‘Death Of The Bull’ by Darja Kazimira & Dagmar Gertot
In the realms of music, it’s easy to find a host of stale and conventional material turned out under the hashtags of ‘experimantal’ or ‘occult’. So when something truly visionary, breath takingly visceral comes along, we like to share.
Taking pagan fertility rites as a starting point, Darja Kazimira & Dagmar Gertot have constructed a narrative that witnesses the collapse of the natural order and the end of an age. The breadth and scope of the work is mind-blowing and the results are quite unlike anything we’ve ever heard before.
Darja Kazimira (Latvia) & Dagmar Gertot (Russia) are engaged in experimental art practices based on the research of various funeral and initiation rituals of the peoples of the world, with emphasis on the territory of the Balkans and ancient Greece. With a solid foundation of musical and classical archaeology, religious studies, mythology, philosophy and thanatology, they have sought to create an entirely new ritualised imaginal space. Through improvisation and glossolalia, a new mythic realm is born.
For us, music is an opportunity to articulate a myth, to make tangible imaginary space, to deform the environment through sound, shifting its stable temporal and local criteria.
With a mix of various ethnic vocal traditions, extreme and academic vocal practices, and a radical approach to traditional notions of folk music in its truest sense, ‘Death Of The Bull’ is undoubtedly highly demanding of the listener. While many albums can be termed immersive, the mythic-space and otherworldliness of ‘Death Of The Bull’ holds the listener to it’s rough hide and drags them into the underworld.
For those who seek the most unusual and challenging of sounds, we can’t recommend ‘Death Of The Bull’ enough. This is not music as entertainment. Rather it is music as practice, both spiritual and academic, and is worthy of investigation by all who seek their paths outside the box of modernity.
Available from Aurora Borealis Recordings and all good independent record stores.
Occulture Research Group 