Tongues Of Light | The Myth Of Separation And Selfhood (LP) [VHSX-014]

Tongues Of Light | The Myth Of Separation And Selfhood
Label: Pre-Cert Home Entertainment ‎– VHSX-014
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Clear
Released| 24 Jan 2020

A second youtube meditation tape pressed to vinyl from one of the most enigmatic projects we’ve come across in recent years, conducting disparate, glossolalic voices in a spellbinding, etheric communion for Andy Votel & Demdike Stare's Pre-Cert Home Entertainment label. Followers of anything from Breadwoman to Nozomu Matsumoto to Japanese environmental recordings and Demdike Stare’s earlier occult-driven soundscapes are urged to investigate.

Helmed again by Sam A. McLoughlin, Tongues Of Light dip back into a rhizome of spirit-channelling YouTubers first encountered on ‘Channelled Messages At The End Of History’ which had us rapt back in 2016. Acting as a lightening rod for the online phenomenon of light language transmissions, Tongues of Light finds that the styles of glossolalia, or speaking in unknown languages, have developed and diversified over the last half-decade, as have the belief systems and rationales surrounding the practice online. Belying this expansion and variegation is the common conviction that their asemic (“having no specific content”) utterances come from some agency outside their personal volition - they are simply fleshy vessels for a greater, unidentified force.

Effectively hitting square between the eyes of, say, performance artist Breadwoman and EVP expert Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, ‘The Myth of Separation and Selfhood’ doubles down on the project’s convictions, and those of the channellers, with two side-long collages that augment and accentuate their spontaneous intuitions with light processing and sensitively synthesised backdrops of haunting, new age-related pads and recordings of electro-magnetic fields that subtly mirror and emphasise the contours and cadence, or musical qualities, of the vocals.

When abstracted away from the original youtube clips’ relatively prosaic, everyday settings - living rooms, bedrooms, captured on a laptop/desktop camera - the results reduce the listener’s cynicism and allow the messages to come thru clearer, better manifesting the idea that these transmissions are actually attuned to an expanded consciousness or at least a common spiritual malaise so symptomatic of our time. Or as the artist explains, they are “ultimately emanations from the same source that produces our subjective sense of self”.

- Vinyl edition of 300 copies, artwork and liner notes by Andy Votel.

TRACKLIST:
A   Unity
B   Void

 # Experimental  # Ambient # Ritual # Electronica