Luca Turilli's Symphonia Ignus Divinus semi-review/experience thing

[davidn]

Nova Genesis (Ad Splendorem Angeli Triumphantis): Choirs split into male and female chanting passages from Psalm 68 and the Apocalypse of St John. Duke Nukem speaks Latin.

Il Cigno Nero: Starts off sounding like it's going to be slow-paced but quickly turns fast and choir-supported as well, with high notes from Alessandro Conti singing quite beautifully, but I have no idea what about because it's in Italian. The last passages of this, with heavenly choirs and trumpets, sound like what I'd expect from the final song on any album by a reasonable person.

Rosenkreuz (The Rose and the Cross): This was one of the singles released before, so I thought I would be prepared for this, but the choir of the apocalypse is still here and is now joined by a very active string section which gets its own solo.

Anahata: The first track not to feature any Latin. But what it does have is a glorious John Williams-styled orchestral beginning that turns into a mid-paced song without quite so many choirs (then again, this isn't saying much) but with an equally pompous horn section.

Il Tempo Degli Dei: The booklet quotes Jesus Christ. (Equally applicable: "The booklet quotes. Jesus Christ!") Like Il Cigno Nero, this is entirely in Italian, it's upbeat and wondrous and I have no idea what it's saying.

One Ring to Rule them All: Gollum!!! I can't tell if it's the Andy Serkis version from the films or just an impression of it, but it's Gollum and his precioussss. I seriously thought that this song was in Orcish or some other made up language, but it's actually entirely in English (the first track to have this honour) with enough layers on top of it to disguise it as such. It's what you'd expect, seven minutes of being absolutely stunned by the excess of it all.

Notturno: I think we're actually calming down a bit here. By this album's standards this is a fairly low-key performance, still full of orchestrations but slower and dare I say it, calmer.

Prometheus: No, that was just to make you think you were safe. We've already covered this - the lyrics hide a code that somebody managed to work out a part of, and that's that the pre-chorus lyrics encrypt a binary number that works out as 81, which the explanation tells us is the Perfectum Numerum Quem Noviem Novies Multiplacata Componiunt and invites us to use this as a starting point to decode the rest of the album. You absolute wankers.

King Solomon and the 72 Names of God: I seriously think this is in Yiddish or Hebrew or something. Possibly both. I don't even know if I can make intelligent commentary any more. Very technical track. I'll need to listen to this another twelve times before I can even process it.

Yggdrassil: There's so... much of everything. I don't know.

Of Michael the Archangel and Lucifer's Fall Part II: Codex Nemesis:
Chapter I: Codex Nemesis Alpha Omega: You...
Chapter II: Symphonia Ignis Divinus (The Quantum Gate Revealed): ...absolute...
Chapter III: The Astral ConvergenceL ...wankers.
Chapter IV: The Divine Fire of the Archangel: What?!
Chapter V: Of Psyche and Archetypes (System Overloaded): I seriously can't do this any more.

Thundersteel (Cinematic version): It is a bonus track.

You absolute wankers.

Ten out of ten.

Comments

I'll just crosspost this here

[premchaia.livejournal.com]

Ad splendorem Angheli triumphantis!

I feel like I have an unfair advantage due to being able to pick through enough Italian and Latin to make out sentences and the occasional stanza here and there. Also, well, the first Premchaia had a history of writing papers about Mahler song cycles and Beethoven masses back at university…

That said, this is after one full listen-through, and I realized to my dismay halfway through that I should probably have been taking notes (including, incidentally, of the notes themselves) from the very beginning, so I'm probably not going to keep my advantage.

I'm mostly treating the album as a single performance in several pieces, rather than a suite of individual songs. I don't know whether that makes a difference. The theme of the techknowledgeical transcendence of humanity is pretty well-covered (and hardly hidden, as the Prometheus is right in the title).

First half

[premchaia.livejournal.com]

1. “Nova Genesis (Ad Splendorem Angeli Triumphantis)”: I am irrationally pleased that they pronounced “Alpha et Omega” almost exactly as I hoped they would after glancing through the songbook.
2. “Il Cigno Nero” (“The Black Swan”) has a wonderful lyric and is one of my two favorite tracks for that and the elegant vocal performance. ♪ Vola o mio cigno nero! ♪
3. “Rosenkreuz”: haven't done enough research on the Rosicrucians, but I recognize the basic story arc.
4. “Anahata”: this one I had to look up the title of because I hadn't heard that name before. It's an… interesting interpretation of the idea, seemingly trying to mix the Vedic form with the Judeo-Christian form.
5. “Il Tempo Degli Dei” (“The Time of Gods”) is a close second to “Il Cigno Nero” on lyric and vocal counts. It doesn't quite make it into my favorites-set because the horns and strings in the chorus strike me as cluttered. (Much of the album uses very dense instrumentation, of course, but something about this rendition didn't work as well for me; it might be my irrational tetchiness at synth strings.) I did like the bridge with the narration + piano.
6. “One Ring to Rule Them All”: there is the Black Speech chant from the One Ring, isn't there? So it's not entirely English. It's not bad, but it feels a little out of place compared to the rest of the album. Probably my least favorite.
7. “Notturno”: very nice vocal overlap in the chorus and prechorus parts, nice emotional curvature—especially with the sort of “quadratic” structure (Cartesian product of {thesis, antithesis} and {foreground, background}) in the first half of the chorus.

(I had to take an intermission after this to get some water.)

Second half

[premchaia.livejournal.com]

8. “Prometheus”: a straightforward “empathic melisma” song, as I first hear it, though there's probably more layers I haven't picked up (in particular it follows the “Alpha Omega” flow which I haven't tried to reconstruct yet). While I can't speak definitively because I saw people explicating it before I had a chance to listen, the “code” in the prechorus sounded even more obvious than I expected when I actually listened to it: it's not even like they were hidden in disparate sections of the song—they're overlaid right on top of each other with exact lockstep phase correspondence and very low gram-frequency interference, so decoding the positions of the words is just… the thing to do, really.
9. “King Solomon and the 72 Names of God”: I have nearly zero experience with Hebrew mythology (I can recognize chunks as Hebrew), so I expect to have to pick up a book on the basics of Kabbalah before getting anywhere with this one, though I do recognize “Hashem Shekhinah” as “God indwelling”.
10. “Yggdrasil”: my other favorite track, being a nice (if a bit fragmented) retelling of (mostly) the myth of Odin and the runes.
11. “Of Michael the Archangel and Lucifer's Fall Part II: Codex Nemesis”: I am irrationally pleased that the melodic construction of the stanza beginning “Draco magnus est proiectus” was almost exactly of the style I thought it would be after glancing through the songbook. I suspect several of the motifs are relevant callbacks that suggest a microcosm of the rest of the album, but I didn't take enough notes, and that could be pushing it a bit. And I still haven't reconstructed the “Alpha Omega” flow.

My reaction to seeing the Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis Trismegisti shoved into the middle of the songbook: I know him! A little bit. Well, I wouldn't say I'm an awesome priest of him or anything but we've had the occasional incorporeal conversation. (Well, I know him as dhwty rather than Hermes Trismegistus, but close enough I think given the relative promiscuity of syncretism in that period.)

Re: Second half

[davidn]

This is incredible, thank you for sharing all of that :) I still have many, many listens to go before I really get a handle on anything that's really happening here.

[dj omnimaga (from livejournal.com)]

I haven't listened to that particular album yet, but I hope that it's as good as Luca Turilli's earlier work. My main problem with Rhapsody of Fire and to a lesser extent Luca Turilli's Rhapsody is that their albums made after 2006 don't seem to live up to the standards of their earlier works. Maybe it's because they changed directions when they changed names but I haven't liked any of their albums ever since (except a few songs).

The other problem is that their label or management is stuck in the late 90's, pre-Napster-era mentality of selling music: They seem to think that it's still OK in 2015, in this era of illegal music downloads, to charge $30 for a CD album with 7 songs, when every other power metal bands charge about $10-20. They need to catch up with times.

[davidn]

Well, this new band (I'm not even sure if you can call it a new band if it has the same name and most of the same people in it) is very different direction from the original Rhapsody as well... as you can deduce from just the cover and tracklist, it's absurdly pretentious - very different from the pure power metal of early Rhapsody. It's much more operatic/cinematic-inspired - if you've heard Ascending to Infinity, then it's like that turned up to even greater levels. It's all undeniably incredibly composed and realized, but perhaps not for everyone.