Distorded Void is the Russian label bringing you the new album, “Trakl Trauma Tracks”, by Eumourner, an Italian musician.
Eumourner has 6 tracks to convey his historical story, set in World War 1, all in the form of music. Someone commented the album cover was creepy…. but then that is what happens when we exhume the dead.
“Track I. Der Schlaf” is like moving into darkness and the unknown. The sound scape builds and undulates with impending doom. Unseen and unnatural creatures chitter as a voiceover announces details of the Great War.
Cuckoo clocks and chimes bring on “Track II. Stunderlied”. It s0 the feeling of desolation and swirling loss in a terrible fairytale with wind swept whistles intermingling with musical box tunes, until the mood changes and becomes more insistent.
Like the muffled horns of Valhalla blasting into the void heralds “Track III. Neil Krupp und Krieg”. This could be the rumbling of giant mortar cannons on the Eastern front, the orders to move forward into a hell never seen before by mankind. A machine churning through men and forever changing them and sirens sound marking the hostilities.
“Track IV. Grodek” is the longest track at over 10 minutes long. It is not so much the sounds of violence but rather, the spirits of men leaving their tortured bodies, or at least this is what it feels like to me. The terrible aftermath left on a battlefield, which few forget amd even fewer wish to repeat. The lament of ghosts of the fallen, crying for what they have lost.
Birds chirp and maybe chimes or cow bells in the distance. We hear the words of Georg Trakl‘s poem “All Roads Lead To Black Decay” wavering over this piece, “Track V. Landschaft”. It sounds so calm and yet there is a sudden burst of a gatling gun to break the serenity.
“Track VI. Die Ungebornen Enkel” closes this album. It is the void filling with near distant rage and cacophany with pieces of violin flitting in and out before a plateau, decending into unearthly screams of that which sounds not human. Oppressive and swelling. The character, Trakl’s descent into madness, with his overbearing feeling of depression due to his inability to cope surrounded by the damaged and massacred, fueled by his overdose of cocaine, pulling him into the depths of hell. It finishes with the innocence of children singing and the music box.
For the uninitiated, Georg Trakl, born in Salzburg, Austria was a poet who suffered from depression for most of his adult life and found refuge in the army life as a trained pharmacist, until the beginning of the Great War where he found himself serving in the Austro-Hungarian army.
While in the Battle of Grodek, against the Imperial Russian Army, he was forced to look after approxiamately 90 wounded soldiers, which overwhelmed him and Lieutenant Trakl attemped to shoot himself, however was thwarted and resulted in his being hospitalized. Not long after this he was found dead of a cocaine overdose.
Eumourner has taken a small piece of dark history and put it to dark ambient and experiemental music, to paint you a life cut short in a time of war due to mental breakdown, even using the poets own style of evoking spirits in the quiet recesses of what is not said. It is an evocative soundscape on a grand scale.
https://distortedvoid.bandcamp.com/album/trakl-trauma-tracks
Onyx Music Reviews 