Mitochondrion – Vitriseptome

With the wider use of music streaming services, which also demand a description of what you’re about to hear, some artists / bands started to run wild with the obnoxious descriptions of what they recorded. Especially with the more extreme genres of music, the pompous, grandiose, larger than life vocabulary is used to describe the most mediocre, if not boring thing since the left over pizza. Some try to appear intelligent, some try to prove they possess some sort of clandestine knowledge… and some live up to their description.

I might have had some issues with understanding the description on the ‘Vitriseptome’ by Mitochondrion, where it was stated ‘11 alchemical Death Metal works, split over 17 tracks, to form a trilogy in three parts, in two phases, which elapses nearly 90 minutes in length’… until I actually managed to listen to the entire album in one take. Then it started to make perfect sense. But, lets cover the basics first.

Alchemy has always had its fans among metal fans, but rarely it was anything beyond words (cooking meth / smoking it at your parents garage does not count as alchemy). The ancient combination of natural philosophy and protoscience was always interested in transmutation of matter (usually of basic metals into noble ones, especially gold) and finding an elixir of eternal life and a cure to all illness. All good… until you’re challenged to turn this definition into an aural form… And that’s where Mitochondrion step in.

If the record hasn’t been divided with short intermezzos / intros into the next part / phase of the massive building up of this monolithic album, it would sound like what I imagine the death of the universe as we know it sounds like… while it’s changing into something even weirder. Yet, at the same time, those short parts are the ones enhancing the feeling of darkness and fright. After each intermezzo, the sound becomes denser and tighter, making it more and more difficult to the listener to escape, until the said listener has no more chance to escape and its bits and pieces are devoured by a black hole, where it changes into something else.

At this point it’s redundant to describe each song individually, as one song is just a part of the described process and doesn’t do the justice to neither the album or the band behind it. Is the album progressive then? It builds itself up, yet there’s nothing progressive about it. I’ve been familiar with how Mitochondrion sound and I knew what to expect from the new album. But it still managed to devour me whole. And that’s an incredibly amazing thing. This sort of music is based around building an atmosphere and taking the listener to another state of mind, showing it another realm etc. And that’s exactly what it does.

Describe your records or your favourite artists new album as you wish… but try to refrain yourself from shitting your pants out of sheer fright when ‘Vitriseptome’ does its work on you. It will leave a really bad aftertaste. While some just talk, others know actions are more important and they make an album exactly how they described it. Mitochondrion have been building their sound and message which comes with it since their inception over two decades ago and the often longer pauses between individual releases (13 years since the last full length and 8 since the last EP) are quickly justified with the indescribable darkness and overwhelming atmosphere of this monolithic record.