Tertium Non Data - Hers Is Blood
Tertium Non Data is Latin for "the third is not given," an alchemical reference to the combination of two unique elements to form a third element. How this transformation occurs is an occult mystery, an unexplained reaction the chemistry of which has never been fully illuminated. While the basic idea of this partnership is not lost on the savvy music listener who appreciates the hit and miss nature of celebrity collaborations, it is the occult nature -- the unknown mystery of secret processes -- of this effort which permeates this project. Tertium Non Data is grounded by John Bergin (once of Trust Obey and c17h19no3) and Bret Smith (who mainly records under the moniker of Caul, but also did some work in Trust Obey with Bergin), and their alchemical creation is an operatic industrial soundtrack replete with theatrical ambience. The third element rising from this mixture is given voice by a number of guest musicians. On Hers Is Blood the majesty is supplied by jazz vocalist Pam Bricker (recently heard on Thievery Corporation's The Mirror Conspiracy).
Hers Is Blood opens with "I Know You Will," a drifting lament anchored by Pam Bricker's sorrowful voice, surrounded by swells of violins rising plaintively out of a white mist. This is a heart's last request, a woman's plea for company as she lies dying. The entire album is ensnared in this instant upon the lip of passage, caught up at the cusp of death. The lurching beat and wandering melody of "Final Resting Place: Snow" is the relentless approach of the crows towards the dead man of the song, the scratched vocals their voices as they collect about the body. After the monstrous assault of "Box-Inside," Pam Bricker returns with the mid-tempo "Low," a woman's fearful frozen instant of abandonment that is enveloped with beats and subterranean rumbles and a string section that both soothes and terrifies. She cries out under the boot-heel attack of "Hers is Blood." "Angelbox Closed" is a pine box on a wind-swept cliff that, at your touch, shatters into a cutting storm of blood-seeking dark birds. The record closes with a cover of Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks," wherein Jimmy Page's guitar and Robert Plant's vocals are replaced by Ms. Bricker's soulful voice and a cavernous bass guitar -- a combination makes the increases the menace of the black waters beyond the levee.
Hers Is Blood is not a happy record, but it is an honest record: an honest collection of songs about fear and loss and pain and death. Thoroughly empathic, resolutely orchestral and appropriately operatic, Hers Is Blood is the scene of a passionate struggle, an imprinted memory wherein one faces the penultimate moment of blood, where one struggles at the foot of death for belief and love and life.
Tertium Non Data
Crowd Control [2001]
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