This Morn' Omina - 7 Years of Famine
This Morn' Omina's 7 Years of Famine is a tribal ritual, make no mistake. To listen to this record is to partake in a dark ceremony of ancient communion and mystical transformation. Sounding like a mix between the work of Vromb, Ah Cama-Sotz and the Hybryds, 7 Years of Famine is a late-night listening experience, best heard in a room lit by firelight and filled with sweating, writhing bodies. "One eYed Man" has a simple liturgy -- "in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" -- and, once you have learned the principle, you can gather round the ceremony stone with the rest of the attendants and lose yourself in the choral-driven techno beat.
The atmosphere of "The Other Side" evolves slowly, beginning as a tiny sandstorm blown across ancient dunes. Voices creep in, crepuscular wraiths drifting with the errant wind from the deep desert. This is the beginning of the seven part mystery ceremony, and "The Other Side" tugs at you like a fine sand pelting your skin, dusting you off in preparation for your entrance into the holy temple itself. Your first moment inside is the orgiastic "One eYed Man," a furiously pounding trance ritual which, by its very pace and insistent rhythms, will pull you into the center of the maelstrom. "The Burning Hand" spins away into the ecstatic realms of goa-trance, building from the sweaty communion of the previous track into an endless cycle of sound and light.
"Les Signes dans le Désert" is an atmospheric interlude, the soundtrack to your initiation into the Inner Mysteries, filled with exotic percussive instrumentation which highlight each step of your enlightenment into the whispered secrets of the sanctum. You are purified in a fiery ablution before the assembled mob during "(The) Fires Within," and, as your body disintegrates into ash and fiery spark, you are shuttled into a realm of expansive consciousness. This is "Currents" and your body may be lost, but your mind is allowed to swim into the open spaces between stars, listening to the solar wind and the endless echo of the centuries. The final act of the ceremony is your ascension and arrival at the "Monad."
7 Years of Famine is a spiritual whirlwind of techno, industrial, ambient, and rhythmic noise along with Middle Eastern and African rhythms, and everything is spun into a orgiastic nocturnal ceremony. It shouldn't work, and even as I describe it, it sounds impossible. But this is what This Morn' Omina is all about: making ritual music out of any element which they find useful. They don't cling to conventions; they laugh at genre boundaries. They are building powerful ceremonies to forgotten pantheons, striving to shake the sand from buried statues and to ring the heavens with their sound. If gothic dance clubs are the modern temples of the Eleusinian Mysteries, then This Morn' Omina is the High Priest and 7 Years of Famine is his holy ritual. Highly recommended.
This Morn' Omina
Ant-Zen Records [2002]
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