Title:Axon By: Skincage Released by: Malignant Records Released on: 2000 Rating (out of 10): 10 Date: 06/03/2002
On The Wings Of An Angel...
An axon is the long process of a nerve fiber that generally conducts impulses away from the body of a nerve cell. Jon Ray, as Skincage, plays neural transmitter with the listener of Axon acting as the transfixed dendrite, receiving a virtually overwhelming amount of information over the entirety of the hour-long recording.
Released under the banner of Malignant Records, Skincage's Axon boasts an aural experience that could easily be likened to a soundtrack of Dante's journey through the entirety of the Circles of Hell. Released in 2000, I was slow on the uptake where Skincage is concerned, and it was most certainly my loss. Relying solely on strategically produced samples for the purpose of vocals, the dark ambience of Axon takes somewhat of a departure from most of its peers within the genre; the orchestrations and manipulations are dark to be sure, but not completely so, and not for the entirety of the CD. Enigmatic and ambiguous are probably much better adjectives to describe the overall whole of what is presented to the listener through the vehicle of Axon.
As with all ambient works I review, the best approach, at least in my personal experience, is to share the thoughts, visions and surface emotions that the work evoke in me as the listener. What follows is not necessarily the "story" or intent of Skincage where Axon is concerned. Rather, it is my own attempt to share what music such as that that is recorded by Skincage awakens from my own, personal consciousness and, in some cases, subconscious:
I hear an angel falling to earth in the opening track, "Alphaleph." His mouth has been taken from him by the Prime Mover for speaking blasphemy against the Order of Heaven, and as he falls to Earth and is scorched by the atmosphere, his wings catch fire and disintegrate. He cannot scream. All he can do is concentrate on the jumbled cacophony of media transmissions bombarding him from the planet's surface below. Signals invade a mind where only choruses of Seraphim sang once before. The pain is too much for the angel to bear. "Hell would have been more merciful than Earth." he thinks as he watches the surface of the planet grow closer...
"Parasight" opens as the broken angel lies in a crater formed from his impact with earth. His burned and blistered body, the cauterized remnants of his wings, have become a feeding ground for vermin worms and beetles long forgotten; forsaken creatures who have not fed on the flesh of a godlike since before the rise of the Pharaohs. The track is the elation of these lesser demoniacs at the taste of the divine. Their singing, bickering and chittering however, attract even more foul, more ancient carnivores... Horseman Pestilence himself appears at the "crash site" to claim the lion's share of the felled angel's body.
"An Homage to Pestilence" opens as the Horseman makes his way into the crater where Alphaleph has fallen. The worms and beetles part like a shining, sea of filth as Pestilence licks his lips, a line of thick, oozing spittle draining from his bottom lip as he beholds the fallen angel's body. He reaches down with a hand covered in the coarse, black hair of a great gnat to tear away a bloodied bit of Alphaleph's flesh...but is burned. Pestilence cries out with the voice of a screeching rat, his hand singed, and the music of Heaven deafens him. The angel is not for him to touch or to take...and the appearance of the mighty Tulpatulku at the "crash site" frightens him. They are the Seal Breakers, the Wardens of the Fallen, and sons of the Nephilim. Pestilence flees the site and is given leave by the Tulpatulku, who collect Alphaleph's body with metallic, clawed devices attached to their arms, careful not to touch the fallen angel's flesh with their own.
At their sacred pyramid in Giza, the Tulpatulku ritualistically embalm and mummify the remains of Alphaleph in accordance with rites taught to them and passed down through generations of heraldic angels and hermetic masters of their own order. Alphaleph is encased in a sarcophagus of lead, covered in Enochian glyphs and symbols, and transported to the deepest, most isolated chamber of the Tulpatulkian Shrine. As the mystics of the order echo the final chants over the sarcophagus, the procession exits the chamber. The last of the wizards, however, places a tarot card on the cold, sandstone floor of the chamber before the crypt is sealed; the card, sun bleached and as ancient as the pyramid itself, reads "The Devil."
Alphaleph dreams in the darkness of his tomb. His dreams are not of Paradise, the choruses of angels or even of the Prime Mover, but of a time and a place forgotten by humans and angels alike. Dreaming of a time when his visage, his body and form, was worshipped as a household god of Upper Egypt, he smells incense burned in his honor and tastes the blood of jackals and crocodiles sacrificed in his name. He dreams of a time of locusts, toads and plague; a time when firstborn sons died at the whim of the Prime Mover, and hears the screams of his idolaters as they are put to the sword by the armed zealots of men-cum-gods. Further back through time, Alphaleph sees himself standing high above a river city. He is surrounded by beautiful, naked women and by humans who speak in a tongue very similar to that spoken in heaven. He surveys the construction of a pyramid while observing schematics and drawings of its mathematical riddles. Millions of slaves, threadbare and flayed, toil under the drumbeat of overseers as they pull monolithic, pentagonal bricks up scaffolding for the half-finished construct. Alphaleph realizes that the slaves toil under his decree, and live and die by his leave.
In the cold silence of his morbid prison, Alphaleph experiences "Regenesis" as his eyes open...
Pressing the door of his tomb open with force of will alone, Alphaleph emerges from his prison to find the scattered bodies of a dozen of the Tulpatulku broken and dismembered, their eyes frozen in horror and betrayal as they gaze without seeing at his apocryphal form. "Master," a voice whispers from behind the dim glow of a single lantern. "I am Makkat Bekhorot. I am your prophet, and your servant." Alphaleph's emotionless face shifts into that of a mouthless smile as he hands the tarot card to Bekhorot.
Through infernal trigonometry, Bekhorot explains that he has discovered the means with which to destroy the Messiah of Humanity upon his birth, an act that will "set things as they should be; as they should always have been." With Alphaleph's assistance, Bekhorot is able to decode the "Arrows of Artemis," a spell written by Solomon the Wise in the language of Heaven as taught to him by the Prime Mover Himself. Alphaleph's hands invert the spell, conjugating the Enochian script from an ultimate weapon for the prevention of the rise of an antichrist into certain death for a returned Messiah. In return, the prophet Bekhorot constructs a pair of arcane, metallic wings for Alphaleph to replace those he lost when he was cast from Heaven.
On glistening, insect-like wings, Alphaleph leaves Bekhorot to his preparations and flies like an angry wasp towards the Emperyan from whence he fell. His mind is once again filled with the scattered, choppy transmissions of the earth below him, he plots his revenge against the Prime Mover as he ascends; reborn, transformed, and renewed with a will to bruise the mandala of God himself upon arrival.
So there you have it. My personal interpretation of what Axon is, or rather, what it can elicit in the imagination of any listener. One of the things I find prevalent throughout the community of individuals who enjoy ambient music is that they are, for the most part, intellectualists and/or dreamers. Don't let this one get away from you. If ambient, electronic music is something you love because of the sagas it creates in your mind, then you need to find a copy of Axon.
If ambient or electronic music are somethig you enjoy, then you'll find my advice sound, I assure you.
