Label: Heavy Psych Sounds
Release date: January 10th, 2025
In the twilight hours of Uruk’s final days, when the last embers of the sacred flame dimmed atop the ziqqurat, a lone scribe set ink to clay. His hands trembled not from age, but from the visions seared into his mind. These visions were whispers of a prophecy carried by the desert winds, echoes of a dirge yet to be sung. This was no mere record of the past, nor a warning for the future. It was a lamentation, a hymn to the inescapable ruin that lay ahead. And though his name would fade like dust upon the temple steps, the echoes of his work would endure, passed from voice to voice, from Wyatt E. to “Zamāru Ultu Qereb Ziqquratu Part 1”.
The first murmurs of this chronicle arise in “Qaqqari Lā Târi Part 1”, a summoning from the depths of memory. A procession of unseen spirits moves through the crumbling temples, their steps slow, deliberate, resonating through cavernous halls. The air trembles with droning incantations, the heavy sigh of time’s unrelenting tide. A ten-minute invocation unfolds like smoke curling toward a forgotten sky, layering solemn strings and hypnotic percussion over a bed of shifting sands. It is not merely an opening, it is a threshold. Once crossed, there is no return.
What follows is the solemn breath before oblivion: “About the Culture of Death (Kerretu Mahrû)”. Here, the echoes of past rites manifest in spectral form, the ritualistic hum of an unseen priesthood conducting ceremonies for a kingdom already lost. A silence between the notes speaks louder than the music itself. It is a space where the dead linger, waiting for the call to cross the final river. This silence is a prayer cast into the void, answered only by the hush of impending doom.
Then, the prophecy takes form. “Im Lelya” emerges like a vision seared into the mind of a doomed oracle, a foretelling plucked from the scrolls of Daniel himself. The beasts rise from the churning waters, their monstrous forms shadowing the sun, their voices carried in the haunting chants of Tomer Damsky. Words spoken as if through a veil of flame, the interplay of solemnity and fury mirrors the rise and fall of forgotten empires. Each note is a stone, each crescendo a tower that will soon crumble. The seer does not weep, for what has been revealed cannot be undone.
A desperate invocation follows, a last attempt to bend the will of the gods: “The Diviner’s Prayer to the Gods of the Night”. With Nina Saeidi’s spectral voice at its heart, it is not a song but an offering, a plea sung beneath a sky choked with forgotten constellations. Šamaš and Ishtar, divine names echo through the temple ruins. Their power is not diminished, but it remains silent. The gods listen, yet they do not answer. The air is thick with reverence, with sorrow, with the finality of fate as the city’s last fire flickers, casting long shadows against cracked stone.
And then, the abyss. “Ahanu Ersetum” does not conclude, for there is no end to what has already been foretold. Instead, it unravels into darkness, an eleven-minute descent into the inevitable. The walls of Babylon tremble as the heavens weep, and the earth swallows the last of its monuments. Here, the listener stands at the precipice of all things: the past, the future, and the void between. As the final echoes fade, all that remains is silence, along with the weight of what has been lost.
At the heart of this journey are the Belgian duo Stéphane Rondia and Sébastien von Landau, the architects of sound who transform these ruins into something both vast and intimate. Rondia, with his mastery of electric and acoustic guitars, synths, and haunting vocals, lays the foundation upon which the temple of sound is constructed. Alongside him, von Landau conjures the spirits of forgotten ages with electric guitars, bass, saz, and synths. Every note becomes a prayer, and each reverberation an invocation of something timeless.
Wyatt E. does not craft mere soundscapes; they raise ruins from dust, resurrecting what was thought forgotten. This is not an album but a rite, a ritual not to remember history, but to relive it. The ziqqurat still stands, existing not only in its form but also in the echoes that will outlast us all. As the last note dissolves into the ether, the prophecy is fulfilled, and the cycle begins anew.
