Wrekmeister Harmonies - Night Of Your Ascension

Wrekmeister Harmonies - Night Of Your Ascension
Released by: Thrill Jockey
Released on: November 13th, 2015.
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Night Of Your Ascension, the third album from Wrekmeister Harmonies, sees the musical collective's coordinator, J.R. Robinson, teaming up with an interesting and eclectic group of musicians. This recording includes contributions not just from Robinson but from the likes of Lee Buford and Chip King (The Body), Alexander Hacke (Einsturzende Neubauten), Cooper Crain (Cave), Marissa Nadler, Mary Lattimore, Olivia Block, Eric Chaleff (Bloodiest), Dylan O'Toole and Ron DeFries (both of Indian), Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), Sanford Parker (Buried At Sea), Mark Solotroff (Anatomy Of Habit), Solomon Lee Walker, Chris Brokaw (Come), Esther Shaw, Noah Leger (Disappears) and Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors). The press release that accompanied this release notes that the death of Father John Goeghan and the life of Don Carlo Gesualdo “were starting points for the two compositions on his new album.”

The first track, Night Of Your Ascension, runs thirty-two minutes even, so yeah, it's lengthy, but it's interesting. It starts off as almost a drone piece, with some ambient sounding keyboards swelling slowly and monotonously while some genuinely pretty vocals rise up courtesy of Marissa Nadler. Again, referring back to the press release, this piece was based around Gesualdo's madrigal “Ahi Dispietata e Cruda” composed in 1595 but it's been reworked by Robinson 'into the key of A' and then extended quite a bit. The vocals sort of fade in and out in interesting ways. When they're not the focal point of the piece they're still very much up front in the mix, but as the strings used in the track become more and more prominent you are definitely left with a feeling of loss, and possibly of a violent end. What begins as mellow, almost transcendental, and quite soothing, gives way to the dark sounds of the string section before segueing into a chanting male chorus that in turn leads into what is basically a stretch of doom metal.

It goes in some interesting directions once it gets heavy. The drums start to swirl and pound, the strings give way to electric guitars, the pretty female vocals disappear under a barrage of male rage (fitting, given Gesualdo's personal life - he did murder his wife after all) with elements of both the psychedelic and the subversive handed out in equal doses. The last six or seven minutes of the track are absolutely vicious, completing this fucked up musical journey in a completely unexpected by entirely appropriate manner.

The second track is Run Priest Run (extended) and it clocks in at sixteen minutes and forty seven seconds and it's influenced by the death of death of Father John Geoghan. For those unfamiliar with Geoghan's story, he was a priest in the archdiocese of Boston who was accused of molesting over one hundred and thirty kids. He was sent to prison in 2002 but a year later, while in custody, was “strangled and stomped to death” in his cell by a white supremacist named Joseph Druce doing life without parole. So yeah, once again we see Robinson dealing in some pretty dark subject matter. It starts out with a stretch of drum and bass, with some weird synthesized noise fading in and out with varying levels of distortion. More serene high pitched vocals croon in the background, almost buried in the mix. Around the seven minute mark things go from quaint if unsettling into considerably more intense territory. The vocals start to become almost piercing, there's a wailing quality to them that is more than a little eerie and as you start to think about what inspired this composition, and as the track becomes relentlessly more intense, it all sort of makes sense. The song comes to an end as violent as its subject as the mad orchestrations become less like music and more like a car crash, but after that violent end, there is, deservedly or not, a final peace as the composition goes quietly into a fade with the instrumentation decidedly out of the dark tone for those last few seconds.

Beautifully intense, disturbingly sinister and sometimes very heady, messy stuff this is not the type of thing you put on when you want to get pumped up for a night out. Having said that, if you can appreciate what is essentially brooding, metallic chamber music with dark, sickening atmosphere and some absolutely insane classical overtones, you should appreciate this.