This Morn' Omina - Le Serpent Blanc - Le Serpent Rouge
This Morn' Omina have a tough job facing them: how to top the impressive nocturnal ritual record of 7 Years of Famine. I've been resistant to listening to their new two-CD record, Le Serpent Blanc - Le Serpent Rouge, for two reasons: (1) I'm not entirely sure such an improvement is possible; and (2), I'm not sure my desire for TMO to knock my socks off again won't get in the way of appreciating this record for being different.
Because it is. I can tell you that right now. No track on Le Serpent Blanc - Le Serpent Rouge stomps with the same Matrix-style rave-up fervor that so filled "One-Eyed Man" from 7 Years of Famine. Which is probably okay; you only really need one track like that in your life.
More sinuous and more sensual than their previous record, Le Serpent Blanc - Le Serpent Rouge is the beginning of a new trilogy for This Morn' Omina. "This is ritual musick, this is Nyan I" is the description I am handed along with this record and, as I pass along this information to you, you should treat it as a pass key to the environment into which This Morn' Omina transports you.
The four-on-the-floor tracks of Le Serpent Blanc -- "Epoch," "Suneater," "(the) Ninth Key," "The Immutable Sphere" and "Uraeus" -- aren't as world-beat techno as Juno Reactor's work, but they do have that same flair for border-breaking goa trance that Ben Watkins does. "Epoch," after a brief intro of tiny cymbals and atmospherics breaks into the beats and takes off on its snake-rousing journey. "Suneater" shuttles back and forth between a single line of spoken dialogue and a wordless male chorus for a minute or two -- giving you a chance to catch your breath -- before inducing a Kundalini serpent awakening. "Taliesin" is a insidious dance, the serpent wriggling up through the vertebrae of your spine. "Return to the end and the beginning," a female voice whispers, revealing the Ouroborian nature of the ritual. You dance to lose yourself; you dance to resurrect yourself. (And I love the imbedded joke of "tail sin" in the name of the track.) The ritual of Le Serpent Blanc is euphoric, an orgiastic dance ritual which extends into infinity.
In contrast, Le Serpent Rouge is a mental journey, an ambient and internalized excursion into ritual headspace. Mika, This Morn' Omina's chief conspirator, explains the contrast: "Le Serpent Blanc and Le Serpent Rouge are the antithesis of one another -- as simple as the serpent's split tongue or left and right, positive and negative, good and evil -- whereas the former delves deeper into the cause and effect of saccadic movement, the latter is of an introspective nature."
Le Serpent Rouge concerns itself with the movement of the serpent through a strange French zodiac riddle poem. Mika makes no attempt to explain the mystery -- in fact, he claims to have no solution to the puzzle -- but rather presents the 13 tracks of Le Serpent Rouge as an impression of the text. Each track on this second disc is named after one of the zodiac markers with the extra track being named for the serpent -- "Ophiochus." The tracks are shorter -- they range from just over a minute to five or so -- and are fraught with atmosphere. "Taurus" is a subterranean rumble as backdrop to the movement of several initiates with rain sticks and percussion who keep tempo for the High Priestess invocation as delivered by Poly Esther. The 100 seconds of "Virgo" is spent spiraling up a waterspout, turning and turning in an upward flowing rush of sound. Ms. Poly Esther whispers over a tiny plucked melody and an equally thin wisp of synthesized sound for the 68 seconds of "Libra." "Sagittarius" grooves like the movement of the desert air just as the sun colors the sand and sky with new light. The percussion instrumentation of "Ophiochus" sounds like snakes, and the regular rhythm of the guitar chords makes me think of the parallel tracks in the sand left by sidewinders. Wave patterns. It's all about the repetition of cycles.
I've lost my preconceptions somewhere along the way -- they've either been shaken free during the serpentine ritual musick of the white serpent side or been absorbed back into my body during the introspective navel-gazing of the white serpent riddle. Either way, I'm under This Morn' Omina's spell. Le Serpent Blanc - Le Serpent Rouge seduces with its insistent serpentine way. Whether you lean towards the light or the dark -- whether you prefer the physical or the spiritual in your music -- you will find a rich narcotic dose in This Morn' Omina. Highly recommended.
This Morn' Omina
Ant-Zen Records [2003]
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