In her book The Empathy Exams (2014), Leslie Jamison writes that “[e]mpathy isn’t just something that happens to us… it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves… Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations…” (p. 23). If you’re asking yourself how in the blue bloody hell this relates to Belgium’s hypno-doom ensemble Neptunian Maximalism… well, let’s see if we can get there together.
The album’s first section, for example, is broken into four parts but plays as a single, 34-minute suite, opening with an ominous build of low cymbal wash and gong that blossoms out into a Sunn O)))-ish guitar and trumpet drone. The second part introduces the thud of drums and wordless, chanting vocals, settling into a meditative trudge like Om, but when band mastermind Guillaume Cazalet comes back in on trumpet for “Unisson Composition,” the theme and bluesy riff feels like a molten lava slow-mo take on “21st Century Schizoid Man.” This opening suite ends with “Dream Chord,” an eight-minute coda of mostly beatific sound, with unidentifiable, airy tones floating in the clotting resin of a deep bass oscillation.
Whether you see the deliberate, patient unfolding of this album as a challenge or an invitation might be the key, because the band feels spiritually locked into the crafting of the album as experience – the album as a painstakingly interlocked puzzle box. This context is important, because the depth of your enjoyment of Le Sacre du Soleil Invaincu (which translates as something like “The Rite of the Unvanquished Sun” or “The Coronation of the Unbeaten Sun”) depends on a certain suspension of disbelief, or at least the ability to bring yourself into the projected ecstatic mindset of the performers. How can you connect with someone else’s ritual? But already, this is a weirdly defensive posture to be writing from, isn’t it? That I would assume you come into this with skepticism or bitterness rather than openness to whatever sounds the artists seek to convey? It is true that Neptunian Maximalism’s long-form albums can feel like they demand precisely the kind of focus and attention span that are such scarce currency these days, but does that mean I should write you, the reader, off as having already written them, the band, off?
This might be an inopportune time to inform you that the first song of this album’s second disc (“Raag Todi – Alaap on Surbahar”) is a 16+-minute solo performance by Cazalet on the surbahar, a large stringed instrument from India that is like a bass version of the sitar. Its seeming incongruence here reminds me a little bit of James Blackshaw’s use of the tamboura on his wonderful album O True Believers. It is both arrestingly beautiful and unlikely what you came to this album in search of. After this pensive, chiming interlude, however, the album’s noisiest stretch tumbles in, with “Chaotic Polyphonic Taan Combinations” a pulsating squall of stuttering percussion and overlapping waves of guitar. Reshma Goolamy’s bass guitar is particularly powerful on this piece and its continuation, “MadhyalayaYama DCCLXXII,” where it curls and prowls back like a threatening dub eruption. This middle section is the album’s most intense, and often recalls fellow experimental travelers like Chaos Echoes and Aluk Todolo.
The album’s third part marries parts of all that preceded it, bringing the droned density into a more spacious light, playing Cazalet’s guitar more plaintively, tentatively across ripples of billowing undertow. When the track switches to “Rite D’Ovairture & Badhat Unisson” with a drop and the introduction of some straining vocals, it gives the piece a bit of latter-period Urfaust flavor, and the song eventually moves into a great, slow-snaked groove. The album closes with an 11-minute exhalation, a desert heat mirage that opens in a hush with gong and then an extended passage from Cazalet playing a Central Asian double-reed instrument called the zurna. In these quieter moments, the album sometimes recalls Karl Sanders’s solo albums. The twitchy, knuckled guitar twang and woozily thumping drums that eventually rise from the quiet all float atop a modal churn that has no particular arc or destination other than a single point of silencing convergence.
When I try to formulate a critical judgment about Le Sacre du Soleil Invaincu, my brain seems to stall. Part of me wants to say that, much like Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (“The Rite of Spring”), it’s a work far easier to admire than to enjoy. But I also don’t think that’s quite right, because each time I sink into this album – and really let myself sink in without falling prey to distraction or irritability – I find its mesmerism compelling and earnest. Still, there’s a distance between me and the music that I can’t quite bridge. It’s like participating in a communal religious ceremony, but you don’t know the words and your body doesn’t move with the same remembered reflexes.
But then I come back to Jamison’s empathy, and I come back to how I imagine the musicians might have felt, striving after ecstasy in their performance. The word “empathy” comes to English from the Greek, but in an odd delay of a few millennia and a detour through German. It combines the Greek em- (meaning ‘in’) and pathos (meaning ‘feeling’), or empatheia (though the original Greek usage meant something more like “passion”), but its English usage is actually an early 20th century translation of the German Einfühlung (also literally “in-feeling”). The word “ecstasy” also comes to English via Greek, as in ek- (meaning “out”) and stasis (which comes from the Greek verb histanai, meaning “to stand”). These two words, then, seem to describe opposite movements: empathy, “in-feeling,” to move into the feeling of another; and ecstasy, “out-standing,” to move outside of oneself. But doesn’t each also require the other? How do you empathize with someone else – literally feel in (no giggling, please) – without stepping outside yourself?
So I keep thinking about the band. Not about what they might have wanted me to hear in the album, but about what they might have been chasing together. I can’t shake the sense of place, either, this London church that they made to vibrate. The promotional copy provided for the album is with me: “Over four days, NNMM undertook a residency in the church, forming an unusual yet profound bond with its architecture and the history and energy it held within. In this space, they morphed into a new entity, turning their performance into an ecstatic experience” (emphasis added). St. John’s on Bethnal Green is just two or three miles from St. Paul’s Cathedral, and I’ve recently finished reading Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time, which has a chapter in which Laing discusses the alien, pockmarked landscape of London after the Blitz: “My father was always telling us stories about wartime London, inspired by nearly every street we walked down. It was a source of fascination to him, the way the city had been so rapidly ruined and so drastically rebuilt… In those days the bombsites were occupied by a profusion of flowering weeds, so that the ruined city resembled a garden, incongruously mantled in gold and imperial purple, the ripe smell of buddleia mixing with the sourness of brick dust and mould on the air” (Laing 2024, pp. 230-231).
I have no idea if St. John’s on Bethnal Green was damaged in the Blitz, or what temporary, opportunistic gardens might have sprung from its wreck. But I picture it and I picture Neptunian Maximalism, eighty years on, channeling their noise and shaping it upward, outward. London, like any now-gleaming city, stands on the compacted sediment of its own history, its metal and refracting glass transmuted from soot and bleach and bone. And I think, if you listen like that, you can hear both histories.
It has been years since I read John le Carré’s 1963 debut novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but the imagery of German arclights dancing across the Berlin Wall – truthfully, just that word ‘arclight’ soldered itself directly to a nerve – has stuck with me. So I looked it up just now, finding this other postwar vision: “There was only one light in the checkpoint, a reading lamp with a green shade, but the glow of the arclights, like artificial moonlight, filled the cabin. Darkness had fallen, and with it silence. They spoke as if they were afraid of being overheard. Leamas went to the window and waited, in front of him the road and to either side the Wall, a dirty, ugly thing of breeze blocks and strands of barbed wire, lit with cheap yellow light… East and west of the Wall lay the unrestored part of Berlin, a half-world of ruin, drawn in two dimensions, crags of war” (Le Carré 1963, Chapter 1).
Jamison’s empathy, remember, is a choice, “a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves…” (And the word “extend,” too, circles the same etymology, though this time via Latin, as ex- [meaning “out”] and the verb tendere [meaning “to stretch”]; thus “to extend ourselves” is “to stretch ourselves out.”) And when I choose empathy with this album, the peculiar tangle of associations I’ve lodged myself in is, in a way, an attempt to pursue ecstasy. I did not stand there, letting the amplifiers sound my ribcage like a tuning fork, feeling down through my feet to the roots of the land and what they know. But the unbeaten sun? The unvanquished? It shines on all the ones who are outside myself, all the ones whose in-feeling depends on my out-standing. That’s a choice I would like to see myself make unfailingly. What about you?
