Review Summary: For the victims at Club Colectiv, a very fitting tribute, and for Chioreanu's artistic career, a memorable an inspirational effort.
As currently one of the most revered album artists of the extreme metal underground, Costin Chioreanu has admitted on numerous occasions that "I like to include the audible space as well as the visual in my work". This brutally honest perception of his own artistic talents eventually culminated in a musical compilation entitled
The Quest for a Morning Star, released in November last year. However, this wasn't merely an exercise in building on some half-forgotten ideas bubbled up during his time as a world-renowned artist of extreme metal album covers, nor was it attempted proof to show the world he could encompass a voyage into mass multimedia.
The Quest... was initially put together as a sorrowful homage to the 63 lives lost at the Club Colectiv in Romania during a fire, and all proceedings and money raised for the production of Chioreanu's sole collaboration was used to help the victims of the tragic event. Many artists in this day and age find a multitude of ways to express their grief and sorrow at such tragic events around the world, but devoting a hour of avant-garde, extreme metal-related musicianship was naturally the only way for Chioreanu to express his.
And what an excellent album
The Quest... turns out to be. Firstly, it should be duly noted that Costin Chioreanu himself had begun writing some of the songs which made it to their final cut on the album as far back as 2011, also a time when Chioreanu wasn't particularly as well-known in his artistic field as he is now. Of course over time he has built on the progressive structure of some of these songs, and the end result is very rarely short of phenomenal. Accompanying him on the album's opening triumvirate of "Absent Abstract Above", "An Empire Beneath Oblivion" and "Phantasma and the Midnight Stalker" is Aura Noir's Rune Eriksen (Guitar, FX, percussion), Andre Ionut of The Boy who Cried Wolf (Bass) and Tudor Diaconescu who provides a stunning violin performance on the final part of this trilogy. Such a line-up may already spark interest to the listener before the album itself has even started playing, but it should be made common knowledge that from a songwriting aspect, Chioreanu offered all hands on deck himself. The musicianship explores various tones and themes, most commonly those found within atmospheric black metal and the stranger avant-garde side of the extreme metal underground, but it's really within the finesse and polish that these three songs reach near flawless peaks. Take Diaconescu's violin performance on "Phantasma and the Midnight Stalker" for example. After a few minutes of increasingly tense ambient progression, the instrument flows both soothingly and heart-stoppingly into the ominous soundtrack, accompanied by a slightly heavier guitar tone than before. What is demonstrated here is more than a mere focus on years of classical training-rather, it is the strong culmination of dynamics and harmonies neatly tied together to create one beautiful ode to a real-life tragedy. As a matter of fact, it is the soundtrack to a calming afterlife for all the victims who died during the fire.
The album continues to inspire and impress afterwards, though certainly challenges the listener with constant changes in tone and harmony. "Ihwaz" is a sole 8-minute ambient piece which for some, is certainly hard to get stuck into. Alike Burzum's "Gebrechlichkeit", it follows a very repetitive pattern but builds up a very focused and sublime emotion, ready to explode in the final lasting seconds. This song is one of a few to be solely composed by Chioreanu himself, and it definitely shows when compared to the album's opening salvo in "Absent Abstract Above". However, none of the feelings felt in
The Quest...'s opening triumvirate of musical pieces are lost, rather grown and spread out over lengthier songs. This previous statement leads us into the album's closing two epics, "A Storm Shall Take the Words Away" and "Outside the Great Circle", both over 12 minutes respectively. The two songs strongly contrast each other, but only more and more with repeated listens. The former is definitely the rawer, grittier of the two, and definitely demonstrates the more disturbing side of Chioreanu's songwriting and composition. Utilizing short, frequent bursts of heaviness in the second half of "A Storm Shall Take the Words Away", Chioreanu here focuses on menacing dynamics to literally bring the listener to their knees, and then lift them up ethereally into the open air. It's with this musical style that Chioreanu can alter both sides of the same musical coin to suit listeners of all types of pitch and tone, but it's still far from an easy listen. For one thing, the song is hard to get into until the real bite arrives halfway. The same can be said for "Outside the Great Circle", definitively a softer musical piece by comparison but which also has its own moments of aggression, solidified by Attila Csihar's faintly demonic whispers breathing life into an otherwise murky background. That said, the two songs work with each other to complement each other's differences regarding levels of emotional grief and sorrow.
Indeed, there's never quite a happy musical moment to indulge in here, but knowing what the album is devoted to, why would there be any? Of course, this has been one sublime form of experimentation of Costin Chioreanu, but he has done so in as unique a way as any self-respecting artist could have done. With
The Quest..., he has opened up every emotional outburst of all lives lost at the Club Colectiv in Bulgaria, and although he had consulted in help from the extreme metal unserground to deliver his musical output, the ideas have been solely to his credit. Chioreanu here has amalgamated several musical pieces separated by years of focus and forethought into one hour-long compilation, developed through sheer emotion and ethereal ambient soundscapes.
