It arrived the way these things ought to arrive: unannounced, unmarked, wrapped in kraft paper stamped with a dripping pentagram and sealed with an instruction we were almost tempted to obey. Do not break the seal. We broke it anyway. Inside: a sampler mini-CD just under twenty minutes long, a scattering of tarot cards we cannot explain, and a silence where a tracklist should have been. No names. No song titles. No country of origin. Just a ram-headed figure pierced by ten swords, staring up from the card table.
That absence of information turns out to be the whole point. Pentagrams Of Discordia — three shadows, maybe, operating from nowhere in particular — have built a collection of tracks that feel like a séance was conducted through deeply unstable analogue circuitry, all shimmering wooze and invocation. Whispers About Radiance doesn’t begin so much as it is summoned. The opening passage arrives with no percussion at all, just warm, unstable analogue synthesizer tones folding over one another like arcs of sunlight filtering through a canopy of branches. There isn’t a single wasted layer in it; every tone is placed with the patience of people who know exactly how to translate melancholy and nostalgia into music. It plays as an invocation, a hearth-lit ritual meant to loosen the listener’s grip on the present tense before the real conjuring starts.
And conjure it does. What follows is a slow procession of breakbeats dragged through syrup — not rushed, certainly not urgent, moving with the weighted certainty of a rite performed exactly as it has always been performed. Kicks land like final pronouncements. The bass runs deep and constant, a low-end presence so grounding it works like a summoning circle sketched beneath the track, holding everything else in place while it drifts. It’s a genuinely gorgeous piece of sound design, thick without smothering anything above it, the kind of low end that takes real restraint to get right. Over it, melodies emerge single-note, plain, but faded and worn at the edges, unstable, unearthed rather than composed, sepia-toned artifacts dug up mid-decay. The simplicity is deceptive; there’s real melodic instinct in how little these tunes need to say to have profound effect. Voices drift through in muffled, reversed, gooey fragments, too slowed to fully parse, murmuring what could be liturgy, could be numerology, perhaps they are invocations or prayers for the dead — or they could be nothing at all — the mini-album never confirms, and the not-knowing is where its power lives.
There’s a shifting sense throughout of things running backwards through time, of tape wound the wrong way and left to unspool. Synths open one passage reversed and eerie, pads creeping in sideways, drums shuffling as though the whole rhythm section were caught walking against the current — a genuinely tricky arrangement to pull off. Deep in that same piece, a mournful lead melody drifts to the surface, not so much played as dredged up, dragging old memory and a sense of nostalgia with it. It’s one of the most quietly beautiful passages on the record, a melody simple enough to hum but weighted with far more feeling than its few notes should be able to carry. This is that signature POD sound at its finest.
Elsewhere, oscillators refuse to sit in tune with one another, drifting apart and colliding again in small, gorgeous accidents — the sound of longing rendered directly into waveform, grief and nostalgia beating against each other like two out-of-phase signals that were never meant to reconcile but can’t stop trying. It’s a difficult effect to control, that constant near-miss tuning, and the fact that it stays beautiful rather than curdling into noise says a great deal about the composers behind it. And on the record’s most disorienting passage, the machinery itself seems to stir awake mid-track — muffled arpeggios flickering like a system booting from dormancy, radio chatter bleeding through in broken, half-heard transmissions, before the whole structure collapses into silence and reassembles itself heavier, slower, and thicker than before, as though whatever spirit had been raised needed a moment to fully cross over. The structural nerve of it is impressive: most producers wouldn’t risk a full stop this deep into a track, let alone trust it to pay off.
Twenty minutes is a strange length for a ritual. It is too long for a spell but too short for a full ceremony, and that in-between quality suits Pentagrams Of Discordia perfectly. This mini-album is a fragment of something larger, something that is coming like storm clouds glimpsed through static and half-speed tape hiss, delivered by a trio who apparently want to be known through their work alone rather than their mortal identities. Whether that anonymity is a genuine magickal practice or simple spotlight shyness hardly matters by the time the disc runs out. Whispers About Radiance gets under the skin the way real hauntings do: quietly, steadily, and with the unshakeable feeling that something has followed you out of the room.