rasplyn

Was it not a few reviews ago that we mentioned alrealon musique and Rasplyn in passing. Well I’m happy to say that we got a message from Carolyn O’Neill – better known to the musical cognoscenti as Rasplyn, who kindly resent the brace of cuts that we had suspected correctly we’d overlooked and indeed mislaid. There’s a moment within Huston’s superb cinematic telling of Kipling’s short story ‘the man who would be king’ where ‘Danny’ played by Connery is preparing to wed, having already been bestowed a Deity like status by way of a freak occurrence and the playing to the naiveté of the elders, where Maurice Jarre’s orchestrations suddenly groan and glower with menace where once the entrancing almost kindled in a spiritual haze and empowered by the stifling heat assumes something approaching a mystical mirage which though turns abruptly from the beautified and the reverential to something doomed and foreboding to rupture as though the very heavens and nature itself unite in congress to howl with indignation in some warring pact. I mention this because there’s a moment here wherein the self same sonic fates appear with equal oppressive foretelling. Prized from her debuting full length for the aforementioned Alrealon Musique imprint ‘priestess of the Goddess’ emerges from a dreamy haze courted and ushered by hushed bowed silvery shimmer tones, a sub 8 minute snake charm invested with a heritage as old as man and at one – or so it would appear -with the very elements, a mini operetta seduced with weeping strings, tip toeing harps, whispering wind recitals and sun scorched droning blazes. Deeply transcendental, the framing and the opposing sonic positioning of light and dark shades is breathless, one minute luxuriant and sultry the next brooding and ominous whilst equipped in a full on cinematic wrap that comes replete with Ofra Haza like motifs. For ‘yexter ra / derech hashem’ she teams up with fellow Alrealon-er John 3:16 to craft something that has the air and feel of reaching forth to a given point, to some hitherto karma like plateau. Much like those cavernously stilled melodic mosaics crafted by Yellow6, this straying melancholic mistral is sorrowfully inscribed in a free spirited aura. Side winding long abandoned and lost and forgotten civilisations, its opining overtures are draped and couched in ice cold detachment and bleached in a tearful introspection whose head hangs in the shadow of lost godspeed and the grails glories with both protagonists complimenting each other perfectly.