Mare Cognitum / Spectral Lore - Sol (2013)

Split releases are often times just a rudimentary thing. My guess is a label says, "Hey you, band over there, you do a split with these guys over here. It will make sense, it will sell, do, do, do it!" Or two bands that are friends are like, "Hey, let's pair up our songs with your songs and release it as a split." Simple enough and I suppose it works, but it will often times make for an uneven listening experience, but when two artists come together to create a conceptual split then you know your going to be treated to something special.

'Sol' is very much one of those special splits, which pairs up two solo artists, both of which happen to be located on opposite sides of the world too. Spectral Lore is the Athens, Greece solo project of Ayloss whom has been intriguing and blowing my mind with his amazingly unique and bludgeoning compositions since his first album 'I' back in '06. Mare Cognitum is from Santa Ana, California and although this solo project of Jacob Buczarski has been around a few years with two full-lengths behind him, I am completely new to his work. 'Sol' as I already said is a true collaboration, both conceptually and musically. The bands have stated, "Themes and riffs have been cross-referenced and transfigured, structures have been put in proportion, lyrics have been written in parallel. Conceptually, it is an attempt at a kind of cosmological philosophy; searching the vast, cold expanses of the universe(-s) for traces of meaning and purpose. What it is out there that is fundamental, absolute and shared? What can we learn about ourselves by looking outward, to the void and the inanimate?"

'Sol' consists of just three songs, but runs for a staggering seventy minutes, with each of the main songs being 25-29 minutes, while the final song, a totally collaborative ambient track clocking in at fifteen. Even if I'm not familiar with Mare Cognitum what I hear through the two first songs is a unified sense of song writing. Both bands pummel the listener with eruptions of double bass drumming, hastily picked tremolo rhythm guitars, vicious screams, howls and growls, aerial synths, soundscapes, ambiance and even one hell of a catchy melodic lead riff in Mare Cognitum's, 'Sol Ouroboros.' What makes the compositions so rich and unique is that the music itself ranges from speedy raw black metal to technical death metal, funeral doom and purely ambient and ethereal and back again. The thing is that it really doesn't sound exactly like anything else I've heard before, except for Spectral Lore and Mare Cognitum themselves. Something unique in this day and age of black metal you ask? Certainly, and these two are the game changers right here.

I'll admit getting into two nearly thirty minute songs isn't easy, but thankfully the bands smoothed things over by having plenty of slower atmospheric breaks that just made me feel as if I was lifelessly floating through some black void of space. However, just as things seemed calm the music would resemble the very cosmos exploding with incomparable ferocity. Interestingly many black metal bands have taken the space theme as a lyrical and musical inspiration, but where bands like Limbonic Art were always just boring to me and Darkspace being too repetitive, Mare Cognitum and Spectral Lore absolutely nail everything that could possible come to mind when thinking about space. It really is a fair balance between celestial darkness, light and everything between, around and after. Its impossible to really put this immense release into words as it simple must be experienced.

The gorgeous artwork depicts the sun, which warms us and gives us light, but will perhaps one day detonate and utterly destroy us too. And when nothings left, a faint glimmer of sound will be heard as the universe starts to rebuild itself once again... Absolutely astonishing.