Secret Chiefs 3 - Book of Souls (Folio A, Folio B)

oooooh...looking like Oct. 29th according to amazon. sure, sure...whatever you say Trey.

seeing them tonight in p-town with Goblin - yesss.....

  On 10/20/2013 at 4:05 AM, alcyonidae said:

seeing them tonight in p-town with Goblin - yesss.....

nice! do you know Ogo? I'm seeing them in SF very soon, can't fucking wait

On or around Halloween (delayed due to manufacturing defect in original batch). Here's the tracklist slow reveal:

http://www.webofmimicry.com/wom2/index.php?topic=20544.0

dem song titles

supposedly this Balance of the 19 version is faster and more intense, with Danny Heifetz on drums, although I learned that on W.O.M., so it's probably bullshit

This?

From the 7:

"A 90% live-in-studio version. This recording captures the recent live lineup of Ishraqiyun (absent: Jai Young Kim, Timb Harris). It's all organic, and differs from the version slated for an upcoming SC3 release, which is faster and more aggressive & features different players (Danny Heifetz, William Winant, etc.). This is the first-ever release from Ishraqiyun the band."

Sounds legit to me. Danny is easily one of the most amazing drummers I've ever seen. His style isn't just tight, it's friggin' crisp!

Midheaven is now stating November 18th as shipping date for a November 26th release date.

  On 10/24/2013 at 1:39 PM, Claudius t Ansuulim said:

This?

 

From the 7:

 

"A 90% live-in-studio version. This recording captures the recent live lineup of Ishraqiyun (absent: Jai Young Kim, Timb Harris). It's all organic, and differs from the version slated for an upcoming SC3 release, which is faster and more aggressive & features different players (Danny Heifetz, William Winant, etc.). This is the first-ever release from Ishraqiyun the band."

 

Sounds legit to me. Danny is easily one of the most amazing drummers I've ever seen. His style isn't just tight, it's friggin' crisp!

yeah, that's it! I suppose things might have changed drastically since that announcement.

Hopefully preorders go out before midheaven distributes their copies. I don't really expect anything other than to get it eventually, at this point.

  On 10/24/2013 at 9:28 PM, Claudius t Ansuulim said:

Midheaven is now stating November 18th as shipping date for a November 26th release date.

  On 10/25/2013 at 2:00 PM, olo said:

 

  On 10/24/2013 at 9:28 PM, Claudius t Ansuulim said:

Midheaven is now stating November 18th as shipping date for a November 26th release date.

 

 

My preorder (edit: direct from WOM) just shipped for reals.

Glad Tristrya is on this. A fucking favorite.

Got it!!

Only listened to the first few tracks but wow! Great stuff. Loving the Electromagnetic Azoth tracks especially.

Just got mine, too! Probably not going to get to listen to it until the drive in to work tomorrow, but I'm seriously looking forward to that drive for once.

obligatory lol so when's folio b coming out lol

  On 11/7/2013 at 5:53 AM, baph said:

Just got mine, too! Probably not going to get to listen to it until the drive in to work tomorrow, but I'm seriously looking forward to that drive for once.

 

 

more like dat Drive

C'mon on guys. Did you just convince yourselves that you received it. Look real hard at the album cover. Does it really say Book of Souls? I mean really?

failed edit:

From the samples listened. The most promising to me seem like: Scorched Earth Saturnalia , Drive , Tistrya

Boxus & Baph, can you confirm this?

really, we could have been listening to this album for 2 years now. Several of these tracks have been performed for awhile & available on youtube.

  On 11/8/2013 at 2:39 PM, olo said:

failed edit:

 

From the samples listened. The most promising to me seem like: Scorched Earth Saturnalia , Drive , Tistrya

 

Boxus & Baph, can you confirm this?

 

really, we could have been listening to this album for 2 years now. Several of these tracks have been performed for awhile & available on youtube.

Yeah, a lot of it was on the 7" releases and/or live material. I was kind of expecting that, though. The Personae:Halloween on here is a pretty different version... actually, with the exception of Jacky, the production is all quite different from what I've heard either live or on the 7" series.

Not going to go into much detail because of spoilers, but these might be spoilers anyway:

Tistrya is a fairly brutal end. It's intense.

This version of Drive is tweaked in some subtle ways and it's absolutely gorgeous.

Jacky is slightly tweaked, if that, but IIRC it was always supposed to be an "album single" for BOS. Sound quality is a lot better than my 7" version, though.

Balance of the 19 is huge sounding, more along the lines of Saptarshi than the version I've been familiar with.

Potestas Clavium sounds like DIsco Volante era Bungle. It's great.

Scorched Earth Saturnalia is fucking amazing, and has a bit of call-back to some old SC3 motifs. Kind of makes me want to hear some full on orchestral stuff from Trey (this is getting close).

All the other tracks are short to very short interludes, and it's easy to be discouraged by that on paper, but fuck. Might be my favorite part of this album. Think, I dunno, radio ident tones, boards of canada interludes, fucking grindcore, DJ Revisionist/First Grand Constitution style fragments. They're weirdly effective, and they're scattered over the length of the album but they sort of form a coherent composition.

I tend to see these big SC3 albums as a way for Trey to really flex his arrangement/production skills, and on that respect this is probably beyond even Book of Horizons territory (BoH has some incredibly intricate stuff on it, obviously, but the production feels a lot fuller on this). It sounds massive. Really fucking impressive. The guitar tones in particular just occupy so much space without anything getting muddy. I have no idea how he did it.

It's a very dense 39 minute listen, but It's not exhaustive like BOH was. It doesn't feel short, but it feels like it's intentionally leading towards a counterpart, which it is. Like a really great cliffhanger. Tristrya doesn't resolve anything, it's like a suckerpunch.

I'm actually hugely impressed, and I was honestly expecting to be a little let down once the tracklist was revealed. My first listen was a bit muddled by expectations, but on second listen it's a very cohesive album, and full of little surprises even on "old" material.

markfellface.jpg

  On 11/9/2013 at 1:42 AM, phling said:

markfellface.jpg

is that the opposite of patrickbatemanpursedlips.jpg?

  On 11/8/2013 at 2:30 PM, olo said:

C'mon on guys. Did you just convince yourselves that you received it. Look real hard at the album cover. Does it really say Book of Souls? I mean really?

it's just a ladder actually, you may be right

sez book of trolls on the side, fuck you trey

Shit. That bad, Mark?

yeah dunno... Mr. Bungle was awesome, and some SC3 stuff was.... quite good... but this album sounds like an unnecessary excercise to my ears... an excercise in what? i dunno. but that Morricone vs. circus music collage style they're doing sounds very predictable and annoying on this one, imo.... all filler.... meh

(i was always on the fence wrt. SC3, was fun listening to them once in a while but i get annoyed quickly by their gimmickyness... don't mean to be harshh... would still love to see them live!)

  On 11/9/2013 at 12:27 AM, baph said:

The guitar tones in particular just occupy so much space without anything getting muddy. I have no idea how he did it.

 

 

Interesting thoughts Baph. I'll check the album out soon.

Side note: Not to do anything with SC3 or Trey's guitar, but i just watched a Doc on Jimi Hendrix on PBS. Nothing amazing or new, but they had an engineer break down a song from Axis Bold as Love (I think). He separated Jimi's 3 different licks, building each track on top of the other to the full 3 lines playing together. It sounded the way your quote suggested. Wall of sound.

  On 11/11/2013 at 2:05 PM, olo said:

 

  On 11/9/2013 at 12:27 AM, baph said:

The guitar tones in particular just occupy so much space without anything getting muddy. I have no idea how he did it.

 

 

 

Interesting thoughts Baph. I'll check the album out soon.

 

Side note: Not to do anything with SC3 or Trey's guitar, but i just watched a Doc on Jimi Hendrix on PBS. Nothing amazing or new, but they had an engineer break down a song from Axis Bold as Love (I think). He separated Jimi's 3 different licks, building each track on top of the other to the full 3 lines playing together. It sounded the way your quote suggested. Wall of sound.

 

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to oversell this thing because it is short and it is incomplete without "Foilo B" and it's a pain in the ass waiting this long for something that needs a Part B for full assessment, but the production is really top notch and clearly a ton of time went into this.

Without Folio B I don't think this quite hits as high as Book of Horizons did for me, and in part that might be because I'm familiar with a lot of the material (but that's I guess how SC3 operates -- they'd been playing Exodus live since the '90s, I think), but these well-fussed over versions are pretty special sounding imo.

And I dunno, Drive and Tistrya are both fairly simple songs, structurally, but they hit really hard.

Live is always better with SC3, but this is kind of the flip side of the coin-- there aren't a ton of bands out there that will go through the ten-year piecemeal recording process that this version of Balance of the 19 apparently had, and probably even fewer that can make that sort of thing sound coherent and intentional.

Re: the guitar tones, I dunno what's going on here; it's fairly standard crunchy metal riffage in terms of tone and everything, but no part of the mix overwhelms any other part of the mix, and everything sounds very clear even during the more violent bits. Could be there's slightly less going on than in Book of Souls (edit: Horizons), but I'm not sure if that's true. Probably a pretty simple answer, but it does sound impressive. Kind of just want to hear whatever tricks have been applied here to a straight Holy Vehm-only album, tbqh. It all has a sort of live intensity that was missing from Book of Horizons.

So, tldr, it's just a good balance between intensity and fussiness, I guess.

Seconded! More Holy Vehm please! This is pretty cool though. The new version of Balance of the 19 blows the other one out of the water. It is a little annoying to have to wait so long and not even have the full work to listen to, but I guess I can't complain about any new Secret Chiefs.

Also, Nova IHVH has to be the coolest 20-second interlude I've ever heard.