Band: Seeker

Album: The Invocation of the Sleeper

Album Year: 207

Label:  Autumn Wind Productions

Genre(s): Deep Ritual Ambient

Website: www.myspace.com/invocationofthesleeper

Rating: 9/10

Tracklist:

Deep, deserted submarine cities and ruined cyclopean structures, inhabited only by strange ghosts unknown to the light and water as cold as death, sunken in the black eldritch depths and crushed by water and aeons. The detritus and dust of uncounted ages, the carcasses and rotting flesh of untold numbers, settling on forgotten and legendary ruins where the Sleeper awaits, when the stars in their eternal courses become aright. Cthulhu, the Dread, stirs from his tomb of night and his endless dreaming, to walk the Earth that was once his to roam and rule, to be welcomed by his acolytes, those whose secret rites brought forth this gargantuan apparition into the light of day…

This is the musical accompaniment to a wordless ritual, enacted by the hidden priests and adherents of Cthulhu’s subterranean cult and concocted by Seeker, a side project of Xardas of 20.SV. Unsettling bass (and quite possibly sub-bass) frequencies, sinister insistent textures, alien ambiences and the sonorous pealing of a single bell, like that on the bridge of a sunken ship moved by the deepest and coldest submarine currents, calling out across the unknowable canyons and plains of the ocean like a harbinger of doom and catastrophe. Visions of hooded celebrants in benighted caverns, their partially covered faces lit only by the dim comfortless light of the  black candle that each carries, circle and weave in adoration, their step long and slow, echoing both the dread majesty and endless sleep of He Who Dreams. The atmosphere is admirably sustained over the entire 25minute length, the melancholy and doomy atmosphere enveloping the listener like a suffocating blanket, shutting out the familiar warmth of the everyday world. There is an inescapable feeling of despair and hopelessness, that something beyond our understanding is once more resurfacing and that there is nothing we can do about it – it cannot be appeased or mollified or even worshipped, it does not care about us or anything else…  we are as amoeba and totally beneath its notice.

It is often difficult for a musician manage the feat of holding a listener’s attention over a long duration, especially one that has but a single theme like this has… but despite that I found myself imagining the summoning of strange and cursed forces anathema to life and humanity whilst I was listening to this… and the use of the bell is useful in this respect because it brings you back at just the right intervals, focuses your attention on the moment at hand and never lets you get bored, just like real-life rituals do. I listened to this on headphones three times whilst writing this review and I was engrossed in it all three times and that’s a measure of how successful it is and I felt that same frisson too… I have heard many attempts over the years at conveying ‘dread’, ‘fear’, ‘sinister’ atmospheres and ‘inhuman’ ambiences through the medium of sound, but very rarely do they cause me to shudder with that indefinable frisson so essential to conjuring the requisite atmosphere – John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ theme is one that readily springs to mind for instance. The work of Kerovnian and TenHornedBeast  also spring to mind. For sheer atmospherics alone, this has to be one of my personal favourites and quite possibly one of my CDs of the year so far (running alongside R|A|A|N’s “The Nacrasti”). Absolutely beautiful.

-[S:M:J63]