Made up of a single 11-minute track,  Frejyalune’s  divination :: ritual is not an album in the traditional sense. In fact, listeners with more conventional taste will find that the work barely resembles music as they know it. This is because divination :: ritual seeks to be something much more; a musical journey verging on a spiritual experience.

The soundscape is dominated by the primal, melismatic vocalizations of a single vocalist. In the background, eclectic and heavily-distorted instrumentation gives the work a foreign, even alien feel. The combined effect is a sense of grandiosity; a feeling of gravity that evokes imagery ranging from vast desert landscapes to universal genesis itself.

The vocals that pervade the album are entirely lyric-less. Interestingly though, one quickly becomes accustomed to this fact, almost forgetting that they are not listening to English. Perhaps this is because the fervid shouts and wails throughout the album speak to something primal within us; an innate understanding of vocal inflection that precedes human language. Whatever the case, listeners find themselves intuitively sensing that the message being relayed by our vocalist is one of deep spiritual import.

While the album may be free-form, it is anything but formless. Like nature itself the work ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes, dividing its one track into interconnected chapters that tell a story of the listener’s interpretation.

Though the tale woven by Frejyalune is grand, it is anything but impersonal. Like the lone voice ringing out from an amorphous sea of sound, divination :: ritual appeals to something deeply human: a sense of smallness in an infinitely vast, mysterious universe.

Header image by Christopher Rodgers