Miserere, The Lovecraft Sextet’s fourth release, is a haunting, chilling, and subtly distressing experience. In the words of composer Jason Köhnen (Celestial Season, Bong-Ra, Mansur, Ex-The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble), this curiously elevating album is ‘a musical submergence into songs of repentance’ that ‘wanders into the darkest corners of the human soul’. Mixing doomjazz with the ambience of black metal and Gregorian soprano singing juxtaposed with ‘unholy cavernous screams’, Köhnen’s search for the ‘darkest parts of the spirit’ has produced what he has called ‘the first ever recorded Doomjazz Blackmass’.
Upright bass, guitar, organ, electronics, saxophone, cello, a soprano, and a screamer are the tools at Köhnen’s hands, and very well utilised they are. Their timbre, their tone, their shape imbue each of Köhnen’s captivating concoctions with a dark power that is at once hypnotic, enchanting, mesmeric, their effect light, their impact enduring. This is an album that bears a strikingly penetrative power as it lingers, circles, and observes from afar. Inspired by Psalm 51, one of the penitential psalms most widely known from 17th century Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (performed here by award-winning choir Tenebrae and conducted by Nigel Short), to experience Miserere is to be subject to a force that resides within yet somehow beyond the music, somewhere in the deteriorating stone labyrinths of the soul. Ethereal, entrancing, mysterious and magical.
Revered and reviled by Jason
Miserere opens a portal into another world through Debemur Morti Productions on 7 October 2022
- The Lovecraft Sextet: Bandcamp
- Debemur Morti Productions: Website | EU shop | US shop |Facebook | Bandcamp | Youtube | Instagram
Track list:
- Miserere [Opus I]-Occulta
- Miserere [Opus II]-Domine
- Miserere [Opus III]-Sanctum
- Miserere [Opus IV]-Sacrificium
- Miserere [Opus V]-Humilatum
- Miserere [Opus VI]-Libera
