The trio’s distinct sound was the result of its refined treatment (the seven pieces were three years in the making) of acoustic instruments, primarily guitar, paying the utmost attention to every detail as they merge into knurly drones aerated by splodes of nocuous gases.
[Release page] Polish label Zoharum has been re-issuing rarities by some of the legendary blackguards of experimental dark ambient in big, chunky packages, most recently a twentieth-anniversary celebration of Andrew Lagowski’s False Dawn, the first album he released under the now-retired monicker Legion, including additional, unreleased material and three brand-new remixes. The first volume in a retrospective collection of Rapoon’s limited-format pieces, Seeds in the Tide, has also just been made available. Both are double albums.
1997’s Emotional Engramm was the last album by German innovators Maëror Tri, two of whose members went on to form the misty Troum while the third, Helge Siehl, has released a number of fluid, architectural albums as Tausendschoen. This particular re-release (featuring an appreciation by Martyn Bates of Eyeless in Gaza.) comes with no new material on its single disc, but its nearly eighty minutes really need no complement.
An “engram” is a reactivatable storage area of the mind’s painful memories hypothesized by neuropsychology and hastened into “existence” by L. Ron Hubbard’s pseudo-scientific Dianetics. So either way, a journey to the non-cognitive centre of the brain. The trio’s distinct sound was the result of its refined treatment (the seven pieces were three years in the making) of acoustic instruments, primarily guitar, paying the utmost attention to every detail as they merge into knurly drones aerated by splodes of nocuous gases. As each track on the album widens, it deepens. The elegant fare-thee-well of the closing track almost brings a tear to the eye. Though actually released after the band broke up, Emotional Engramm shows why Maëror Tri was so great—it could think big, long, epic thoughts.
Emotional Engramm is available on Zohrum. [Release page]
