Los

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Release Date: 16 October

(All physical vinyl copies comes with download codes)

Ye Gods

‘Los’

In William Blake’s Jerusalem, he argues that imagination itself is “The real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow” – it seems Antoni Maiovvi, would agree. Especially given that Ye Gods, his latest and most monolithic project to date, arrived directly from a dream.

In this dream, Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke took him to task for easing off on his longtime study of hermetic ritual magick and instructed him to atone by making a record under the name Ye Gods. Upon waking, further investigation proved that this was also the name of a fictitious 70s supergroup invented by Peter Cook, in a telling display of cosmic symmetry.

Convinced this path was the correct one, he was duty bound to comply. And sure enough, the Ye Gods project began to evolve and metamorphosise, until this vehicle for ‘Occult Devotional Electronics’, became a beast capable of delivering ‘Los’ the towering and transformative new album for Rocket Recordings. Although Antoni's musical life has extended across contingents and genres in the last two decades - from the noise world of Bristol to the techno scene in Berlin, and via Italo-disco and soundtrack work to supporting Mogwai on their recent US tour – this album maps out yet more ambitious terrain. Through the widescreen sweep of three expansive tracks, ‘Los’ makes for an epiphanic journey of formidable scope and intensity.

Rich with texture and cinematic atmosphere, and as confident with spectral tension as emotive songcraft, it’s a work that breaks new ground for this intrepid polymath. Somewhat akin to the creative deep-dive that Scott Walker took into the avant-garde from ‘Tilt’ onwards, Los also conjures a sense of epic scale across tracks like the beat-driven ‘Outlier’ and the fearless soundscape trajectory ‘Handmaiden’ which brings to mind the work of Swans on White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity’, the dark ambience of Lustmord or Justin Broadrick’s Jesu.

Beyond these touchstones, inspiration came here not only from the ritual and psychedelic practices of his private life (including magick and LSD experiences) but from a desire to fight back against the prevailing zeitgeist of the mid-2020s. “For this record especially, I wanted to make something that would be antithetical to AI” he reckons. “I wanted each track to be very long as a deliberate 'fuck you' to the obvious musical ideas – the perfect Spotify-ready 3-minute run times and the general neatness I see in most modern music”.

In scaling these heights and plumbing these depths, he enlisted a variety of guest musicians from his now hometown in New Haven, Connecticut, whose particular eccentricities as well as the doors opened by his academic life there have bled into his creativity. He also enlisted legendary seer Jarboe to the fray, whose rawness and spiritual intensity had spurred him on, and whose involvement formed another full circle moment for the project. “She was happy to add spoken word and vocal textures, and she sent them remotely” notes Antoni. “On one had this helped finish some of the arrangements and on the other being told by Jarboe your voice sounds great already, is a huge confidence boost”.

The character in Blake’s book from which this album takes its name is a prophetic artist and embodiment of creativity and inspiration, a blacksmith whose hammering on his forge mirror those of the human heart. “It seemed to fit well, a hopeful character hidden in a prophetic/apocalyptic work” says Antoni. Thus is Los – an emotional life rendered in beats and tumult, and a reverie become a reality.

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