Label: K-RAA-K

切れた弦が付属する特殊物件!!ベルギーはゲントの孤高のギタリストVenediktos Tempelboomの1st LP!!12弦ギターをメイン楽器とする独学のミュージシャンであり、ジョン・フェイヒー、ロビー・バショー、ジャック・ローズといった巨匠たちのエッセンスを凝縮し変則的にアウトプットする孤高の演奏家Venediktos Tempelboom。プリミティブなジャケット・アートワークの通り、どこかメランコリックなアシッド感が充満する怪しいインストゥルメンタル集であり、各楽曲には天使と悪魔を同等に際立たせる側面がある。ヘビーでありながらも美しい超パーソナルな一枚。







Venediktos Tempelboom's debut LP in coal black wax (like his heart) featuring original neo-primitive artwork by Felix Baele + sleeve adorned with ghoulie stamp drawn by Benoit Monsieurs and crafted by Dieter Durinck and a broken string memento ~ beheaded trickster knight on the label for those smokey evening listens!

The Ghentian skyline has low peaks and hides its horrors in full view ~ walk streamside and you’ll quickly be confronted with façades that leer with their tales and secrets, the angels and demons that built this city holding up its mortar and stone in an inextricable embrace. It is within this incongruous backdrop that Benoît Monsieurs has fostered the Venediktos Tempelboom persona. Using the 12-string guitar as his main instrument, the self-taught musician creates passages that take fingerpicking Americana and Eastern transcendence into the Flanders fields, with winding compositions that distill the essence of giants like John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Jack Rose and folds them into the dark drone melancholia of Funeral Folk/KRAAK stalwarts like Silvester Anfang, Helvete and Ignatz. The results are ringing meditations of awe and terror, flamboyant and grotesque yet utterly mesmerizing in their unrooted sonic imagery.

In his debut LP, Syne Vuyle Hoeck, the Tempelboom amalgamates his influences - East, West and deep Flanders alike - into a flurry of acid-drenched tracks that spread out into a distinctive musical iconography. Each composition carries a facet, highlighting angel and demon in equal measure: the solemn opener “De woelige rit op een roze wolkje” is a threading of melodies that carry pensive heft and hopeful asides, as hints of ragtime buoyancy lead into sullen ruminations in a fully lucid change of course; “Ocharme Ochgod” is a sober penitence, slowly and almost imperceptibly building up into a tangle of lines that inexorably coil back into their brooding backbone; the echoing tape loop of “In Flock” reverberates and torments, steel sharpness and frayed magnetic disintegration finding improbable common ground; “El Contrario” swerves unforgivingly in an Eastern-infused openness reminiscent of Six Organs’ rawer days and unnervingly giving way to a forceful - dare we say upbeat - conclusion. And so one treks into the depths of the Tempelboomian universe, a place of high drama and low morals inhabited by a prankster creator who deploys euphoria and distress in equal measure. Just as the strings of his guitar are left to echo like sparkles in the dark, so his music lingers in the soil of our humanity, redolent of the kind of peace one can only make with the demons of the self.