Band: Black Seas of Infinity

Album: Amrita: the Quintessence

Album Year: 2007

Label:  Autumn Wind Productions

Genre(s): Occult/Ritual Ambient

Website: www.meyspace.com/blackseasofinfinity

Rating: 8/10

Tracklist:
 

The promotional blurb that came with this release read thusly:

“AMRITA - The quintessence, is a concept album revolving around the vama chara or vama marg, otherwise known as the path of the left, or the path of woman, centering upon the Amrita, which is the sexual secretion of the woman in her oracular phase. These creations shall mirror the gates of ingress, congress, and egress that bestow the great magickal power. Ritualistic Dark Ambient Transmissions...Trances...Obsessions into the caverns of your mind yet to be explored and yet to be bled. The ritualistic beauty of AMRITA is the essential mourning to your darkness”

Now for those of you who don’t know, vama chara or vama marg are Tantric terms denoting the left-handed path and essentially the path for those who want everything that is to be gained spiritually in THIS life as opposed to gaining it through countless reincarnations and the above also seems to imply that sexual energy is an essential ingredient in the mix, as women in a trance of orgasmic ecstacy achieve states of prophecy akin to that of the shaman. It also means that that focus of energy can be transmitted through sexual congress. The amrita referred to in the title is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘without death’ and is also referred to as nectar, implying a drink that can confer immortality upon the imbiber and this would seem to mean that the secretion released during sexual congress by the woman at the convergence of orgasm and ecstatic state is nothing less than this very nectar, which could also imply that oral sex is the vehicle by which to achieve this happy state of affairs. It should be noted that sexual magic has an enormous magickal power (refer to Crowley’s experiments with yoga and his creation of Thelema for a general insight) and so too have women, because they have a particular attribute forever closed off to men ie the power of bringing forth life AND they bleed once a month, which is both a source of power over AND fear to the male of the species. However it should be noted that this is my personal interpretation and although I am of the left-hand path myself I must admit to ignorance of eastern methods of gaining self-knowledge and enlightenment, so I apologise to Jhon should I have completely misread his intentions here.

And so to the meat of the matter: the music. And without wanting to sound difficult it’s one of those albums where I freely admit that I have struggled with the writing of this review for some time because of my very unfamiliarity with the ideas used to initiate the creation of this album. It would appear that these concepts are absolutely central to an understanding of this album and to fully do it justice (and to be fair to the creator) requires an understanding that I unfortunately don’t possess at this juncture. However, one must also ask, how many of the listeners of this album will fully grasp what is being propounded here. So, asking the forgiveness of Jhon yet again, I will instead concentrate on the sounds and the feelings elicited from them, because here I am firmer ground I believe.

I have to commend BSoI on the both the breadth and depth exhibited here, in terms of dark ambient this goes far beyond the one-dimensional droniness so often found on many lesser releases and employs a gamut of sounds, styles and layers that combine to evoke a distinct air of ritual. Using a range of instrumentation, screechings, rasping, scrapings, electronics, ethnic-tinged percussion, rhythmic figures, a hint of woodwind and vocal samples (with a guest appearance by the seemingly ubiquitous Kenji Siratori on “Anti Vital Interior of the Womb Exploded Moon”) an atmosphere of moonlit mountaintop ceremonies performed in splendid isolation against a backdrop of age-old stones, hoary forests, turbulent skies and ancient memories springs readily to mind. There is more than a hint of menace and threat here though rather than an immediately uplifting spirituality (an ardently earthbound one perhaps, communing with spirits of an unfettered Nature and not a benevolent deity), palpably so in fact; I felt an oppressive weight bearing down on me, of centuries of knowledge and nocturnal arcane rites performed by servants of a secret current unknown to the daylight, swift windborne clouds scudding fleetingly across a pale lunar orb, sweating flesh shivering in the freezing chill, and this thread runs like a rock-encased vein through the whole presentation. And indeed this speaks of a rocklike solidity created by a tradition crusted with the wisdom and dust of age, handed down only to those deemed worthy enough and hidden from the general purview. I like its baleful ambience and cold alienation, its isolationist stance perfectly stating the wilful separation that these rites need in order to be performed properly and away from the prying eyes of the masses and the profane. If you were somehowexpecting orgiastic rites of wild abandon and warmly fuzzy bacchanalia then you will be disappointed, at least in my reading of this offering. But maybe there is an invitation here to those who, having glimpsed the merest hint of the power implied here, are brave enough to traverse and explore both the outer AND inner darknesses and to partake of the light that is held within…. the choice is yours whether to accept

-[S:M:J63]