There’s something intensely terrifying and equally tantalizing about exploring the dark side of anything, be it ourselves, others, or something else entirely. Without them, we would never come to relish in our highest highs, after all.
The quarantine gave us plenty of time to explore whatever intangibles we wished, but electronica artist Sabarah Pilon, the mastermind behind experimental electronic project DenMother, took it nine steps further with her latest concept album, Frantic Ram.
Loosely inspired by such material as Dante’ Inferno, the occult, mythology, and Jungian archetypes, Pilon’s latest collection seeks to take the listener on a journey through the darkest depths of oneself, coming face-to-face with loss, fear, shame, anger, grief, and inevitability along the way.
“It did actually become a bit of an issue at one point,” says Pilon. “I hadn’t prepared thoroughly enough and allowed myself to somewhat submit to some of these dark energies while in an already emotionally weakened state.
“I really just dove in and completely submerged myself in meditations, ceremony, readings, research and writing.”
And as Pilon submerged herself in creative inspiration, so too are we plunged right into the aftermath of her journey with “Descent,” an ostensibly haunting and harmonic opening that lifts us into this alien atmosphere, rendering us helpless, yet inviting of this mystery before us.
The album doesn’t come without a bite either, with tracks like “Salem,” “Gates,” “King,” and “Birds” cranking up the collection’s attitude with intense percussion and sharp, haunting synthesizer notes. Pilon herself isn’t afraid to embody the piercing effect this auditory journey gives either, with her vocals becoming especially intense in tracks like “Birds.”
And it’s all tied together with blends of the atmospheric opener and small sparks of intensity in the album’s remaining, interlude-esque material, like “Redeemless” and the titular “Frantic Ram”—which does an especially good job of wrapping up the album—with Pilon serving up her lyrical best.
Frantic Ram is a beautiful, haunting journey with a beginning, middle, and end, but we hope with all our hearts that the end of DenMother is far, far from being a reality.