It seems inevitable that I’d be writing my first eulogy on the same weekend that I write this review on The Summoner, the third album by Belgium composer Pepijn Caudron. There is almost too much cohesion between my balancing of personal, sentimental baggage and Caudron’s six-track meditation on death, grief, and sorrow, a compendium that also touches on emotional responses to losing someone close. It’s a fascinating overlap and one that could be easily dismissed, but it just seemed too much of a coincidence to not acknowledge. As this funeral looms closer and I think about how to best encapsulate a person’s life and present it to an assembly of others, those varying responses cloud my thoughts and feelings in a way that borders on the absurd. We all have different experiences of dealing with death, none of which are truly comparable, even when they relate to the same person.
That’s one of the things that makes The Summoner a tricky album to address. It’s based on five established stages of mourning, but the songs represent personal retaliation to losing a number of close friends. It takes the listener on an almost structured journey that seems so far removed from the actual physical state of grieving that it has every potential to fail at the first hurdle. Grief and loss are often perceived as chaotic sensations constantly in flux, and to feel sympathetic while being guided across a linear suite of bereavement is quite an ask. That’s how I’ve ended up approaching this record: with both curiosity and an unhealthy dosage of skepticism.
Because as much as we would like to rationalize the process, mourning can’t be so easily simplified into set stages or sequences that a person passes through — and even if mourning does happen to fall in line with these stages, the transitions through them are purely subjective and certainly can’t be allotted a specific time frame. “Acceptance,” the supposed final stage of mourning and the closing track on The Summoner, can be blown apart at any moment, only for the entire set of stages to recur. The album is therefore conceptually interesting on various levels, because the more attention one pays to the structure of each piece, the more the album begins to develop as an apparent rejection of categorization, outlining the one certainty that binds our lives together.
Caudron assimilates his musical tones in a way that’s as varied as the reactions anyone might have to loss. Where this has been deployed in the past through sample-based compositions that borrow from abstract sources to create atmosphere and heighten anxiety, here they are performed by musicians under instruction. From the obscure Amenra collaboration on “The Summoning” to the death ambient flurries of “Anger,” the album is not quite as linear as it pretends to be. It comes across as a morbid experiment as much as an outpouring of gloom, and even with “Acceptance” burying the hatchet, there is enough uncertainty in this album to forgo any attempt at a concrete conclusion.
The thread that runs through Grimoire (2011) and L’Autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu (2009) is the creation of ambience and pressure. Through pulling together scraps of sound and creating his own warped assimilation of a haunted setting, Caudron projects his audience into an almost instant recoil that even purveyors of the most abrasive music would have trouble conjuring. The Summoner opens with “Denial,” an unperturbed building of rigidity that thickens and peaks with a searing bouquet of metallic strings. As an opening piece, it plays to the composer’s strengths as an anxiety-builder before delivering a blow that induces numbness and obscurity. This is echoed again on “Depression” through rising tension and fear, but the aura is balanced with keys instead of strings. It’s unsettling, sure, but also celebratory and phlegmatic.
Having heard Works For Abattoir Fermé 2007-2011, it’s impossible to say that Kreng demonstrates an overarching aesthetic — his work is far too varied and instinctual. However, there is a distinctive personality within each of his albums that is wholly discerning, and whatever form that presence might assume, it sits center stage throughout The Summoner. After a daunting insight into the album’s premise and negotiating the intensity of buildup and decay on the opening track comes not only the assured album highlight, but also one of the most bewildering of Coudron’s arrangements to date. “Anger” ventures to tread at the most discomforting edges of grief and remorse. Through percussion, it presents mourning at the closest possible proximity and the personal impact of experiencing it. As the wrapping of wood on stretched skin reverberates, the strings kick in to reveal a horrendously pointed and vivid interplay of senses, like a plethora of stark, close-up images, each depicting the inflation of a goose bump.
But then there comes the album’s most curious twist: a 15-minute doom metal track that perpetuates all the clichés of an unleashed rage. It certainly makes for an unexpected counterpoint to the track’s ambient surroundings, but the mood is utterly skewed to a point of no return. After such a profound and personal introduction, there is little left to tempt the listener back in; “The Summoning” opens out the characteristic image of grief that had me swooning throughout the opening tracks, at least as a person in mourning. As an album, The Summoner is a desperate endeavor at pulling the pieces together while illustrating a wavering depth of despondency that leads toward acceptance. While one can’t hep but feel the personal touch has been sacrificed at the hands of diverse instrumentation, there are still some breathtaking compositions to be found here.
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