The trouble with genre-bending avant-garde artists is the line between utter brilliance and foolhardy amateurishness. Like a sleeping bear of sonic putridity, artists poke it with their toes of jazz and ambiance and drone, and it largely is a matter of time before they’re greeted with the teeth, and consequently, our ears are bathed in confusion.1 R.A Sánchez, proprietor of the ambient weirdness of Black Baptist, offers this odd concoction in solo debut L’Ottava Sfera, a title which is translated to “the eighth sphere” in Corsican. Balancing crystalline and dark ambient soundscapes, jazzy chord progressions and spurts of brass, and a drone weight, all to a pace seen in funeral doom, it takes its sweet and pitch-black time oozing into the bones with sluggish precision.
L’Ottava Sfera does well in emulating the darkness of its cover art.2 Inspired by Catholic imagery, as well as sonic inspirations of experimental jazz, funeral doom, and avant-garde composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and Iannis Xenakis, R.A Sánchez offers a pitch-black sonic exploration into formality, death, illness, and madness, on paper penned like this year’s Swami Lateplate. While albeit merely hinting at metal through expansive soundscapes infected with cancerous doom, L’Ottava Sfera feels heavier and darker than some of metal’s more vicious offerings – as dread and dying course through every fiber of this beast. Undeniably divisive and jarringly stitched together at parts, R.A Sánchez offers a pitch-black descent into meditation and madness through its weaponized gloom.
L’Ottava Sfera by R.A Sánchez
R.A Sánchez essentially takes funeral doom and drone and strips them to their bare minimum: as atmospheric and unrelenting but its teeth are notably absent, pinpointing its potentially divided reception. Punishment is not his aim, but rather evocation. L’Ottava Sfera’s tracks range therefore from ambient sprawls touched by the crooked hand of drone to dense and unforgiving weight that tugs on the throat. Designed like an unassuming crescendo, the album opens up with the simple and overlong “Nimu,” which can simply feel like a warbling improvisation on a Roland synthesizer. Maneuvering between jazzy chords with underlying pitch shifts, there is little else to be impressed with, continuing into the piano-led “Forma,” whose pastoral chords are interrupted by a staccato break: again, a rather unassuming twist on an unassuming track. However, there dwells beneath the true monster of L’Ottava Sfera at its halfway point: a growing crescendo of drone that adds depth, darkness, and weight to the jazzier proceedings. Even then, the chord progressions stand at odds in “Forma,” with a dark minor scale dominating the drone clashing against the relatively lush major proceedings of the piano.
It isn’t until the full weight of the meticulously constructed and wildly mind-warping “Qutb” that R.A Sánchez reveals his hand. Beginning with a relatively toothless doom beat alongside a synth substitute for squealing feedback, the dirge warps into deep and dark drone slogs that feel the weight of eons, while narrowly skirting the “metal” tag. Balanced with a segment of wonky jazz spasms, a revenant of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, the drone hits as a welcome ton of bricks that suddenly dominates the track with a tastefully religious tone that pairs neatly with the ritualistic flavor. Colossal fifteen-minute closer “Gnosi” continues this trend in the mammoth climax of L’Ottava Sfera, where drums and drone approach an uncanny valley version of brutality (recalling this year’s Rorcal) while the ritualistic and shamanistic drone-inflected jazz drags listeners kicking and screaming into the darkness, recalling Neptunian Maximalism or Zaäar. A true test of patience, interlude “Sovranu” is a sprawling ambient track that slowly and methodically swells from near silence to suffocating density throughout its fourteen-minute ethereal march – although a masterclass in ambient dynamics.
R.A Sánchez toes the line between coyly amateurish and meticulously cunning across the album-long dynamic of L’Ottava Sfera, ultimately landing on a sound best described as soul-crushing – even if it takes a while to get there. The pitch-black tones that embody the destination “Gnosi” showcase the intention and care all along: an ultimate emptiness that scratches under the skin with a duality of both religious and primal weight. The road is bumpy and forlorn and your patience will be tested across its forty-four-minute runtime of divisive genres, but fans of jazz, drone, and dark ambient will find their journey well rewarded.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: STREAM
Label: Lost Tribe Sound
Websites: blackbaptist.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: December 1st, 2023
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