“Music Appreciation” is the name of a short horror movie by Lucas Milhomen that hasn’t been released yet. During the covid lockdown the Berlin-based metal band Lares were asked to collaborate on the movie by creating their own version of the main soundtrack theme written by the composer Eylül Biçe, and to perform it in the movie.
The name of the song that Lares made is “10 Hygiea“, and we’re presenting it today through a surreal video shot and edited by Paolo Lombardi that makes use of live footage from Lares‘ recent concert at Reset Club in Berlin.
The song is a stand-alone single, but it also serves as a wake-up call for people who have been waiting for a new record by this distinctive German group — and a new record will indeed arrive this coming spring (we have some details about that after the presentation of “10 Hygiea”.
Lares have provided this explanation about the song:
The title comes from a major asteroid discovered in 1849, named after the pagan goddess of health and represented by a serpent drinking from a bowl, a serpent that is also part of the Lares imaginary.
The song’s concept is about the constant relation between celestial bodies, human embodiment, the cycle of death and rebirth in deep space and the visceral communion between them that transcends the ordinary and delves into the macabre. There is an echo that reverberates through the abyss, a dimension where the boundaries between nightmare and reality blur.
Bookended by wailing chants and simple beats that sound like primitive hand-drums, the song manages to be both deeply chilling and frighteningly exhilarating before it ends, and it’s intense in both phases.
In the opening phase the music slowly flows like strange cosmic waters, eerily glimmering and strikingly effervescent, over the deep drone of the bass and the sharp pop of the snare.
But these are waters capable of pulling a body beneath them, where murky grit begins to obscure the sight and suffocate the soul (or you might imagine the extinction of blazing celestial spheres). When the reverberating vocals arrive, they’re shattering, like excruciating howls wrapped in sandpaper that would draw blood when scraped across flesh.
In the second phase the music unexpectedly erupts, as if the gloom of sorrow has boiled over into madness, or like an attack of things that dwell below in those choking flows through the void, or like a nova event. The drums blast, the fretwork becomes an abrasive frenzy. And high above, those shining melodies flow again, but seem now to wail in agony, their splendor most dire.
Throughout, there’s something hallucinatory about this song, even nightmarish (as the band have described), and the video effects draw upon that part of the experience, accelerating and slowing the band members’ movements and blurring them. The visuals suit the music very well.
For those of you unfamiliar with Lares, this is a good time to become familiar. The idea of their name originated from an archaic Roman Etruscan word which means “heroes” and “demons“ — “a faceless god, an entity that could be molded into any desired shape, believed to observe, protect and influence fate”.
Across their previous releases, which include 2017’s Mask of Discomfort and 2020’s Towards Nothingness (you can find those here), they’ve experimented with a changing amalgam of sludge, doom, and black metal, strongly influenced by psychedelia from the ’60s and ’70s and ’90s grunge/noise.
As mentioned earlier, they will be releasing a new album in the spring of this year through Argonauta Records. Created in a live recording session in their rehearsal studio, it’s a concept album named Et In Arcadia Ego.
The new album was mixed by Luca Leprotti (David di Donatello Awards for Best Sound on “Volevo Nascondermi” by Giorgio Dritti) and mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege studio in Portalnd OR (SUNN O))), Sleep, Magma, Obituary).
To keep abreast of more about the album as it emerges, follow the locations linked below.
https://www.argonautarecords.com/
https://argonautarecords.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ArgonautaRecords/
https://www.facebook.com/laresband/
https://www.instagram.com/laresmetal/