Yrsel is a collaboration involving the French musician Julien Louvet, best known for his experimental black metal project The Austrasian Goat, and the Swedish dark ambient musician C-J Larsgarden, a.k.a. Ondo. These two artists have some shared history already, having released a split CD-R on Burning Emptiness in 2007, but Requiem For The Three Kharites, recorded in 2007-2008, is the first fruit of this new collaboration. Before discussing Yrsel’s music, some explanation of that title seems called for. The Three Kharites are better known as the Three Graces, the ancient Greek goddesses of grace, beauty, pleasure, and human creativity, associated above all with the arts. As such, their ‘Requiem’ implies a valediction for the death of culture and art – as the label description puts it, a ‘requiem for the loss of culture in an ever spiralling material world’. It doesn’t feel to me like art is quite dead yet – at least, not to judge by the pile of review CDs I’m constantly buried under – but this message of cultural pessimism and decline sets the tone for a very dark work.

Requiem For The Three Kharites contains three long tracks, each one referring to one of the three Graces, who are Aglaea (‘beauty’), Euphrosyne (‘mirth’), and Thaleia  (‘cheerfulness’). The 20-minute ‘The Last Visions Of Aglaea’ opens with several minutes of massive waves of rumbling downtuned guitar, shot through with sinister black metal whispers, something like Attila’s or Malefic’s work with Sunn O))), and distant fragments of discordant tremolo guitar fading into the brooding dronescape. At this point, the track is dominated by Julien Louvet’s vocals and guitar, with a bleak, grey, ambient black metal feel quite similar to SunnO))), TenHornedBeast, or some of Hail’s or L’Acéphale long ambient compositions, but C-J Larsgarden’s contribution of ambient electronica assumes greater prominence as the track progresses, with the guitar dying away to leave only a low synth pulse overlaid with sibilant whispers. The guitar is reintroduced around the halfway point, as a series of disjointed atonal scrapes and squeals of feedback, then it joins forces with a repetitive two-note minor-key piano phrase, with faintly echoing traces of eerie ritual chanting and muffled ambient beats just discernible in the background. The guitar and synth drone structure has something in common with bands like Locrian or Keplers Odd, and the morose, dejected atmosphere of the track has affinities with depressive black metal and funeral doom, though Yrsel’s music is neither straightforward metal nor completely ambient, but really a scorched-earth fusion of the two.

As the title would suggest, the second track ‘The Tears Of Euphrosyne’ features little of the mirth that that goddess is associated with – it’s another pitch-black journey into desolation, opening with smoothly implacable, cavernous reverberations, like stretched singing-bowl tones, cold metallic notes frozen in endless decline, with a dense minimalist buzz of guitar gliding over the top after several minutes, and a middle section of hissing whispers over a siren-like wailing tone. Overall, this track is colder and more ambient than the first one, though the closing minutes fade out with a slow, desultory funeral doom riff. ‘Thaleia's Neurasthenia’ rounds out the album with drawn-out hissing tones and mournful piano notes over wan washes of suspenseful orchestral strings and delicate jangles of chiming percussion, something like Beyond Sensory Experience, and closing with a stark section of coldly shimmering frequencies in cyclical waves. For me, this is less successful than the first track, which manages to blend elements of dark ambient and drone metal in a more innovative way. ‘Thaleia's Neurasthenia’ is still resolutely bleak and gloomy, but it’s a more orthodox piece of dark ambient, with no discernible guitar work.

The Austrasian Goat has been garnering a cult reputation in the last couple of years, in particular for his series of split singles, the most recent of which was shared with L’Acéphale (it’s reviewed elsewhere on Judas Kiss). The Yrsel album reveals an intriguingly different, more drone-oriented, aspect to TAG’s music, and this collaboration will have crossover appeal for fans of a number of different dark music genres, ranging from black and doom metal to dark ambient and industrial drone.

Requiem For The Three Kharites is a 500-copy limited-edition CD, and it comes in a black arigato pack with screenprinted silver artwork.

www.theaustrasiangoat.com

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www.myspace.com/avondo

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