Igloo Magazine :: A Tomb Full of Stars :: 1: When the Reflection Passes (Varla)

Conjuring ceremonies with appropriate cosmic significance

A dark epic journey through astronomy and mortality, the musical study of the sun, moon, stars, and planets by early human civilizations for timekeeping, agriculture, and religious practices, touching death and the cosmos. I hear strange dark classical and science fiction sounds, certain harsh and dark atmospheres of earth, temples, and caverns that were used to store the dead bodies of ancestors, individually or together as the night sky. Layers accumulate frequently before receding, with recurring shifts between harmonic passages, distortion and extended silence. At times the voices seem to speak, it sounds like poets are talking and chanting, a dark communication probably representing different desires and passions, light particles of the world soul fixed in the sky, but the individual words, the language, is almost completely lost in harsh darkness. So we must pray the voices are conjuring ceremonies with appropriate cosmic significance.

1: When the Reflection Passes‘ recordings were assembled from extended improvisations, with subsequent editing emphasizing repetition, erosion and negative space. Individual performances were continually reworked, layered and reduced until each piece reached its final form. Although not part of the initial conception, lyrics emerged early in the process. Rather than occupying the foreground, the voice is treated as another instrument, moving between intelligible passages and abstraction. Brief images surface throughout the record before dissolving back into the surrounding textures:

Beauty behind every curtain shut
Every shadow patched oak
Rainbows laced on skip-trowel walls
Muted reflections on numb glass

We open into a ferocious rolling boiling sea, pebbles scrubbing in the surf, I hear the interplay of humanity, nature, and the cosmos. The sound of doom and destiny, the orchestra emerges, building on all this with no mercy. The first track, “Beneath Bruised Sea” (9:01″) could be a theme for a disaster at sea, going under the waves, slow and relentless against powerful spray, while science may explain reason, magic can explain non-reason. The fever breaks and things calm down, a complex and subtle percussive interlude begins, quick repeating rhythmic patterns and other activity, a blending of mystical and scientific ideas, as well as a redefinition of the perception of magic, transmitted cosmic stories, a guy starts talking, heavy echo, an energized poet using forceful expressions, words become shimmers, sparks that shatter. We are travelling under the water.

Creatures calling from another place ::

Next, we are awakening in a new place, the music arrives, strings, an orchestra, sometimes throbbing or welling, emotional intensity. What is over there? “We Can See Forever” (8:23) Sights of glitched drones, unstable synthesizer tones and processed vocals drift through wider harmonic movements, into roaring pressure, building and then smearing radio and throbbing machines. The sounds reach out and gamble with different textures, something dark must be happening, the voice is projecting more tension, this is “Veiled Levity” (4:43) the further voices ride on the open colors of the drone, finding textures and glitch shadows. Soon this whole world will be gone. There are creatures calling from another place, “The Battered Angels of Our Nature” (6:13), we are out in a strange nocturnal sounding field, there are strange and dangerous creatures all around, some might be from outer space. Now the field is expanding, there is a musical drone glitch formation taking over. The entire universe stops.

1. When the Reflection Passes closes with a sort of eulogy. Looking at the night sky and thinking about the ancient’s pursuit of the mysteries of outer space and the idea of hidden knowledge that could be explored through music. Burial is sometimes believed to be a necessary step for an individual to reach the afterlife. We are laid out, looking up into eternity, feeling the interlinks between behavior and consequence. We hear a distant throbbing, an electronic growling angel, glowing, growing, new elements appear and complicate the tempo, slow and dark, we are putting the dead away in a solemn and respectful slow manner, “Repose” (7:37).

A Tomb Full of Stars is the collaborative project of R. Hunter (missing scenes) and Sean Victory (aka World Hum). Recorded between Chicago, Illinois and Vancouver, Washington. The A Tomb Full of Stars logo was designed by Lucas Allen Cook, with layout and design by Sjøli Design.

1: When the Reflection Passes is available on Varla.