Secret Chiefs 3: TraditionalistsLe mani destre recise degli ultimi uomini
We'll let the blurb below do the official talking, but this release (coming REALLY soon in May!) will undoubtedly come as a bit of a surprise --- that's how it works around here! This is an album by SC3 satellite band
"Traditionalists". It's not "Book of Souls". It focuses exclusively on the cinematic sound of SC3 -- the dark side in particular. This one is NOT for the faint of heart!!! There's plenty of charm and beauty to it as well (listen to the clip), but when the shadows start crawling around you, don't say you haven't been warned!
Now for the blurb:
From
out of nowhere Secret Chiefs 3 (operating here as Traditionalists, one
of the seven ‘satellite bands' introduced on Secret Chiefs 3's album
Book of Horizons) presents an elaborate "colonna sonora paranoica" — a
paranioac film soundtrack.
The film is imagined, but the horror is real.
This entire project, as you might expect from this band, is a
spiralling allegory that extends itself well-beyond its starting-point
cliché as a "soundtrack for a non-existent film." But that's always
been one of those potentially good clichés, in theory anyway. Pursuant
to that potential, this particular work remains singularly, decidedly
faithful to its sworn genre, the Giallo Horror Film Soundtrack.
At
this point, it's fair to assume we can take the dizzying conceptual
maelstrom that comes with anything SC3-related as a "given," right?
Alright, so we won't go into that here.
But
a word on the strictly musical side of things is warranted. The first
thing to note is that Giallo cinema music has the distinction of having
been graced by nearly all the great masters of Italian film music in
general: Bruna Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani, Ennio Morricone, Goblin,
Pierro Piccioni etc. And though this area of "B cinema" certainly has
its appreciators, one still-underplayed element is that when
considering the music, Giallo's harmonic language was developed by
brilliant people who, by current musical and aesthetic standards, set the bar
very high.
For any of us wannabes to share in the magic of this lost artform, we
have to bring a bit more more to the table than some vintage amps &
keyboards and vague undeveloped musical ideas based only in hipster
aesthetics. Because if you ignore the deeper intricacies of the music
theory at work, the orchestration, the arrangement, etc., you're really
only asking to make an ass of yourself (which is likely anyway no
matter what you do). But the usual thing is to sample stuff or simply
borrow themes from the masters and to then repackage them in a new
"updated" context. Well, in a climate like that we should emphasize
that Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini is quite simply an album
of original compositions. The process should be likened to when someone
is learning another language and begins to have dreams in that
language. It's the same process in any style of music, really. So to
state it plainly, these are original compositions that were dreamt into
being in the harmonic language of the Giallo Horror Film Soundtrack.
It's that simple. The point is not to be strictly period-specific, or
culturally-specific, but to be
psychically specific -- caring
first and foremost about how to convey things that will affect the
psychic state of the listener in the intended way. After all, the point
of dreaming in this particular language, with all its sophistication,
elegance and beauty, is to go that much more deeply into the territory
of
nightmare... and um, let's just say SC3 feel it's necessary to pursue this particular range of the human experience at this moment.
The
album itself is a full orchestral score that fully capitalizes on SC3
stock of musical manpower (Trey Spruance, Ches Smith, Timb Harris,
Shahzad Ismaily, William Winant, et al.) and adds to that a broad cast
of A-list hired musicians (among them Laurie Goldstein and Hans
Teuber). The material runs the gamut; dissonant violent strings
receding to beautiful textures with flute and female vocals through
echoplex; analog synthesizers, harpsichords and celestas over a tight
'70s-style rock band rhythm section; crazed psychedelic freakouts with
major payoffs; church organs granting repose, until tape treatments and
a chorus of possessed shrieking voices force the listener to reconsider
his position on the existence of
Evil... If you can imagine all
that produced to the standard found on any other Secret Chiefs 3
release, you've pretty much got the idea here.
The album was mixed analog to 1/2 inch tape. LP comes in 180 gram vinyl. CD is a mock gatefold LP, with a printed sleeve. Pure
win.
*180 Gram vinyl LP Limited Edition!
*Mixed analog to 1/2 inch tape
*First SC3 album on Mimicry in 5 years
*CD is a mock LP gatefold with printed sleeve
*First "Apocryphon" and first full-length album by a SC3 "satellite band"
*sure to scare off some of the more timid SC3 listeners, but be a seriously coveted item for anyone even mildly into this kind of
thing
*all original music and original paintings in artwork
*decidedly walking in the footprints of the Great Masters of
cinema music. They don't call it Traditionalists for nothing, you know!
*If you're looking for Book of Souls, this definitely isn't it.
Pre-order at:
http://www.webofmimicry.com/catalog/index.php
LP is limited and flying out the door fast.