How bad can a year end that inevitably closes with a brand new album and a resurrected (sort of) project from Mr. Vakinov's tortured psyche?

Probably still pretty bad. He hasn't released a loaded carriage this year in the terms of music (apart from his new Dungeon Synth project).
seidmannen.bandcamp.com/releases
Nevertheless, today is the day for a new project and a new album release. Here's the latest one!

The project was previously known as "Avernus", but was later renamed to avoid unnecessary confusion, because there is already a band carrying the same name. The project was in a sense “resurrected” in the fall of 2019.

Inevitably, it's an interesting concept and an album. it's not a five star Skinny Puppy, Ministry or a Gary Numan clone, but it deserves your attention. Not quite like anything you have recently heard and it's certainly not an album to be played inside any crappy mainstream dance club for the sole enjoyment of the masses (I like to call them "The Meat Golems"), and as a friend of mine pointed out, "It's still high-drive rotation music for me". That pretty much sums it all up.

It's interesting to look at the continuity of words/motifs across the album. Obviously "light" being the main one, and also the double-meaning behind the title of the album. I would say that it was done not because it was trendy, but because it was necessary.

The album has a marvellous experimental industrial-like quality that puts one in elevated mood and launches him or her in that early 90's era when sex, drugs and industrial music were reigning supreme. Somebody with this little experience, to say nothing of talent, in messing about with esoteric symbolism and creative output needs to be credited with nuance. Uncle Al would've agree! "Manifesting Light in the Dark Universe" is a sonic companion to Borislav's writings on his blog (carrying the same name as the project), his YouTube channel and his other artistic work around the internet.

One of the appealing things about such type of music as an operative model is that it allows us to push a metaphor into the spirit world. Whatever the artist's 'spiritual local biosphere' looks like, it would be hard to say it's not vibrant and healthy... a give and take of movement, inspiration and creation across dimensions. This, I would argue, is the "Deep Structure" behind practical sorcery, divination, operative runology and so on: An accumulation of signs that are responded to and responded back to... that is how we got Enochian in the first place.

This makes this album less of a 'sync' and more of a portent elixir of high strangeness. It's not a 'bingo'! but it probably says something currently indescribable that it dropped at the end of this year, where reality was most certainly saturated with sufficient doses of high weirdness and magic. The next year is perhaps going to be no less weird than this one.

- Borislav Vakinov (Samhain, 2019)

Cover design and layout by Borislav Vakinov

Cover art by:
www.deviantart.com/alexandreev/