What is the “great working” about which g🜞t – presumably pronounced “gut” – speaks? What does the symbol, 🜞 (artistically rendered for the album’s cover), mean? And what are we to make of the lyrics for 🜞‘s first half?
Let’s address these questions in reverse order.
A literal translation seems unwarranted, and so, through a hermetic process I shall not here name, I’ve translated the lyrics as follows:
“An angel calls from the Heavens
And their song is like a dream
And a honey drips
And floods Hell
And voices echo, as they do in valleys
But when God arrives, all is silent.”
What can we say about these passages? That the forces of good – God and Heaven and their army of angels – conspire to render evil – and Satan and demons and Hell – obsolete? That this is a music of both devotion and dominion? Is it one of triumph over darkness or one of Revelation‘s trumpets? Will the trees be burned? Will the mountains throw themselves into the seas? Will Wormwood strike us dead? Is that what God brings to us? Further, what are we to make of 🜞‘s second half, in which there are no lyrics at all? Is this the deathly silence that clothes God?
Let us continue.
🜞, I have come to understand, is the alchemical symbol for the crocus of iron, Crocus martis; chemical name: red iron sulfate (FeSO4), a pigment and bi-product of the Oil of Vitriol (modern name: sulfuric acid). Iron is associated with Mars, which is associated with war and violence (and therefore the spilling of iron-rich blood), with masculinity and strength and courage, with genitals and gonads generally, with trauma and pain.
🜄 is the symbol for water (or possibly simply liquid).
🜍 is the symbol for sulfur (and flipped upside down resembles the iron crocus, 🜞).
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
