For
almost two decades now, Steven Severin's solo instrumental work has
largely kept its own counsel in the shadows. The output of the former
co-founder and bass player of Siouxsie and the Banshees has been
prodigious, with a dozen albums of dark ambient soundscapes released
thus far.
This
began in 1998 with Visions,
an extended reworking of his soundtrack to Nigel Wingrove's short
film, Visions
of Ecstasy,
almost a decade before. Unreleased until 2012, Wingrove's sensual
fantasia inspired by the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila is the
only film to have been refused a certificate by the British Board of
Film Censors on the grounds of blasphemy.
Since
then, Severin has released scores for theatre and film, including the
soundtrack for supernatural thriller London
Voodoo and
Richard Jobson's film, The
Purifiers,
as well as for one-time Edinburgh Festival Fringe dance
performer/director, Shakti. Since Severin himself moved to Edinburgh
twelve years ago, he has become even more prolific, with soundtracks
to Jean Cocteau's 1930 silent movie Blood
of A Poet,
and, with his actress wife Arban, collaborations with director
Matthew Misory, first on Delphinium:
A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman,
then on Joshua
Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean.
The
first of four download-only new works released over the next month,
The
Vril Harmonies
is a spaced-out instrumental suite that appears to draw inspiration
in part from The
Coming Race,
an 1871 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton which charts the discovery of a
superior subterranean master race fuelled by an energy form known as
Vril. The book's life-enhancing elixir not only gifted Bovril half
its name, but inspired theosophists such as Rudolf Steiner and George
Bernard Shaw to buy into its philosophy. More recently, graphic
novelist Grant Morrison and readers of the Fortean
Times
have been similarly fascinated by the power of Vril.
Unsubstantiated
claims led some to believe that a secret Vril Society of occultists
existed in pre-Nazi Berlin. This may or may not have been governed by
a network of female psychic mediums who claimed to have contact with
Aryan aliens living in Alpha Cen Tauri using their pony-tailed hair.
Either way, the musical result of Severin's sonic explorations is an
other-worldly exercise in synthesised hypnosis.
Split
into two sections, the first, Black
Sun Arcana features
four pieces, and the second, Absolute
Elsewhere
section, two longer meditations. The eight minutes of Black
Sun Arcana's
opening track, Maria,
is key to everything that follows. A sepulchral slow-motion drift
around some imaginary cosmos, it references Maria Orsic, the real
life Austrian psychic whose luminous visage peers from the album
cover, as inscrutably beautiful as a movie starlet. Orsic was de
facto leader of an organisation called the Society of Vrilerinnen
Women, who were allegedly in cahoots with the aforementioned aliens.
Orsic's
partner in such adventures was another medium known only as Sigrun,
who gives the album's second track its title. Here the jittering
frequencies at times resemble Bebe and Louis Barron's 'electronic
tonalities' for director Fred M Wilcox's 1956 mix of sci-fi and
Shakespeare, Forbidden
Planet, or
the end credit sequence of Gerry Anderson's cult live action TV
series, U.F.O.
The
stuttering low-end transmissions of Haunebo
sound like Nazi flying saucers jockeying for position before they go
in for the kill, while aether
sounds suitably transcendent in intent. Referencing the
much-mythologised fifth element, which in Vril lore contains the
life-force of the universe, it's as if its repeated synthesised
phrases were gathering strength as they go, with layer on layer of
some intangible force powering them up to take on the world.
The
Absolute
Elsewhere
section probably isn't referencing Paul Fishman's long lost prog rock
project of the same name, although the inspiration of Chariots
of the Gods
author Erich von Daniken on Fishman's synthesiser-based In
Search of Ancient Gods
album sounds like it could be a fellow traveller.
The
first piece, (Not
All Good Comes) From Above, shares
pretty much the same title as a track from Swedish
post-industrialist, Vagr, who has recorded an entire trilogy inspired
by Maria Orsic. Here, however, Severin's deep bass swathes scan
around the ether, proceeding with forensic caution before it gives
way to Phase
Into Light. This
swirls
into view, increasing velocity as it gathers momentum over its
twelve-minute duration before bursting into some twinkly-eyed idyll
like a celestial merry-go-round on a trip to the warmer reaches of a
hidden universe.
The
Vril Harmonies is available to purchase at www.stevenseverin.com,
and can also be downloaded at www.stevenseverin.bandcamp.com.
ends
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