Arcana
Magna Silentia
Cold Meat Industry
The fourteen year gap between Swedish neo-classical/dark ambient project Arcana’s As Bright As A Thousand Suns and new LP Magna Silentia was marked by halted reactivations, live reunions, and tremendous personal loss for Peter and Cecilia Bjärgö and their collaborators. It’s no surprise, then, to find them working in a register quite different from their last recorded material, though Magna Silentia‘s combination of Arcana’s earliest and most austere work and the technical prowess they’ve since accrued makes for a striking and affecting reemergence.
Records like Thousand Suns and Raspail saw an expansion of Arcana’s acoustic side, augmenting their neo-classical side with folk threads which resulted in a sound not unlike mid-period Dead Can Dance. That degree of ornamentation has been stripped back Magna Silentia. Low, abyssal horns and drones accompany ritual drums whose earthy timbre carries real menace on “The Adversity Bell”, yet the melodic thread of the piece, carried almost exclusively by Peter’s wordless vocals, is far more frail and pained than those more bracing elements might suggest. And it’s in that tension, between the severity of a record which fittingly marks Arcana’s return to Cold Meat Industry (and everything that infamous label entails) and the full, crushing emotional register of real human grief and loss, that Magna Silentia shines.
A sustained focus on funereal dark ambient drones and echoes is often the conduit for that tension. Dark ambient has always been one part of Arcana’s heady alchemy to be sure, but it’s never been given so much focus as it has here. The rich sound design and subtle but elegant compositional chops which guide “Somnia Intus” might not have been achievable for Bjärgö in the project’s early years, but are now well within his grasp and fit the record’s sober and enduring grief. While perhaps more abstract and less directly emotional, “The Obsidian Mirror” again finds Arcana wielding both metallic, industrial noise and contemplative tones in equilibrium (for a project which has always focused on atmosphere they’ve rarely felt “cinematic” in the way that term’s often deployed, yet there’s something of a classic cyberpunk cityscape in this track).
For all of its pain and extremity, there are real currents of beauty in Magna Silentia. The mournful violin which passes through glowing chorales in “The Collapsing Of All Light” might not be as bombastic as some of Arcana’s earlier neo-classical works, but it’s as affecting as any of them. After their hiatus Arcana have returned to their roots, shaped by time and loss, but none the weaker for it. Recommended.
