From the primordial psycho-ambient folklore that inducted us through the Deprogrammed experience, we again discover our individual Papal possibilities. The autonomous sonic followers ordered, arranged, and set the controls of the inner mind to the outer limits via Teleportation To Gliese 12b. With devotees united, the enigmatic caprine-clad overlords led us through a retro-themed exploration of the irrational fear of the number 13 in the much-loved Triskaidekaphobia, and on through the paranormal beyond haunting themes, transistor radios, hypnotic beats, intoxicating motifs, and the lure of the music leading us further toward our Ambient Enlightenment.
Despite being warned by the spirit of dark and lonely water, we are irresistibly drawn again to the next chapter of musical revelation from The Pentagrams Of Discordia — the joyous Whispers About Radiance, arriving courtesy of Sounds of Discordia Original Future Frequencies (SODOFF).
Imagine a nostalgic psycho-acoustic cerebral callanetics programme devised by Barbarella, Dr. Carl Sagan (In The Ship Of The Imagination), and the Merry Pranksters with Tom Wolfe. If you can, then the wonderful Whispers About Radiance would be the result.
The album opens with “Slowing Of Evolution,” (is this a nod to Laraaji and Eno’s Ambient era?) and the tone is set deliberately from the start. The track opens calm and meditative, the kind of music that provokes thought before it provokes anything else. The imagination is massaged, gently, through various states of slow musical luminosity. It’s tempting to hear this track as evolution slowing itself down, literally — the stresses that society and technology pile onto us, gently unwound here, note by note, until a deep calm starts to take hold.
Musically, it’s part ancient and part modern, building a quiet euphoria as it goes. The palette is warm and seductive, rhythmic without being insistent, minimal and diffuse. Voices drift somewhere just out of reach, never resolving into clear dialogue, but every element in the mix seems built for pleasure. There’s an image that keeps surfacing while listening: a Hollywood haze, a lipstick-smeared Sharon Tate wandering through half-remembered highs, all of it leading back to some original source. By the track’s end, the mood has lifted into something close to choral joy.
“Refrain From Dusk” follows, and it moves through several rhythmically-driven sections that drift and merge into one another, echoing what might be a forgotten language, something that predates the voice itself. There’s a ritual quality to it, one that recedes into a kind of shamanic hum generated deep within the CPU — and it’s genuinely hard to tell whether any of it actually happened, or whether it was simply dreamed. The entropic motifs shift and multiply throughout, but they all resolve toward the same sun-drenched, euphoric release. The track stays warm and inviting for most of its runtime, until the final sequence arrives and delivers the radiance the album’s title promises. It isn’t a whisper by that point. It’s a revelation.
The closer, “Loops Of Entropy,” opens with a genuine sense of disorientation — a cosmic rhythmic convention seems to be forming, then themes from earlier in the record resurface without warning, broadcast outward like a mural painted among the stars. Skittering breakbeats sit beneath warbling synths and unstable, drifting oscillators, the whole thing sounding as though it’s being steered by dark spirits, or maybe just playful imps. Scattered spoken word repeats fragments of half-remembered dreams and sun-drenched virtual worlds, stitching pieces of the earlier tracks back into the mix. By the end, the album feels like one long waking dream, remembered in pieces, three songs folded into a single unbroken vision.
And so the rite draws to its close, though nothing here ever truly ends — it simply loops, entropy dissolving into radiance and radiance fading back into entropy, an ouroboros of breakbeats and drifting oscillators. Somewhere beyond the speakers, three unnamed figures tend their strange machine, coaxing whispers from circuitry and calling them revelations, and we, the willing initiates, ask for nothing more than to be led further in. Whispers About Radiance arrives on CD, a small silver talisman for a record that feels older than its own runtime, summoned — not composed. Play it in the dark. Let the glow find you. Amen, or something close to it.
Whispers About Radiance by Pentagrams Of Discordia releases on the 28th of August exclusively on Sounds Of Discordia Original Future Frequencies (SODOFF)
