Rancor:Succour the new album by Chiaro Oscuro probably has the best artwork of any album I've been sent this year, coming with a 12" high quality book full of artwork to accompany the beguiling music, as well as an evocative poster that grabbed my attention even before I heard the music.
Chiara Oscuro is the musical art project of Chiara Viscomi who collaborated with Skot Brown, Tom Wasinger, Daniel Knowles, Danielle Goldsmith, Eric Glause, Marta Sologni, Joe Kuta and Heba Kady. The album was recorded mainly in and around California, apart from In The Manner Of Serpents and La Perdita that were recorded at The Tank a converted 7 storey steel water tank in rural Colorado, that is now a recording arts space, it of course has unique acoustics.
The album opens with Scorched Season an atmospheric tonal piece with shimmering percussion and choral backing vocals, a main operatic vocal that is full of pain and sorrow for the desperate days of the last few years, the vocals sit somewhere between Diamanda Galas and Lisa Gerard, they are totally captivating.
In The Manner Of Serpents is the first song recorded at The Tank in Rangely Colorado that helps to give this poem a ghostly haunted feel, as the resonance of recording within a 7 storey high tank, adds cadences that would otherwise be impossible to create, the spectral modern classical tonal shifts, on her specially adapted accordion, as her voice arches over everything, the stark beauty becomes apparent, while evoking Diamanda Galas' Wild Women With Steak Knives in places. The tonal bass reverberations echo around my speakers becoming a thunderstorm, that if turned up you will feel in your feet as much as your head.
Her Life-Giving Caresses has ethereal bewitching vocals wafting across the range I'd guess from the Rancho Rivera where it was recorded, siren voices calling out across time and space, to heal and give life, layered and looped vocals surround you, as if you're in a grand cathedral, as the voices rain down, wavering between Lisa Gerard style beauty and the mysticism of Ofra Hazra. The looped voices speed up until they become disorientating, fighting with cataclysms of bass drums, as if you are listening from inside the beating heart.
Narcissus And Echo takes the ancient themes, exploring them through carefully chosen samples, radio frequency crackles, hums, deep bass rumbles, as you keep falling in love with yourself.
Fishwife has almost Stina Nordensturm style whispered poetics, crying in pain, surrounded by echoing choral angels, we hear the Fishwife's tale unfolding, as the waves crash against the rocks once more, the music reflects the pain and distress at the heart of the tale, becoming all-encompassing resonating elongated notes. Before the voices babble in the background, as the doom-laden strings begin the slow march towards damnation, building into the tempest's heart.
Stars In Her Hands feel ephemeral, as this slow piano led poem rises and falls, enticing as it evokes Bauhaus' Crowds through the piano lines, although with a less bitter message, hope is within reach no matter how afraid she may be.
La Perdita has a never-ending echoing around The Tank tone, that Chiara improvises her ghostly vocals over, the vibrations coming through meditatively, working on healing waves, to get lost within stretching bodies among the sine waves, lifting falling echoing back, calling across ages, plaintive through the stratosphere sub structural yearnings.
Hiraeth is an improvised piano piece, somewhere between John Cage and John Cale's soundtracks for Eat or The Unknown, starkly beautiful.
Rancor at the tenor of our times, deep bass grunting's, tonal shifts, disturbing disruptions to normality, whatever normality might be. The piano seeks to find less angry shores. But we are in the 2020's Rancor is all around us, as the rotting carcass of humanity does what it can to destroy everything once more. The bell has started to toll.
The album closes with Your Judgements Fortify My Resolve, to hopefully keep making such beguiling artistic statements as this album undoubtedly is. As the voices slowly rise, allowing those that choose to judge us be truly judged themselves.
Find out more at https://www.nefariousindustries.com/collections/chiaraoscuro-rancor-succor https://www.facebook.com/chiaraoscuromusic
