Rosarium² - Sigillum

I guess you could sort of say that I'm continuing to explore religion within the industrial scene and all that it encapsulates. And, coming off my recent discoveries would be Rosarium², a Catholic act based over in Sardinia. He creates experimental music that, to him, is meant to reflect the soul during meditation and prayer.

His first release was back in December of 2011, titled Exempla, which begin off his trademark use of church sounds and bells, chanting samples, as well as glitchy electronics. In May of 2012, he found himself releasing Apocrypha, which featured tracks both new and old. And, making 2012 a good year for himself, he continued on to make his third full length album, which consisted of ten tracks and was titled Imprimatur.

And, his latest album happens to be Sigillum. The music is said to be best heard while not paying attention to the lengths of the song, and playing them in random order. So, with a clear mind, the album's playlist on shuffle, and without paying attention to the lengths of the songs, I drove myself deep into the sacred chants of this Holy man.

The first song I found myself delving into was that of Sancta Missa. It began off with a fairly ambient sound, but was humble and peaceful. There were a few off-in-the-distance bells, but the song never really fared much better than a few synths here and there.

Shuffling onto another song, I came to Asuncion. Getting a bit more electronic with some muffled chanting in the background, I'd say it was a fair minimalist song. And then Dies Irae came along and threw me for a loop. Much glitchier than the two tracks I've seen before, it used bells to create a pretty solid track on the album. Perhaps one of the better ones so far.

Deo Gratias followed in the footsteps of Sancta Missa, holding over one main synth line throughout the entire song and kept it that way throughout. It was fairly boring.

Introibo Ad Altare, which is technically the first track on the playlist, serves well as an intro. Coming off pretty dark, it uses a sample to settle their message in pretty well. Auto Sacramental came on next, and used the choral samples really well. The beat itself remained pretty simplistic, but it worked wonders despite not really changing up much. The church organ sounds also helped the song work over fairly well.

Paternoster IX was a looping track that didn't do much at all for myself; I guess the repetition in this song came off pretty bad to my ears. Rosarium 2110013 was just a man praying throughout, and had no music working with it. I suppose it went well with the Catholic inspiration, but your goal here is to also put out music. Not just some guy speaking.

And that was all the songs on the album. My thought is that this guy is pretty good at making music. What needs to be fixed is the looping aspect of some of their songs. While I can sit and enjoy ambient pieces, I need them to move on a bit here and there rather than just stay on the same synth line, meanwhile nothing much is going on in the first place. The glitchy electronics that I heard in Dies Irae were awesome, but I didn't really get much more of that throughout the album. I think that if they put more of a focus on making his songs differ throughout rather than loop, they'd get a much more solid album than what has been presented. Apr 03 2014