Andy Aquarius is one of my favourite artists. I am not a religious man but through him I definitely feel closer to touching the spiritual and the mystical. His recent albums Holy Glade, Forest Grimoire, and Golla Gorroppu find themselves on heavy rotation when I want to hear music that can coax tranquillity out of the most stressful of times. Whenever I have friends round and put his music on, people always ask who is playing and usually end up buying his releases for themselves. He has side projects such as the albums Chasyng Drakens and The Organs Of Matter Wheel released under the name Ozbolt (Andy Ozbolt is his real name) and this release, Bells From The Deep, under the pseudonym King Vatra. Vatra means “hearth” or “fireplace” in Albanian and Romanian, and “fire” in Serbo-Croatian.
I have said in many reviews that simplicity is hard to do and authenticity – which seems to have become the currency of the modern age – is hard to fake. Bells From The deep has both. It seems as though Aquarius, as King Vatra, has become a cypher for the Musica universalis, the ‘music of the spheres’, like a radio tuning into space and time.
The tracks on Bells From The Deep feel simultaneously modern and ancient, and you can’t help imagine standing in the early morning mist as it swirls around standing stones or the skeleton of a disused church. King Vatra says of the release that it’s “Dungeon Chants & Vapor Cave echoing from the depths of Vatra’s abysmal chambers. An intuitive delivery of deconstructed Romanian & French poetry and folklore, sung with zero phonetic awareness but primordial conviction.”
Bells From The Deep is Zen-calm and more than capable of soothing the savage beast (or hangover). The music of Andy Aquarius / King Vatra / Ozbolt is as deeply beautiful and, with so much rage everywhere, his world is eye-of-the-hurricane calm and nourishment for the soul.
There are two other meditative releases on King Vatra’s Bandcamp page Bog Procession and Now I Can See The Moon
Andy Aquarius: Instagram | Facebook | Website
Review by Paul F Cook
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