Dying Dark Magic is the first Etheric Bell album. I think it suffers from bad production. The whole thing sounds very lo-fi and decidedly a hackjob, although I think it is a good album if you like alternative ambient electronic music. I have deleted the song "Snow" from the album and will be posting an edited version which is much better. Despite production, this first Etheric Bell album is still above average, in my opinion obviously. I don't think the production is relatively unpolished because of laziness; it was just that I needed to complete this that night or else I would never move on to the other things I needed to do. There is a very beautiful almost-prettiness to some of the songs, very "unconventionally attractive" music.
The album is very archetypally feminine since it's introspective, emotionally sensitive, vulnerable, but I think it fails at going all the way with this. Hiding my voice behind a vocoder or autotune at certain parts sounds good and adds to soundscape in a positive way, but it takes away a lot of the emotive beauty and intimacy a song can have. And most of the music isn't smooth or serene enough to be like that. Dying Dark Magic playlist.
I expect Etheric Bell to get a lot more directed to the external world in an aggressive, masculine, and powerful way at a certain point.
Anyway, where does the title come from and what is the album cover?
Magic could refer to the occult and the band name has "etheric" in it, so it makes sense to assume the magic we're talking about here is not of the Penn and Teller variety. But my interest in the occult is not as serious as possible. I have not been obsessed enough in this subject to even read a single book by Crowley or to permanently memorize the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and definitely not to memorize all twenty-two of the Hebrew letters in order to practice Kabbalah. My interest is more about the general philosophy and basic symbolisms and a bit of the aesthetic of something otherworldly. And something about the panentheism of a lot of occult ontological models is really important (more on that in a later blog post).
The phrase "Dying Dark Magic" comes from a wilting datura bush I found. Datura is a poisonous plant whose toxins have mind-altering effects, so shamanic cultures from the Americas all the way to India have used this plant to come into contact with spirits and, in some cases, perform black magic. The album cover is an altered picture of the wilting datura bush which was frying and dying in the sun due to lack of care, bell-shaped flowers rotting and shrivelling in the grass. This symbolizes evil dark things going away, although there is something enticing and beautiful about the idea of dark magic: that you can attain success through sheer willpower and maybe a bit of supernatural intervention. Datura looks nice and smells amazing when you walk by the flowers at night (that's when the flowers open up since it is cold out and they will not burn). It should be noted that one should not be too curious about the effects of datura since it basically just causes you to be extremely dehydrated, to forget you are human; to be mentally impaired, sleepwalking and having horrific visions for days on end; to have lingering effects and possible psychosis for weeks, to possibly have permanent brain damage, and to possibly die. I am not responsible for you. You have to take care of yourself if you are morbidly curious about this deliriant. Stay away.