Ekca Liena / A Death Cinematic – Preternatural

How music can be so dark and so luminous at the same time? Not sinister or doom-laden but enlighteningly and beautifully dark. Dark with shades of vivid colours, dark as a way of showing bare emotions stripped of unnecessary affect. Is it really darkness we’re talking about then, or the sudden realisation that the looking glass won’t lie to us anymore? Or to put it differently, is there any darkness involved when the collapse of our former self and all its related masks dramatically alter the way we experience our emotions. We should then talk about a new intimacy, rawer and sharper but also closer to our existential core. The liminality of such a change can be frightening but beautiful and unique at the same time. In such circumstances, darkness prevails but is also a wonderful guide to a new world in the making. Daniel Mackenzie, under his Ekca Liena moniker, opens split-release ‘Preternatural’ in muscular fashion and explores this very realm using intense saturated guitar swells, spin-chilling violin cries and foreboding synth drones for a result nothing less than mesmerising.

In ‘A Dense Collapse’, a stillness akin to the beautiful drone work of Robert Henke (circa 2004) is patiently disturbed over twelve wonderful minutes – lonely violin loops, far-away reverberated incidentals and distorted guitar amps conjure up a world of self-doubt and neurotic escapism. ‘Mid-Life Aftermath’ feels like contemplating vestiges of our former self as if suspended in a never-ending hypnagogic state. Sparse and expressive guitar chord progressions provide a much needed harmonic bed that echoes the emotional turmoil in which we seem to be trapped into – synthetic textures drifting atop empty surfaces as a way of contemplating this new found void. In closing track ‘With Invisible Walls’, guitars become heavily saturated and muscular to signal that life as we know it is about to change quite dramatically. But what a change – everything is thrown at you, kitchen sink first: in a balancing act of perpetual disintegration, where all imaginable sonic garbage is poured over an aching chord progression, Mackenzie manages to navigate his sonic boat to find new lands with a mind-numbing brutality that conjure both the visceral and the sublime, ending in a musical triumph.

In the second section of ‘Preternatural’, A Death Cinematic slows things down and take a step sideways to look inward. Four tracks of abrasive beauty explore again the darker side of human psyche. Quite a different darkness this time – thick, enveloping and even heartwarming. A darkness that invites us to see how scars are still painful but inescapably part of our own story. There is an urgency at play, an urgency conveyed by layers of guitars, hiss and noise telling aching stories of despair and surrender. ‘Our bones yellow in the sulfurs of the disfigured sky’ feels like the confession of a wounded man who is determined not to give up. In ‘the winds whip torn clouds to rain and soot’, devastating piano chords accompany the far-away calls of theremin-like guitar swells that conjure a never-ending loneliness. A loneliness experienced directly, felt in the flesh more than in the mind. ‘The nights are black, black as the coals of our bones’ beautifully explores the many different sides of human fragility as if seeking to look for an answer that will never come. A Death Cinematic’s four guitar improvisations are a model of spontaneity and emotional rawness, always expanding inwards but able to reach the listener’s bare feelings with incredible acuity.

‘Preternatural’ is not an easy listen, far from it. It’s dark, raw and intimate. It will demand complete surrender from the listeners and will leave them emotionally drained. But it’s nothing less than a wonderful record.

- Pascal Savy for Fluid Radio.

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