ABYSMOS – BAR-GAL
Art: Gonzalo Santana
Abysmos refers to the sensation of terror our mind faces when we place it before non-existence, the concept of death. This cosmic horror is an ancestral feeling exclusive to human beings (who made us create the gods to be able to resist the knowledge of our destiny). It provokes Lovecraftian vertigo before the vortex of chaos that we contemplate. The lyrics relate the fall of our consciousness, the final descent through the greatest depths, and the spiral fervour that makes us contemplate the deep past, the one where entities that are beyond our perception dwell and whose howls are so insane that they make us lose our sanity, like that ionising chant that produces the solar crackling. This shriek has accompanied us since the emergence of the first bacteria. The interpretation of this cacodemonic chant is based on the most irrational passages of Cyclonopedia (by Reza Negarestani), the darkest grimoire published in this century. We are the first band to intone its incantations and release them for the enjoyment of the initiated. But once you hear the chant of the primordials, there is no turning back.
We have turned to disciplines such as occultism, symbolism, esotericism, sacred geometry or alchemy as inspiration sources to create our music and our aesthetics. Few people know it, but Pylar was born after a ritual carried out by several band members in an abandoned dolmen in the southwest of Spain. We feel a great fascination for ancient religions and how what Miercea Eliade called homo religious and homo simbolicus emerged. The symbol, as an element to understand reality and transcend existence, is essential for Pylar because everything is a symbol, and it is fascinating to get lost among the infinite layers of meaning and try to find your way through them to try to lift the veil and behold what is hidden beyond.
In Pylar’s discography, there are references to Hermes Trismegistus, Paracelsus, Borges, Lovecraft, Gimbutas, Schneider, Melville, Land or Negarestani. Many texts have inspired us and continue to do so. In Pylar, we try that the music transmits the atmosphere provided by these different sources of knowledge, letting the musical form and aesthetics be affected by the concepts invoked in the texts.
The history of thought is fascinating; how human beings had to face the leap into the void that was the emergence of consciousness is one of the most important biological events since the origin of life. The price to be paid for contemplating into the depths of the mind, for being able to glimpse the future, was the eternal disease of cosmic horror. To defend us from it, human beings created the gods. They explained reality through them, using the symbol as a phenomenological element to transcend reality through its use and ritual practice.
This process gave rise to art as the tremendous conforming element of existence. Art was used within the religious sphere as an artefact to open portals to communicate with the gods, which was nothing more than delving into the deepest abysses of our minds. Even mental maps (such as the tarot or the sephirotic tree) were created to guide us in that infinite expanse. How can you not be inspired by such events, and how can you not be equally inspired by those who have turned their backs on the divine and who have dared to contemplate the abyss without the gods’ protection?
When I first started listening to metal, I was always drawn to long songs with slow parts. There was something epic and grandiose about how the elements progressed, and the song was built up. Before you put labels on that and associate it with certain bands, there was already an attraction as a listener and musician. Apart from Black Sabbath as the apparent origin of slow riffs, bands like Neurosis, Om, Eyehategod, Sleep, The Melvins, Earth or Sunn O)))) soon crossed my horizon and changed the way I saw extreme music. At the turn of the century, I found the slower extreme music most interesting, especially Drone with its heavily psychedelic elements.
In short, doom and associated styles are an avenue of exploration for us as songwriters and, in turn, a form of exploration on a mental level. The only way to contemplate regions of your mind that can only be accessed is by subjecting them to the ritual of the slow, crushing, destructive riff.
Pylar writes music without using drugs. The substances that alter our minds are the texts and music that obsess and guide us towards the unexplored regions of metal. Sometimes, an artistic work (a book, a record, a temple, a painting…) is strong enough to show you the way to the subversion of the primary symbols of a style after applying the obscure Salazar’s Law (by which the exceptional becomes the rule) and thus alter the angle of vision to contemplate the object beyond Euclidean geometry a crack is produced at an aesthetic level through which you can contemplate unknown areas.
Have you ever contemplated in dreams the unknown Kadath at the hand of Lovecraft, or have you ever been able to keep your sanity before the Tsalal accompanied by Ligotti? Have you ever travelled through the hyper riffs of Deathspell Omega, Portal or Teitanblood? Hyper riffs that turn music from a liquid and unstable state to a vaporous one of hyperchaos? Have you ever read the last three chapters of Moby-Dick, where the magnum mysterium of alchemy resides? Have you ever been confronted with the ionising chant produced by solar crackling colliding with the earth’s magnetic field that makes the planet intone a demented cacodemonic music in the darkest pages of Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia? Has the hidden relationship between the basic structure of a megalithic temple and a riff ever been revealed to you after contemplation of the hidden arcana? Examples like the above are what move us when we make music. Finding out that many musicians and artists you admire are despicable people. That’s been traumatic at times. But well, we deal with it as best as we can.
Most of the metal bands we admire focus their discourse on the dark side of the human being. Although we can assimilate certain narratives on a thematic level, in Pylar, we have not so far turned to evil or malevolence as sources of inspiration. We have sung to primordials and megalithic temples, to cosmogonies buried in the sands of time, to the goddess of multiple faces, to books that make you lose your sanity, to the forgotten language of birds, to the alchemical process, to sacred geometry, to the most ancient of the wanderers, to the vorticial depth of the symbol, to the God-year, to the cosmic egg, to the sacred spiral, to darkness and nothingness, to the tenebrous harmony, to the spiral fervour, to the solar crackling, to the deep past, to the limit, but not yet to evil.
Human beings have survived since the beginning thanks to the solidarity and mutual aid; that’s a fact. But it seems that a few centuries ago, powers were unleashed that we cannot control. Creatures were awakened, political-economic systems which have become independent of our will and have built an environment in which the human being is no longer more than a puppet at the mercy of a superstructure that prevents us from controlling what is going to happen. And yes, metal will be an excellent soundtrack to accompany these events. Vestigia nulla retrorsum.
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