1. Invocation ov 23
2. Beautiful Lover
3. Anthem
4. Snakeskin
5. Domino
6. Venus in Veils
7. To be forgotten
8. Rebis
9. A Game in the Dark (Revisited)
10. Imposición de manos
11. Vigiliae (3:14 A.M.)
23. …so as not to wake you

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Preview and download individual tracks at The Internet Archive or Last.fm.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5 License.

“Even the most primitive society has an innate respect for the insane”
(Rumble Fish)

The “Chinese Democracy” of dark ambient, except that it doesn’t suck.

This album underwent so many modifications, even I can’t retrace its whole history. I remember doing some first demos which were a load of crap, and starting from scrap at least once. The new ideas after that were much closer to what I had envisioned, and I sent the first demos to Old Europa Cafe, who were enthusiastic about them and agreed to release the album once it was finished. However, the final masters were rejected and the label withdrew its offer.

For a while I kept considering different possibilities for its release and I got in touch with several other labels. But while this was happening, a dislike for a couple of tracks started growing on me; I was starting to see the album from a distance and realizing there was a lot of filler, tracks that just dragged on without any real hook. In a way, yes, it was my best album to date, but not the album I had wanted to do.

On realizing this, I stopped looking for a label to release it. I suspended everything related to the album and concentrated on other tasks, like the split CD of Chaos Condensed and Trajedesaliva. I bid my time, rewrote two tracks and got started on a new one.

It was then that the album started getting that vibe I wanted: that noir Lynch-esque feel that I associate with sad jazz loops and eerie keyboards, with killers who smile and dance to old melodies, with fainted echoes and the flutter of wings in the night, with smoky hotel rooms and cheap booze;

maybe there’s a woman and you’re fucking her hard while the city symphony echoes all around you;

or maybe there’s nobody, and the only thing you can hear is the chiming of the ice cubes against the glass, a muffled piano from the hall downstairs and the sound of your own efforts to fight back the tears;

or maybe there’s just a voice in the darkness. And what scares you most is that you know there’s a smile behind it.

Mix all that general atmosphere with a background of dark ambient and ritual musick, some powerful percussions here and there (can’t help it, sorry) and a lot of samples from films, jazz CDs and spoken word records and you’ve very much got the recipe for “Rebis”. There has been a lot of collage involved, and I guess it comes from my work with Chaos Condensed as well as from my DJ activities, which have inevitabily influenced the way I work in some aspects.

As for the artwork, I was really lucky to have so much time on my hands at the time. I learnt how to develop black and white film, how to make and manipulate prints, and last of all, how to actually take photographs. When I saw all the possibilities it had, I started locking myself up in the darkroom for 8 or 10 hours a day, experimenting with different techniques and gradually finding my way to the idea of the “Fetish Tarot Deck”, as it has been called – even though it’s not a Tarot.

In the end, it’s all about alchemy. Combining elements. Cutting. Stitching. Mixing. Picking up here and there, stirring and creating something new.

So, it was an ambitious project. You might have already noticed that. Maybe too much, and it was just not meant to be finished. Maybe it’s too pretentious and I’ve overblown my own expectations, I thought.

Or maybe it was because since I started working on it, I had wanted it to be Morpheus’ last album. And maybe something inside me couldn’t cope with the idea and didn’t want “Rebis” to ever be finished. I didn’t even know if I wanted start looking for a label again when it was completely finished or if I would give it away for free. At that stage, I didn’t need a record label: what I needed was just to exorcise this.

When I finally made up my mind, I had decided to go solo on this trip. No record labels, no middlemen, no distribution, no physical CD. Just download it, listen to it, enjoy it (or hate it), share it, burn it, do what you want with it as long as it’s not for commercial purposes. (Not that anyone in their right mind would think of doing anything remotely commercial with it considering the amount of uncleared samples it contains…)