in a manner, or with an ambition that you hadn’t really been able to figure out before: this is one of those strange results where there’s an element that sounds fresh and original, despite the fact that serious types indulging in recording industrial noises and whipping guitar samples within an inch of their life are a pound to a penny these days. Maybe it just goes to show that there’s a hell of a lot more in your sensory armoury than gets tested. No matter

The opener Fili di Capelli comes on like a track off Ruth White’s Flowers of Evil, albeit one that’s been left out in the heart for a little too long, melting in the parched landscape like Dali’s clock and consequently emitting strange warbling noises above a heavy scythe of metallic guitar sounds. Taglio follows suit albeit in a more St Vitus-like manner, and remix, Panas is a gargantuan 8 minute buzzing in a subterranean meat factory, or a gig in one of Piranesi’s landscapes… Apparently this is a remix of the original (as yet unreleased) track by Acid Mothers Temple’s Kawabata Makoto Makoto; who added a wall of guitar samples to this track – and it shows, the piece having a blackness that the other two tracks don’t possess.

It’s truly great.