Gydja: Liber Babalon

Gydja's music is divinely-inspired, ambient and mysterious. I discovered a link to her website a couple of years ago while searching for themes based on "dark" goddess imagery/ideas and musics and was immediately entranced by both her choice of subject matter and uniquely creative sound-weavings.

About Gydja:

Gydja, an Old Norse word for "priestess", was adopted as a musical name by Abby Helasdottir in 1995, with the aim of creating music that could be used for magickal and shamanic purposes. Some of the earliest ideas involved using field recordings, and basing whole pieces on these sounds in a largely unprocessed way. This is still a concern of Gydja, but with more emphasis now being placed on abstracting these sounds so that, whilst they retain a sense of their original source, they become something else entirely. MORE...

Liber Babalon is a double-CD release of ritual dark ambient by Gydja, pressed on black cdrs and limited to 156 copies. While most works by Gydja are conceived well in advance of their execution, this was not the case with Liber Babalon. The seed for this release came whilst working on the Clothed in Shadow series: a collection of eight songs, with eight accompanying films, considering eight different dark goddesses. The Clothed in Shadow track for Babalon incorporated a reading of the Gnostic text, Thunder, Perfect Mind, and during the processing of this reading, a second Babalon track emerged, based solely on the sound of the manipulated vocals. This track became alphaOmega: A Drone for the Throne of Babalon, the conclusion to Liber Babalon.

The process was repeated with several other tracks, basing entire pieces on sounds sourced from readings of the Birth of Babalon poem by Jack Parsons, Waratah Blossoms from Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies, and several other Babalon-related texts. MORE...