Cyclobe - Sulphur-Tarot-Garden [Phantomcode - 2014]Sulphur, Tarot and Garden of Luxor are experimental Super-8 shorts made by the British avant garde film director Derek Jarman in the early seventies. Working within limited financial means, these phantasmagorical sequences of astral imaginings lacked a soundtrack, so would be projected in the director's studio accompanied by the sounds from various tapes in Jarman's collection. Four decades later, Cyclobe, the UK's most magical musicians, decided to add their own sonic interpretations to underscore these rarely seen ritualistic scenes: dark figures scrying into mirrors (Sulphur), a magus performing a reading (Tarot) and a confusion of people, pyramids and sphinxes (Garden of Luxor). And, arguably, there's no one better qualified for the job - indeed, Cyclobe's Stephen Thrower befriended Jarman in the early eighties and contributed to Coil's soundtrack of the director's mesmeric love story, The Angelic Conversation, in the mid-eighties. The music presented here was first broadcast (and sold as a limited CDr) just before Cyclobe's sensational UK live debut, as part of Antony's Meltdown Festival in 2012, where the films were screened with their new soundtracks intact. Sulphur, at fifteen minutes the longest piece here, has the power to send showers of chills through its listeners in a similar way to The Remote Viewer, one of Coil's most affecting works. This is, in part, due to it sharing Cliff Stapleton and Ossian Brown's masterful hurdy gurdy playing and Michael J York's arcane woodwinds. Their exquisite confluence of rough textured, reedy mid tones cut straight to the psyche in a deliciously hypnotic cycle. It starts with simple, slow tremelodic tones woozily circling around John Contreras' darting gypsy cello, and is gradually joined by all manner of subtle and deftly crafted electro-acoustic layers to form a beguiling oneiromantic vortex, both eerie and seductive. Tarot opens with elusive vocals, similar to that on 'How Acla Disappeared From Earth' from Cyclobe's last album (2010's Wounded Galaxies...), before forming a startling theme. Thick strokes of hurdy gurdy and strings soar purposefully, angrily even, under and over arch analog electronic manifestations, gaining strength with each attempt. The questing, almost frightening, intensities perfectly portray a master of the dark arts wrestling with the future. Garden starts in a subdued mode with a cool analog bass tone carrying what sounds like radio signals from space along with much slower, more majestic, glassy synth tones to form a disorienting introspective parade of melancholy. This somewhat sinister edge gilded with a profound sense of wonder can be found across all Cyclobe releases and makes their unique music perfectly suited for cinema, where even mainstream movies adopt avant garde musical manoeuvres to imbue their product with sensual depths. But, without Jarman's spellbound idiosyncratic imagery the potencies of Cyclobe's intricate sound-worlds are perhaps even stronger, lacking the otherwise welcome distraction of Jarman's beautifully convoluted dream visions. Sulphur-Tarot-Garden is not a difficult engagement requiring deep listening to mine the magic from the minimalism though; on the contrary, it is a wholly accessible and affecting piece of modern classical composition that captivates and charms from start to finish. Russell Cuzner
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