| The Berlin Requiem | ||||
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| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | June 2006 | |||
| Recorded | Spring 2006, at Prague | |||
| Genre | Industrial, experimental, minimalism, outsider, art brut, soundscapes | |||
| Length | 41:11 | |||
| Label | Old Europa Cafe (OECD 084) | |||
| Producer | Autopsia, Mustakillah | |||
| Autopsia chronology | ||||
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| Review scores | |
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| Source | Rating |
| heathenharvest.com | link |
| side-line.com | link |
| connexionbizarre.net | link |
The Berlin Requiem is an album by Autopsia, a Czech industrial/experimental music group.
When Mary Shelley makes a choice regarding the place on which Doctor Frankenstein will finally render to our memory the creature which he procreated, she opts for an icy wasteland. The place that looks like a perfect description of eternity, where everything is motionless, out of the senses, like a frozen image in which only a wind might be giving a promise of itself – a breath of death, something which remains at the very end, yet testifying that we are still here, on this side of the life.
It is as if The Berlin Requiem deals with what can scarcely be discerned by the senses, be heard, in the realm of the gelid nothingness. As if there faintly audible sounds of the alterations of crystals and frozen bodies are recorded. Duration of the sound is expanding to the very limits of articulation. Only the silent quiver of white light and cold motions is audible. The sound extends through the space that has neither the horizon, nor forms, nor boundaries. Perhaps it is the place where the change is the largest – one that cannot be uttered, such a large one that it cannot be recorded or comprehended.
And yet it is as if The Requiem belongs to a certain place and a certain time. This belonging is indicated through Berthold Brecht's poem and through Berlin itself – it is designated by the name of the world in which the death really occurs. The poem itself praises the transience – the moment when we actually separate ourselves from the things that do not mean anything to us, the moment when we can depart placidly. However, we almost cannot tell anything about this “placidity”, maybe only that it is almost light, cold – almost non-sensorial. What links the city and the frosty desert here is the unutterable itself. In order to perceive this, one needs not travel afar to the end of the world nor to climb high to mountain peaks.
Frankenstein's creature vanished in the white wasteland. We shall never learn if it crossed the frontier of death or is it still with us. It is as if The Requiem restores this ambiguity over and again, as if the sound is that which is still there – that which joins together the word and the unutterable.
Vladimir Mattioni 19. 02. 2007
All tracks composed by Autopsia.
Performed by Dämmerung Orchestra
Omnipotence is the quality of having unlimited power and potential. Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence only to the deity of their faith. In the monotheistic philosophies of Abrahamic religions, omnipotence is often listed as one of a deity's characteristics among many, including omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence. The presence of all these properties in a single entity has given rise to considerable theological debate, prominently including the problem of theodicy, the question of why such a deity would permit the manifestation of evil. It is accepted in philosophy and science that omnipotence can never be effectively understood.
A monster is often a type of grotesque creature, whose appearance frightens and whose powers of destruction threaten the human world's social or moral order.
Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.
"Dies irae" is a Latin sequence attributed to either Thomas of Celano of the Franciscans (1200–c.1265) or to Latino Malabranca Orsini, lector at the Dominican studium at Santa Sabina, the forerunner of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum in Rome. The sequence dates from at least the thirteenth century, though it is possible that it is much older, with some sources ascribing its origin to St. Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), or Bonaventure (1221–1274).
A Requiem or Requiem Mass, also known as Mass for the dead or Mass of the dead, is a Mass in the Catholic Church offered for the repose of the soul or souls of one or more deceased persons, using a particular form of the Roman Missal. It is usually, but not necessarily, celebrated in the context of a funeral.
A eulogy is a speech or writing in praise of a person or persons or things, especially one who recently died or retired or as a term of endearment.
The Messa da Requiem is a musical setting of the Catholic funeral mass (Requiem) for four soloists, double choir and orchestra by Giuseppe Verdi. It was composed in memory of Alessandro Manzoni, an Italian poet and novelist whom Verdi admired. The first performance, at the San Marco church in Milan on 22 May 1874, marked the first anniversary of Manzoni's death. The work was at one time referred to as the Manzoni Requiem. Considered too operatic to be performed in a liturgical setting, it is usually given in concert form of around 90 minutes in length. Musicologist David Rosen calls it 'probably the most frequently performed major choral work composed since the compilation of Mozart's Requiem'.
The Requiem in D minor, K. 626, is a requiem mass by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). Mozart composed part of the Requiem in Vienna in late 1791, but it was unfinished at his death on 5 December the same year. A completed version dated 1792 by Franz Xaver Süssmayr was delivered to Count Franz von Walsegg, who commissioned the piece for a requiem service to commemorate the anniversary of his wife's death on 14 February.
Yang Zhu, also known as Yang Zi or Yangzi, was a Chinese philosopher during the Warring States period. An early ethical egoist alternative to Mohist and Confucian thought, Yang Zhu's surviving ideas appear primarily in the Chinese texts Huainanzi, Lüshi Chunqiu, Mengzi, and possibly the Liezi and Zhuangzi.
Duende or tener duende is a Spanish term for a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity, often connected with flamenco. The term derives from "duen de casa", which was also related to an elf or goblin-like creature in Spanish and Latin American folklore.
Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame was a one-shot prestige format comic book published in 2000 by DC Comics.
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is a long poem written by American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) as an elegy to President Abraham Lincoln. It was written in the summer of 1865 during a period of profound national mourning in the aftermath of the president's assassination on April 14 earlier that year.
Vyacheslav Petrovich Artyomov is a Russian and Soviet composer.
In This Moment is an American heavy metal band from Los Angeles, California, formed by singer Maria Brink and guitarist Chris Howorth in 2005. They found drummer Jeff Fabb and started the band as Dying Star. Unhappy with their musical direction, they changed their name to In This Moment and gained two band members, guitarist Blake Bunzel and bassist Josh Newell. In 2005, bassist Newell left the band and was replaced by Jesse Landry.
Frankenstein is a 2004 American television miniseries based on the 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. It follows the original book more closely than other adaptations.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
"A slumber did my spirit seal" is a poem written by William Wordsworth in 1798 and published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. It is usually included as one of his The Lucy poems, although it is the only poem of the series not to mention her name. The poem is a mere eight lines long; two "stanzas."
A Star-Crossed Wasteland is the third studio album by American heavy metal band In This Moment. The album was first released in Germany on July 9, 2010, and later in the United States by Century Media. It was named by Alternative Press as one of the most anticipated releases of 2010. This is the first album not to feature bassist Jesse Landry; it is also the band's only album to feature bassist Kyle Konkiel, and the last album with founding members rhythm guitarist Blake Bunzel and drummer Jeff Fabb.
Max Reger's 1915 Requiem, Op. 144b, is a late Romantic setting of Friedrich Hebbel's poem "Requiem" for alto or baritone solo, chorus and orchestra. It is Reger's last completed work for chorus and orchestra, dedicated in the autograph as Dem Andenken der im Kriege 1914/15 gefallenen deutschen Helden.
"Mutability" is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley which appeared in the 1816 collection Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude: And Other Poems. Half of the poem is quoted in his wife Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) although his authorship is not acknowledged—appropriately, since the poem is quoted by the central character, Frankenstein, and the novel is set in the previous century. There is also a prose version of the same themes of the poem in Frankenstein.
