Ah Cama-Sotz - La Procesión de la Sangre
The work of Ah Cama-Sotz is steeped in medieval terror. Named after a Mexican bat which uses its long claws to decapitate its prey, Ah Cama-Sotz seeks to engender a similar sort of nocturnal apprehension through music. Herman aka Dr. Blood, the singular vision behind Ah Cama-Sotz, has a fascination with dance and classical music. He crushes these two genres with mortar and pestle into a fine powder before pouring them into a cauldron filled with crumbled shards of ritual imagery, spiced with his consternation about the decline of modern society. The result is a concoction that is part industrial, part orchestral, and part dance-floor rumble -- but entirely sinister and dark. It is the crimson caught in the silver cup by the hooded occultist who waits at the base of the eager guillotine. This is the draught that Torquemada relishes after a full day of whipping heretics.
The beginning of La Procesión de la Sangre -- "[Blood] intro.agnus dei" -- is a minute of lost voices and cascading cymbals, cut-up instances of fog and memory. It is a miasma which rises out of the stones of ancient crypts and which drifts along slow dead water. "The Corridors of the Unseen" catapults us further into this dark and cryptic atmosphere, the hard electronic beats driving us forward. "Ko-brah" weaves about your brain like a hypnotized serpent, its coils swaying back and forth, its scales flickering in mesmerizing patterns. One can see the progression of ideas and musical intentions with the powerful rhythms which pervade this track as Ah Cama-Sotz continues the trend introduced in 2001's Mantra EP -- an evolution towards more charged and more beat-oriented work. Indeed, the evolution extends to a reconsideration of Mantra's "Hungrr-ah," a remix which takes the original's driving rhythms and adds several layers of sound effects and vocal samples to it.
But there are still the deep atmospheres which resonate back to the earlier Terra Infernalis. "Sabbat IV [hexen]" is here, continued from Mantra and the Excramentos Diabolicos 7-inch on Klanggalerie, and it is full of sonorous voices, distant drones of vibrating stone monoliths, and the oppressive atmosphere of a thousand chanting acolytes. "El Último Sacrificio" is haunted by a live wire, a hissing arc of noise which undercuts the Gregorian-style voices echoing throughout a spectral cathedral.
Split into two parts, the last tracks of La Procesión de la Sangre move away from the discourse on blood and are a ritual called "Lughnassadh." Filled with violins, flutes and lonely voices, the rite seems to be pulled from the English highlands. "Lughnassadh" is a rhythmic ceremony, an initiation of the innocent into the practices of dark magicks -- lessons to be learned through an oral tradition of beat and sound. If there are dance clubs for witches, you will hear these tracks pounding over the sound systems there.
There is a history to blood, a thick, visceral trail which leads from me and you back to the first monkey to ever pick up a femur and use it on another monkey. It is inside all of us, pulsing and moving. Ah Cama-Sotz's La Procesión de la Sangre is a historical journey along this route, a reminder that we are never too far removed from the violence of our predecessors. There is something horrible and yet sensual about blood, and La Procesión de la Sangre captures that dichotomy well.
Ah Cama-Sotz
Hands Productions [2002]
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