Ashes of a Numb Day

Description

Ashes of a Numb Day, Sopraterra’s second album, sets fire to our assumptions of early music, utilising bold new interpretations of medieval and renaissance notation, but only as part of a wider vision that crosses the boundaries between times and genres. A single-string bass lays down a churning drone. From a maelstrom of noise, blasts of melody escape on double-recorder and heavily distorted violin. Extra-musical sound is arranged and layered with painstaking precision, acoustic percussion used as ballast against electronic harshness. There are elements of industrial noise and the intense gloom of darkwave and goth, and a looseness to their world-building not unlike dungeon synth—part historical, part fictional and part fantastical. This complicated tonal dance is best illustrated in the album’s cover, where two archetypes, a warrior and a jester, have melted together into a surreal grotesque. Much like the album itself it is at once menacing and playful, unsettling and irresistible.