'Ultionis'

Available from Somnambulant Records, PMB201, 15127 NE 24th St., Redmond, Washington 98052, USA.

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R ELEASED on St. Valentines Day, Ultionis is the Latin word for ‘revenge’ and thus adds a suitably more macabre and less sentimental touch to this well-known festival of love, secrecy, rejection and jealousy. Limited to just 500 copies and imprinted with four interlocking eihwaz runes, this CD is the brainchild of Michael Todd. At present, Michael is also working on a number of side-projects, including Harbinger, Transcendent Device and The Great Despisers (with Somnambulant dynamo, Chris Donovan). Despite amounting to little more than half an hour, a total of ten tracks are included on this recording, each of them allocated with a suitably Latin title.

The first of these, ‘Alator’, tingles through the ears with a gentle shunting that sounds like a train winding its way out of a station in Imperial Rome. A mildly dramatic centrepiece is steady and repetitive, with a slightly detectable whistle lurking ominously in the background like an ally of Brutus on a March afternoon. ‘Ferociter’ is darker still. A low humming chant wafts through corridors of stone, the chinking sound of a hammer can be heard crashing upon metal and quickening beats conjure up images of a gladiatorial convoy on its way to the arena. And, towards the end, there is even the inclusion of what sounds like a rousing marching song from the 1930s. ‘Grauidus’ comes and goes like a bear with a sore head, falling away almost entirely in between belched vacuums of punctuated space and remote female vocals. Nasal breathing patterns and an industrial rumbling creates an inexplicable blend of tumble dryer and obscene telephone call. Either that or it’s an asthmatic having a very bad trip.

‘Immanitas’ has a similarly hollow and minimalist format, but this is soon fused with menacing samples, booming drones and an exercise in Disneyesque choratics. Carl Orff meets the Red Army Choir on the pounding set of King Kong.

‘Legionis’ is wet and watery. Electronic crackles, swooping rumbles of drone and hardened war veterans on the march. The Schultzstaffel as the embodiment of the Roman Ideal; opera as the inspiring soundtrack of the trenches.

‘Malevolentia’ is a gaggle of orchestral confusion, each sample representing a simultaneous cog in a complex cacophony of musical calamity. German vocals stream across a bomb-ravaged landscape, dying away like voices on the wind.

‘Mutilare’ picks up where the last track left off, a harsh droning reminiscent of Enola Gay slowly making her way to Hiroshima like a murmuring paper plane over southern England. Distant drumbeats, tortured swirls and low growls slice through a night sky. It sounds like a psycho with a plastic bag over his head, just as he prepares to examine the freshly-plucked sinews of your heart to the awe-inducing strains of Mussorgsky.

‘Perpetuus Pugna’ is far more upbeat than the previous few tracks, with lively beats and Gregorian incantations tantalisingly close to a rock drummer performing solo in a monastery. Rather odd, perhaps, but effective nonetheless.

‘Venationis’ is almost like an alternative remix of the same track, this time employing a slower beat and attaching itself to a second gloom-filled helping of brotherly chanting. The style is more erratic and comes in fits and starts, but the results are very atmospheric indeed.

‘Vulnero’, the final piece, takes the form of a slow cello superimposed on a backdrop of high-pitched female operatics and discordant thumping. Accompanied by a barely intrusive flock of clunks and rattles, the cello offers a remotely melancholic finale to the album, flanked by more German samples and a driving Wagnerian presence.

When I reviewed Marspiter’s ‘Vigila’ a year or two ago, I found it to be very militaristic and bombastic. Meanwhile, the ‘Finis’ album was less accessible and more suited to the realms of Noise and Harsh Industrial. ‘Ultionis’ seems to occupy the middle ground, rhythmically uncompromising in places and yet structured in others. A perfect link between the two, in fact, proving once again that Michael Todd has a number of interesting and imaginative aces up his sleeve