Sky Burial - Spectrehorse

Sky Burial is the second project of Michael Page, who has found limited fame with the underground harsh electronics project Fire In the Head. Now, I have heard nothing by the aforementioned project, so this release will be a new insight for me.

Sky Burial is also a beautiful (albeit grotesque) ritual practice among ancient Tibetan Buddhists, aborigines, and Zoroastrians. First impressions indicate a more blissful undertone, the intro "Spectrehorse" is a nice ambient piece, with a few nice hooks of harsh power electronics. The title is a beautiful image too. "Ghostly Mules" are a good thing. In fact, the packaging and cover of this album is one of my all time favourites.

"Smoke Sky Horizon" is another track to mention, where as the previous number relied on power electronics to perform it's ritual teachings, this is a much sturdier ambient piece, and there is a very deep and very noticeable Buddhist air to this track, and I suspect most of the album will carry it. Now, you don't need to have been involved in the ambient scene for long to draw this equation, but I shall use it anyway. Buddhism = beautiful. Buddhist Chants = a good album. The concept of a Sky Burial is to allow the soul to escape (after a nice bit of massacre to the body). I think the violent and beautiful contrasts of this practice also reflect onto the music itself, with as many harsh and chaotic noise blasts as there are hypnotic and overwhelming droning ambient tracks.

Particular attention is to be paid to the clever use of word play in the song titles, and occasional bewilderment. (who the fuck is Saquasohuh?) This is a beautiful tie to Indian mythology and religion, as Saquasohuh is actually a Blue Star, the appearance of which is supposed to indicate the arrival of a new world. Anyone who pours this amount of research into a release deserves recognition, and in all fairness, a release by a Western man, cultivating and documenting the beliefs of ancient Indian tradition and practice cannot be ignored, especially when done with such accuracy.

If you like Dark Ambience, Power Electronics, and religious references, you can do a lot worse. Jan 01 2006