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Released on November 3, 2014 via I, Voidhanger Records
“The most beautiful thing one can experience is the mysterious.”
That’s a statement you can find on the Bandcamp page of Mare Cognitum, Jacob Buczarski’s formidable one-man black metal act from Santa Ana, California. It’s an almost direct quote by Albert Einstein, who was discussing the mysteries of the universe and their profound effect on the arts and sciences. The idea is basically this: the human mind, accosted and inspired by the unknowable, is uniquely capable of taking raw enigma and alchemizing it into works of beauty. It’s a cool idea, and one that could hold water as a guiding tenet of atmospheric black metal. And it’s an ambitious move, on Mare Cognitum’s part, to run with Einstein’s quote as a kind of mission statement, as it introduces a readymade metric by which to judge the act’s new album Phobos Monolith: how does the work in question hold up as mystery-inspired beauty?
The short answer to the question is, admirably. From start to finish, Phobos Monolith seeps with grand, large-scale musical interpretations of the cosmos. The guitar riffs are imaginative and wrist-breaking; the drums rattle and rage; the synthesizer, the genre’s trusty stand-by, looms behind the tumult without ever getting too close. A great mix bolsters the extensive interplay between instruments, ensuring that every part of the chaos is heard. All told, Phobos Monolith, which is the band’s first album on I, Voidhanger Records, and third overall, is some of the best music Mare Cognitum has released.
Buczarski’s vocals, which alternate between howl and growl, are the album’s crowning achievement, as they give anguished human voice to the music’s stargazing blitz. When, around the eight-minute mark of album opener ‘Weaving the Thread of Transcendence’, his screams give way to a descending guitar line against a keyboard backdrop, it sounds as if the whole celestial sphere were collapsing.
Mare Cognitum’s fascination with the universe, and humanity’s place in it, is evident. The project takes its name from a dark lunar plain that translates from Latin as “The Sea that has Become Known.” The album’s title comes from a bizarre obelisk-like rock found on the surface of a Martian moon. More to the point, that cover art by Luciana Nedelea depicts a sublimely uninhabitable interstellar landscape, complete with distant stars peeking through a turbulent nebula. Like the album it decorates, it’s beautiful and expansive. But, again like the album, it’s also a little claustrophobic.
That claustrophobic quality is due in part to Phobos Monolith having such a personal sound. There’s no mistaking that this is the work of a visionary setting philosophical wonder to wax, and the final result is fittingly uncompromising and assured. Drawing from a wide selection of influences, the music manages to maintain a singular aura. For this reason, Phobos Monolith reminds me of the second installment of Blut Aus Nord’s 777 trilogy, 2011’s The Desanctification. On the surface, the two albums rarely sound like one another. Desanctification is industrial and eldritch, while Phobos Monolith is driving and ardent. The former summons up the cold of infinite space, whereas the latter voices the emotions that contemplation of that space arouses. But they are two sides of the same coin. Each album gives itself over to some kind of Beyond; each finds beauty in mystery.
Detractors may fault Phobos Monolith for its rarified air. Soul-searching, astro-obsessed black metal is not for everyone, and this album is both of these things. But the truth is, I hope that this album gains enough of a following to attract a small group of detractors, because it deserves the attention. Buczarski is an accomplished musician, and his work as Mare Cognitum offers a dynamic and beautiful listen. We are all of us descended from the stars; on Phobos Monolith, Mare Cognitum delivers on the promise of that lineage.
