OPHE: Somnium Nocte Mendaciis (BLACK METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

In the shadow of Demande à la poussière and Område proliferates the secret garden of Bargnatt XIX that he cultivates alone and that conveys the strange name of Ophe. Strange is the qualifier that sticks to the skin of this project that indulges in the bizarre and the unknown. Strangeness of a name thus but also of titles of albums in Latin. Strangeness always of visuals which question more than they provide answers.

Finally, the strangeness of a sound material which also proves to be propitious to all interpretations, to all visions. This is what makes the music so fascinating, so disturbing too. If "Litteras Ad Tristia Maestrum Solitude" surveyed a genre which does not exist yet, its successor does not offer hardly more beacons to cling to. Once again, the reference points are missing to define a maelstrom with the appearance of an orgiastic pandemonium where so many influences and miasmas merge that it seems vain to try to describe them in detail. One thing is certain however, Bargnatt is not getting better. How could it be the case when one is able to give birth to such a work whose listening has nothing of a distraction, a frightful nightmare, suffocating in its hallucinated excess.

Started by an intro nevertheless (and already) eaten by ambient effluences which ooze a (still) threatening strangeness, this second exploration plunges the listener from the start in the most absolute madness. For twelve minutes, 'Odalisk Incursio Sub Methaqualone' is nothing but noises, screams, crushed emotions, brutal eruptions of violence in a hideous landscape. No light nor buoy to cling to in order to escape this feverish torrent, except, maybe, this metronomic rhythm, the only familiar glow in this alienated ocean.

More conventional (everything is relative) is fortunately 'Squirting Cadaveribus', which scrapes the guts of a post black metal that the sickly vocals of Bargnatt XIX corrode however with a contaminating leprosy. In fact, all along, "Somnium Nocte Mendaciis" leads us astray, seeming at times to want to charm us, to put us to sleep during the (falsely) dreamy 'Decem Vicibus II', in order to finally better grab us between this disturbing 'Partum Chimerae', the short and vitiated 'Noctis Ames', swollen with a noisy hatred, or a 'Flores Vere A Peccatis', streaked with black emanations. Broken up or even deconstructed and not answering to any hook, each complaint escapes the usual constructions, following a flayed progression, bruised in its flesh of which only their creator perhaps possesses the key (or not).

One guesses a work born in pain and which calls for a penetration quite as painful and difficult in that the limits of the audible are pushed back, until the terminal stage of a sound cancer which gangrene all that surrounds it, devours any trace of life. Ophe remains an enigma, demiurge of a protean and elusive art which, according to the consecrated formula, cannot leave indifferent. - Official website

OPHE

SOMNIUM NOCTE MENDACIIS

MY KINGDOM MUSIC

BLACK METAL