Voyage Sacrifice LP

Master of screwed dub and altered ephemera, Black Zone Myth Chant acts as a dark interpreter for chemical elves on the sunless psychedelia of ‘Voyage Sacrifice’ for Félicia Atkinson & Bartolemé Sanson’s faultless Shelter Press label, under the slightly altered Black Zone Magick Chant alias. It’s a whirlpool of fugged-out hallucinations and severely down-pitched vocals with an altered, kaleidoscopic quality – for our money the project’s finest hour, residing somewhere between Popol Vuh, Hype Williams, and the knackered smudge of Andy Stott’s classic ‘We Stay Together’.

Temporarily sacrificing his consciousness for the good of your trip, Maxime Primault aka BZMC has now somehow realised some of the most phantasmagoric sounds in his entire catalogue, which now stretches back over ten years and includes notable highlights in his psych drone project as High Wolf, and pulsing rhythmic noise as Iibiis Rooge.  Gutting out his screwed hip hop and dancehall inspirations over three durational parts embracing pitch black, miasmic abstraction, perceptions of time and rhythm become dissolved in the process, aided by a severely down-pitched vocal growl that absorbs the listener into its tantric pacing on ‘Lightless Mountain’, holding the senses under as deathly bells peal for someone or something, and scattered metronomes occasionally accentuate the temporal smudge, spilling over into the seasick brownian slosh of ‘Incineration of Thoughts’.

Occasionally a rusted, lurching metronome emerges, infusing a drugged sense of forward motion, but the essence of ‘Voyage Sacrifice’ is textural and tantric. The specter of dub still looms in the disorienting fog of FX and negative space, but ultimately these sides exist outside (and deep beneath) any recognisable sonic lineage. Like the potential of any trip worth the effort, however, the darkness and the sublime become entwined in the 22 minute counterbalance of ‘Where will we meet when our ashes are spread in the wind?’, which, thru its convincing, iridescent detail seems to describe from the inside, rather than speculate, a divine space or spirited beyond as the result of lived experience.

Strongly recommended to anyone with a strong urge to zone out.