Artist: VoidWork
Title: Basement
Genre: Ambient
Release Date: 20th May 2011
Label: Rage In Eden Records
Album Review
Xavier, whose vision VOIDWORK embodies, has released an album ‘Dark Corners’ in a digital form four months ago, it was to offer a dark contrast to the neoclassical ‘Basement’ that is coming out with Rage In Eden Records at the end of this month. I found the former to be a great piece of avant-garde art of an original ambient music, which offered the eerie, evocative narrative to contemporary horror cinematography and gothic and horror fantasy literature of past. It was a wonderful surprise to find this new work to review, to see how Xavier’s vision is evolving and to delve into the rich and chilling aspects of world he offers yet again.
From the start the music connects to your senses and puts you straight into the whirl of black, jade, red colour spectrums with a terrible feeling of foreboding, being lost in hell and heaven at the same time - the deep crevices within your being - its terrible absence of light and the height of your craving for it. This is a mirror which offers you confrontation and not a photoshopped version of life and its inevitable twin of death; it’s not a journey through rose garden but a Dante’s immersion into his journeys through even more complex Divine Comedy. The neo-classicist description doesn’t take the fact away that this is original and unique and utterly modern.
‘Something strange stirs the Streets’ is certainly making a great use of an operatic female vocal (Ann-Mari Thim whom you will hear again later on in ‘The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight’. Xavier also invited few other vocalists and musicians and all their contributions are remarkably wonderful and complimenting his creations superbly) alongside some arrangements that might remind of DEAD CAN DANCE in a dark ambient version, it’s more loose and more chaotic - in that creative sense of it. The next song makes a great use of a heavy hitting piano which hits you like a ghostly hammer accentuated by its seemingly random hits on keys. What a heavy atmosphere! You also get a feeling as if shadowed birds were flying around your head as well as with a distanced voice speaking through this, making it feel special and at once locating you in a precise spot. Xavier certainly knows how to maximise these effects to give his songs not only atmosphere but also a visual and three dimensional feel.
The next song delves into yet even scarier soundscape. What this album shares with its previous offering is the deep feeling of tremendous solitude. You’re not experiencing your own solitude in a world which is equally beautiful as it is frightening, but you might get a gist of why Jean-Paul Sartre once said “God is absence. God is the solitude of man”. Of course there is also a weird ritualistic scary scene in ‘Sacrilegious Ceremonies of the South’ with a voice of Melissa Ferlaak. The whole album is contrasted by its Bonus side which is quite substantial and will take you on a similar yet different journey, musically one where the neo-classical influences give way more to the ambient industrial and more experimental (in a way I’d recollect a comparison to say, ZOVIET FRANCE) and one that will pull you even deeper, like those extra leads in the film unexplored in the first version, within second an extra story to be lived, even if it is more disorientating.
What you can expect from VOIDWORK is quite a demanding but ultimately rewarding experience. Horrors often serve to alleviate one’s stresses and the remains of traumas once experienced; in that line this foreboding and darkly dramatic music is just the same catalyst for release and maybe exactly what you need, certainly for me it’s a truly welcomed listening experience and one that I will revisit, especially because with more listens there is more to discover within its musical journeying and landscapes and also behind its stories. This beautiful indulgence in the dark recesses I can only recommend to all willing to experience it as it’s not exactly something that can ever be popular on a wide audience scale (at least not in this day and age); it’s more Ingmar Bergman than James Cameron.
Tracklist
CD1
01.This Town was once a peaceful Place – 3.27
02. The lurid Lights that linger over Lichford – 2.51
03. Something strange stirs in the Streets – 3.36
04. Mysterious Movements in the House of Horace Pinkerton – 7.32
05. The Dead that dwell in Darkness – 3.37
06. Ring a Ring o' Roses – 0.45
07. Sacrilegious Ceremonies of the South – 4.01
08. The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight – 3.13
09. Mastering the Mysteries of Mythos – 3.08
10. Symbols and Signs to Summon Yog-Sothoth- 2.45
11. Night of Burning Buildings – 2.25
12. Exploring the Ransacked Ruins – 5.52
13. Gramophone in the Grave – 2.22
14. Midnight at the old Mound Mill – 2.32
15. The lasting Legends of Lichford – 4.22
16. Bones beneath the Barrows – 4.22
Bonus
01. ...a plague – 2.24
02. The 13th floor – 2.40
03. In Darkness – 3.03
04. Night Noises – 5.36
05. Kaos – 2.05
06. Burial Room – 2.45
07. A Winter – 3.10
08. Dimly Lit Corridors... – 2.29
09. The Stranger – 3.39
10. Nothing – 4.27
11. The Serpent’s Lullaby iV – 3.14
12. Nothing (with vocals) – 4.27
Line-up
Xavier – all music (Keyboard, guitar, bass, etc), lyrics, vocals
Websites
http://www.voidwork.com/ / www.myspace.com/voidwork
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 9.5
Sound: 10
Total: 9.75 / 10
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