Atonia published the video for the track “Sadot” recorded live at Roadburn Festival 2022 and released on the upcoming album “Live at Roadburn” due out April 7, 2023. Watch the video through the Youtube player below:
Atonia is the live collaboration between Wyatt E. (BE), Five the Hierophant (UK), and Tomer Damsky aka MC Slice from JLM’s Wackelkontakt, specially commissioned for Roadburn festival’s 2022 edition. The clash of musicians from the worlds of Doom, Drone, and Psychotrap has produced this hybrid set, conceptually drawing on an array of ancient liturgical and folkloristic inspirations from Hebrew to Latin, a culmination of musical ideas by the three entities welded together in one hectic weekend and performed in front of an audience only once.
This record is a documentation of Atonia’s performance in Roadburn 2022, remembered as one of the most striking collaborations of that year.
The lyrical and melodic content, compiled by Damsky, is a multilingual collection of interpretations of texts from the far-to-near past, each of them holding its own little abyss of symbolic, theological, and political context. All of it, sung-spoken-uttered-screamed in Damsky‘s voice that shifts lightly between various musical worlds and soars on top of the sheer mass of instruments thundering from the 8-piece assembly on stage, hand in hand with the scorching expressivity of Roffey‘s saxophone.
The ominous intro of Mercurius is followed by Quantus Tremor, which joins the notorious (and irresistible) tradition of musical settings to the Dies Irae, an iconic medieval sequence from the Catholic Mass for the Dead. Atonia‘s rendition deconstructs the Latin poem to a syllabic monotonous off-beat chanting that bursts into unleashed screams.
Sadot is a rendition of an early Israeli folk tune, charged with cultural and political explosives, about one who returns from a deathbed to a beloved valley to heal his suffering. The track opens with an excerpt from a tape recording of Damsky‘s mother, Avigail, who passed away during the preparation of this record, singing the more traditional version of the song as recorded by herself in 1988. The story of the endless cultural and emotional luggage embodied in this tune is attempted in more length on the song page.
The Black Waves pretends to give the ears a rest from the swirl of symbolic content but quickly develops into a layered sonic overload as the guitars and synths build a solid edifice for the sax to painfully cut through.
Kol Badai and Polyxena are both built on excerpts from the old Hebrew translation of Roman poet Ovidius’ Metamorphoses. Polyxena, performed as a spoken oration with an attitude between storytelling and reproof, tells the brave story of the brutal sacrifice of princess Polyxena, daughter of Hecuba and King Priam of Troy, on the very grave of her fallen husband Achilles, whose ghost demands his woman not to live while he is not alive to have her. This episode is followed by a deconstruction of a text by Israeli playwright Yonatan Levy, about the symbolic death of the controversial IDF general Rafael Eitan.
Kol Badai is an allegoric, almost surrealistic description of a community ruled by rumors, where a lie-spreading mob is guided by mistakes and everything is automatically believed as true.
Lute is a traditional English folk round song, the exact origins of which are unknown but probably go back to Medieval days: a song about mourning, expressed by both musician and instrument. Looped back into itself, the finishing sentence “at one time mute,” in contradiction with its meaning, becomes louder with each repetition until it builds up into the emptying climax.
Pre-order the album on Bandcamp: https://atoniaband.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-roadburn
Tracklist:
Lineup:
Mitch Barrett / Bass
Tomer Damsky / Vocals, Effects and Synth
Rory Duncan / Percussions
Jon Roffey / Saxophone
Stephane Rondia / Bass, Synth and Effects
Jonas Sanders / Drums
Sebastien Von Landau / Guitar, Synth and Backing Vocals
Krzysztof Wlodarski / Guitar and Bow