Band: R|A|A|N

Album: The Nacrasti

Album Year: 2001

Label:  Malignant Antibody

Genre(s): Dark ethno-ambient

Website: www.myspace.com/r_a_a_n 

Rating: 9/10

Tracklist:
 

Along with Seeker’s “The Invocation of the Sleeper” this album is in the running for my album of the year so far, and one of the best ambient (dark or otherwise) albums that I have heard in a long while. The album explores a fictional(?) “ancient desert culture (maybe based on the Anasazi?) that was advanced beyond its time and yet long forgotten by history”, and this it does with a magnificence and sense of majesty that many would do well to study, sending the listener to the beginning of the world, a time deeper and darker, more mysterious than mankind knows or wants to know, a time when the secrets of the universe were known and held sacred and those who had knowledge were deemed as kings.

So what do we have here? Nine tracks, all seamlessly running into each other yet distinct in texture and atmosphere… sweeping drones, distant percussion, swirling strings and instruments made from the horns of animals, punctuated by ethnic accents paint a landscape of sand and desert dwellings under a benign sun, and drawing a picture of the people that carved their existence out of  that arid antediluvian landscape but wresting a richness from it the likes of which was not to happen again for many more thousands of years. Ultimately, in  the present, that very same landscape is now peopled by their ghosts hiding in the sun-scorched rocks and the still, shady, sheltered out-of-the-way places, where mysteries still have their being. Those very same wind-carved stones can tell their own stories of those whose feet once touched this land and engaged with it, their spirits perhaps living in the nooks and crannys of weathered rock formations, tinged with the sadness of both a then-vibrant culture and their lore turning to dust, where now only the stones, cursed by both heat and cold, stand as witnesses to what we have unknowingly lost.  There is power here, a tangible (and at times quiet) majesty, a proud dignity, a deep spirituality, a formless physicality, a pervasive presence that neither time nor the vicissitudes of weather and natural catastrophe could ever wear away. The physical traces may have gone, but they’re still there nonetheless, allowing us a mere glimpse from the corner of our myopic eyes, that very shortsightedness preventing us from seeing the wonder… but also leaving us wondering where they disappeared to and why they left…

Fanciful?  Sure, but to me, this is what the best music does – it takes one out of one’s immediate temporal co-ordinates & commonplace environment and transports you to places undreamed of and forbidden, allowing us to share the dreamquest of the ancient shaman, pounding out the hypnotic rhythm on his animal-skin drum, on his search for knowledge, the unknown and the unknowable, maybe to see the faces of the gods themselves. At the risk of sounding disrespectful, the deep bass voices that permeate most of the tracks on here reminded me strongly of the Mystics in Jim Henson’s “The Dark Crystal”, a vast power hiding behind a gentle exterior. In many ways track titles are irrelevant, it’s the seamless nature of the whole that gives the music its shape and force but stand out pieces were “Arrival of the Sek”, “Sandrin” and “Tizh of Runn”. All the tracks left me with a sense of awe and an undercurrent of sadness & melancholy, the scale of the sound cavernous and space-filling but the pace sonorous and slow, verging on the funereal, conveying untouchable majesty (it’s that word again…) and slow inexorable doom… if indeed there were a civilization called the Nacrasti, this offering of R|A|A|N’s would be both a fitting tribute and a suitable epitaph, in addition to being a magnificent memorial….

-[S:M:J63]