1. Jormungand Rising
2. Thelema
3. To blacken the Sun
4. Psychopompos
5. Oreibasia
6. Lamia
7. The Thirteenth Angel
8. Splendor Solis
9. Depths of Silence
10. Gathering of the Lilim
11. Smoke of the Gods
12. Ouroboros
13. Purson, the Viper

Artwork: R.G.Hernanz.
Special Guests: Vocals on 13 by Audreane.

The black sheep. The ugly duckling. The crack-addicted cousin everyone in the family avoids talking about. You get it.

In fact, it’s not THAT awful, it’s just that it’s still a very raw, unpolished recording, in all senses. The sound was still bad (I had learnt a lot since “Malkuth”, but not enough), and I found myself experimenting with too many things at a time. This CD has a much more industrial feel than the previous one, because from “Malkuth” I learnt that I just didn’t have the means necessary to produce realistic-sounding trumpets, strings or flutes, so I decided to focus almost exclusively on abstract and industrial ambient. I started creating my own synthesised pads, sampling from different sources, fooling around with time stretching and effects to create strange sounds and atmospheres… The result was, of course, chaotic at best.

The themes were more complex and coherent than the ones sketched in “Malkuth”, and they revolved around the serpent as a symbol in diverse mythologies and cosmologies, in alchemy and in the writings of the gnostic sect of the Ophites. The web of concepts developed here is enough to write a whole book on it, but of course I’ll never do that. I’ll leave it to some critic with too much time on his hands who’ll discover my work 10 years after I’ve died from pneumonia from having lived in the gutter for 20 years.

So, the ideas were good, the sounds were not. Again. And some of the more experimental tracks are horrible when I listen to them now, but what the heck. Let’s give this one at least 6 out of 10, even if it’s only for the ritual tracks, like “Jormungand Rising”, “Thelema” or “Gathering of the Lilim”. After all, this was to be the scrapboard for the First Big Thing: Elohim.

[The "remastered" version didn't improve things substantially, but it did add an extra edge to some tracks, and I even had the chance to re-record some vocals. The artwork was fun doing, too. Ricardo and I spent the money the record company gave us on drugs and locked ourselves up in his house, thus founding ChaoSpiral Studios and somewhere in the process fucking up and sending a 4-meter tall poster to the printing press. All beginnings are tough.]