WL//WH Premiere BELIAL PELEGRIM Bricolage
Almost 5 years to the day since his Bricolage Records debut, “Imitation of Faith”, the prolific electronic musician and producer Belial Pelegrim returns to the Glasgow-based label with his latest conceptual musical escapade, “The Astronaut’s Last Polaroid”, and it’s a very special one indeed.
This album tells the story of Jack Hawthorne. A 68-year-old former NASA astronaut who is now grappling with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Once celebrated for his groundbreaking lunar missions, Jack now finds himself lost in the uncharted territory of his fading mind. Alzheimer’s disease is a subject that is no doubt close to the hearts of a lot of people and it’s a subject that Belial has carefully mapped out with the utmost respect.
The music itself is 15 tracks of lucid and harmonic experimental soundscapes that set a transient stage for what feels like a dark yet beautiful dream. There’s a tinge of anxiety laced throughout as you would expect with such a theme but it never becomes foreboding. It’s more like giant swirls of memories and relics of the past that drift in and out of view.
Belial expertly maps out the journey through hypnagogic tones that resonate with the heart and mind. Fleeting glimpses of rhythmic patterns, flashes of brooding strings and sprinkles of melodic dust. Taking us on a trip through not only Jack’s consciousness but also our own. The depth and emotion that burrows its way into each track is of grandiose proportions. At times it feels like we’re witnessing a one-man orchestra as we traverse through various realms of classical, glitch. ambient and electronica. A reverie of sonic tapestry.
“The Astronaut’s Last Polaroid” serves as a woozy yet visceral reminder that time is not always on our side when it comes to memory, but also that the mind is a beautiful place regardless.
WL//WH is pleased to premiere “Requiem for the Forgotten Spectre”, the fourth song from Belial Pelegrim’s fifteen-track opus.
Refined sculptor of equally mysterious and thought-provoking sound narratives combined with intricately textured and multifaceted rich arrangements, wobbling through lucid visions and pensive moods, the arcane and intriguing “Requiem for the Forgotten Spectre” sets immersive glowing tones, subtly strained, granular bass drones and scratchy shuffling beats as the undertow for semi-frantic icy computing chimes, tight tinny plucks, and primal shrilly calls, to create a both haunting and engrossing headspace, balanced by color, mood and tonal texture, breaking into a shivering, echoing interlude radiating bright clarity, before switching back to the original soundscape.
Belial Pelegrim‘s 15-track album, “The Astronaut’s Last Polaroid”, is scheduled for release on November 22, 2024, via Bricolage Label’s Bandcamp.
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