Various Artists – The Five Senses
Various Artists – The Five Senses
Rune Serpent Europa
Release Date: 21/07/25
Running Time: 42:24
Review by Dark Juan
9/10
Good afternoon. I am back once more to charm and beguile. Normally, I would seek to shock and cause revulsion, but I need love too, and Mrs dark Juan has gone to her studio for a while as her friend Shelley has just got a new apartment in Eugene, Oregon, and she has rushed off to make something unspeakably horrific (that she would think is cute) for a housewarming gift. The good thing about Mrs Dark Juan having a studio is that I no longer have to be traumatised by half-completed eldritch horrors hanging off every door frame and handle in Crow Cottage. The downside is that she now leaves me unsupervised more frequently and there is alcohol in the house. There’s nowt else for it then….
Ah, that’s better. Nothing like a cold beer to sort out the thoughts and make you write something vaguely coherent. Time to drag the Platter of Splatter ™ out of confinement. It does not do me good to think too hard.
This time, I hit the review list at random, and I chose this album, “The Five Senses” as it is part of an art project by renowned Italian painter Saturno Butto featuring an exclusive compilation of unreleased tracks from industrial, metal and experimental music luminaries. Allow the blurb below to explain…
“Saturno Butto’s “Five Senses” oil paintings, consisting of 15 panels, are presented in three parts, unified by the theme of the five senses. Eros is a constant throughout the project, explored in three stages: beginning with beauty and sensuality, progressing to five frames suggestive of a video clip, and culminating in “pornographic echoes”.
However, as with the preceding works, this final series maintains an emphasis on elegance and compositional beauty, avoiding any crudeness. In essence, it’s a reinterpretation of the theme from my perspective, structured into three sets of five works, each employing five models.
The first set features two subjects per panel, each representing one of the five senses without any sequential order. The second set, titled “ritual”, depicts five models on each panel, this time marking sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste in a deliberate sequence, akin to an initiatory ritual. The third set involves three models per painting, interpreting one of the five senses in a much more explicit manner for each individual work, again without a specific order, mirroring the first series.
Let’s get something out of the way before we dive into the music, though. There’s not really any Metal on this record. What there is, though, is a lot of work I have not heard before and quite a lot of Industrial and Drone, some mad pagan stuff and some music that just defies description. The first track is a juddering, terrifying thing that sets a scene of unease and worry that permeates the listener throughout the rest of the album. This is not a record of mainstream music at all. We are in the outer realms of experience here, where music is taken apart and reassembled in shapes and geometries previously unknown to humankind. Impossible angles and diaphanous melodic strands combine in a new musical continuum that causes madness in those who gaze upon it for too long.
And this ties in with the visual component of this art project – the paintings are visceral, dripping with life but with an underlying sense of… not decay, but timelessness, as if the subjects in the works are beyond the ravages of time and space and hover in a narrow frame of reality trapped in a bubble inside the normal passing of time. A continuum in which the sensual experience is all, where the sating of gross desires has given way to ever more subtle pressings on the nerves, ever more sensual due to the fleeting or gossamer nature of the sensations the people in the paintings are experiencing.
It is the same with the music – Where The Magus amp up their Satanic schlock to grandiose levels, but do so knowingly, their extremity counter to the soft singing of Lisa Hammer on ‘Shadowland’, where the groove is mellow and introspective and the sounds soothing and relaxing. This contrasts again with the gothic bleakness of Puppe Magnetik’s ‘Who Will Sing This Sorrow’ and the grinding, screaming Industrial horror machinery of Experiment Death Patient, whose offering to this compilation is not as much music as unbearable, raw nerve flaying visceral torture. Staat Und Organisation switch up the vibe yet again, with a grand piano playing beautifully beneath quietly fizzing electronics before breaking into the kind of synth work that prefaces the massive denouement that could be an orgasm, could be a colossal explosion, could be the end of the fucking world. It builds and it builds and you are edging along with it, held at the very brink of release until you can stand it no more. You want the world to end, or to cum harder than you ever have in your life, or for the explosion to wipe out you and everyone else…
…And it doesn’t happen. You are left gasping on the precipice of sensation, denied that final outburst of passion in whatever form it was going to come, and you are raw, a being composed entirely of sensation with no release. You are a universe afire with touch, or violence, or sex for that brief moment of shocking, unbearably white clarity until it sinks back within you and you become yourself again.
Just like the visual art this compilation accompanies.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System has locked Dark Juan away in the special room because he’s got “that” look in his eye again and was muttering about putting his enemies through a bacon slicer feet first. He’s fucking OBSESSED with bacon slicers. It awards this compilation 9/10. A mark was deducted because the nearest the compilation got to Metal was a bit of distorted guitar on Regard Extreme’s ‘Sensual Symphony’. However, it is a challenging body of work and one well worth the effort if you like having music to unpick and deconstruct.
The charming and beguiling went well, didn’t it? Less than a thousand words before we returned to murder. I am ashamed.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Amphoterism – Intro for Saturno
02. Phobia Effect Presents Time Machines – I
03. Kathodos – Death _ Rebirth (Part I)
04. Schatten Muse – Ich Ging Durch Ein Land, Durch Ein Trauriges Land
05. Elder Futhark – Arthurus ad astra ascendit
06. Ataraxia – Breath of Soundrops
07. Puppe Magnetik – Who Will Sing This Sorrow
08. Stabat Mortii – Mors Voluntaria
09. The Magus – Hymn to Lucifer
10. Regard Extreme – Sensual Symphony
11. Lisa Hammer – Shadowland
12. Experiment Death Patient – The Ritual 23
13. Staat Und Organisation presents Les Joyaux De La Princesse – Untitled
LINKS:
Saturno Butto online:
Rune Serpent Europa online:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
