On Züranhümnah by Bart De Paepe, (BDP BC 2025)
Soundscrapes and scree as I hear the singing of steel
And singed timber; the timbre of which peels what’s perfect
Into something scored from old earth,
As Bart De Paepe’s Ghüül ghosts opens Züranhümnah,
His new album, with each umlaut urging the still searching ear
To prise worth
From all of the day’s other sounds, be they flesh, or form,
Sign or structure, one can hear Thomas Koner, Christian Fennesz,
Sylvian and Czukay, as entire worlds warp and shrill,
And the killing air claims the moment, before the storm
In sound clashes with the nightmare night dreams survey.
There are strange sounds, fresh forms, creatures of mind
And of moment; sudden strikes stalk submersion,
And surrender too as scenes shift from Moorcock like plains
Across which Count Brass may have ridden, or Elric of course,
Wealding runestaffs whose withheld fires bestow as they burn
Blood’s great gift. Which is to know and feel you’re alive
And feeling afresh strange sensations, be they close to death
Or resuming existence and gain somewhere else; in said dream
Of what’s next, or that which has been long forgotten. The Ghüül,
Like all ancients resembles a glacier shaping structures for men
And for mountain before the globalized warmth sees ice melt.
Urmürmürr then is the screech of land leaving land, torn, shorn
And testing. It is a mutant bell striking a soundwaves sent straight
From hell and sounds as cold as that ice, as Hell is not formed
Just by fire. It is a place of all climates sharpened to slice
The sun’s spell. This is pain glistening. This is the sound of blood
And beginnings. The Planet scratch of a planet wounding the one
Next to it. Gases growl. Protons preen and the air is wrent
From the spacesuit, becoming part of space as the spinner,
A lost astronaut once is void versing and in no time at all
Black hole bit. Uzias holds the hum of a portal prised
From God’s shadow. We hear the pulse of the human
Beneath its astral overtake; as the endless sky soon informs
The slurs of that wrenched above us. The clouds are wounds
Worn to cover what this sonic portrait portrays, plays
And makes. Unending earth mirrored, masked by mysteries
Unimagined. Yet there regardless, conjured up through the lies
And conjecture of whether aliens in fact must exist. A Google
Notification appears as I sit typing this in reaction to De Peape’s
Surreal soundtrack to reality’s knife in our backs; Now flesh twists.
For the heavens’ howl can be heard, even as words are neutered.
For this is the sound of skin slipping as something within stirs revealed.
As in Glazer’s film Under the Skin, Or Garland’s Annihilation; unfound forms,
Tiered by terror are here as the heart escapes. Nothing’s healed.
Indeed, only the wound can be won. Only once it is, is pain mastered.
For there is recovery in this music, a shattered symphony from spent stars
Repairing themselves from within, or achieving recalibration,
As if what was found to be formless were to suddenly raise its head
To kiss scars. Zhaüm seals and stores. We can hear comets cross
As it opens. Kingdoms of glass rise formatted from alien dust to depict
An entirely new form of life, Belgium born, but Betelgeuse headed.
Here then, sounds are heralds to the scratching of skies, stars
And silence. Which reveals itself full of motion and of strange verse
And voices that something completely different to you came to pick.
David Erdos 22/11/25
https://bartsloow.bandcamp.com/album/z-rah-mnah?mc_cid=45ec6686cd
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