Published by Alessandro Violante on April 8, 2019
Immediacy, incisiveness, power, strength, freedom. A series of elements linked with each other, which could be used to describe Dionysian Rituals‘s debut album entitled Theatre of tragedy, that will be released by Glasgow-based Clan Destine Records on the 23th of April.
Immediacy
The immediacy is reached by the means of a simple and minimalist songwriting, freed from any gimmick. The album is composed by ten songs, in which obsessive techno rhythms are alternated with noisy sequences or atmospheric layers.
The album could be divided in two parts. In the first half, the musician forcefully pushes fast beats at full throttle, introduced by, more or less, short noisy (as in the titletrack) or atmospheric sequences (such as the purifying water in Eternal cycles, or as in Channeling the presence). In this last song, the mood of the album starts to stretch out already, although the approach to songwriting and the sound signature never lose immediacy.
Incisiveness
The use of a quite “minimalist” songwriting, which leaves the listener with a feeling of immediacy, adds a strong incisiveness to Theatre of tragedy’s songs, in particular to those put in the first half of the album. Such incisiveness recalls the urgency of punk music, enriched by the rough sound of the record and by the use of the tape format. This attitude is common to the whole catalog of the Glasgow-based label.
Even when, in the second half of the release, a bridge is built between the Modern world and the Classical one in which the myth of Dionysus was born, such incisiveness is never obfuscated by the use of tribal percussions and by suffused and mystical atmospheres.
Strength and power
Almost each Theatre of tragedy’s song is powerful and energetic, and it could be danced to, suiting very well a live dimension. Thanks to the drum machine sounds here used and to the rough production of the record, the beats have a strong old school feeling. The listener has no way out.
Freedom
Above all, Theatre of tragedy conveys freedom. Mythology narrates how the rituals dedicated to Dionysus, symbol of freedom from any kind of social rule and scheme, used to took place, and its participants were able to free themselves from all their limits, letting themselves go to extreme sex rituals and to a frenzied dance, as well as to animals sacrifice and eating.
The ritual was conceived as a moment for the participants to free their darkest urges, to express their human nature freely. During these rituals, the participants used to acquire great strength and resistance, and they didn’t feel pain nor physical limits anymore, as if they were divine creatures.
Dionysian Rituals succeeds, through ten songs, in expressing this feeling of flooding freedom to be governed by the lowest instincts.
The listener is literally immersed in a dimension light years far away from his daily life, a no man’s land in which he has the chance to express himself without constraints. Death & rebirth is a very good example of what said above – after a very short introduction, the listener finds himself in a storm of very fast, almost acid, rhythms, which allow the him to reach a bestial purity.
The same can be said for Sacred mask of the wild god. Just as the participant of the ritual, be him a satyr or a follower of Bacchus / Dionysus, frees his instinct while wearing his mask, the listener obtains the same effect through Dionysian Ritual’s music, feeling himself as a free man again, reaching a primordial kind of freedom which can’t be expressed in daily life.
Theatre of tragedy, works both as an antidote and as an invitation: an antidote to those oppressive social rules, “customs and traditions”, which everyone has to follow in order to maintain a certain moral status quo, and an invitation to liberate our inner primordial instincts when it’s possible to do it. Press play, wear your mask and join the thiasus. You’ll be rapt by it!
Label: Clan Destine Records
Rating: 8, 5