A past ceremony, newly engraved into vinyl. A minimal, beautiful LP edition of Phurpa's Lta Zor, a two-part performance that follows the ensembles prior Rituals Of Bon series on Zoharum. Like the stark grey sleeve art from Alexei Tegin that looks like an aged daguerreotype found in the papers of a long-dead Thelemite, Lta Zor is spare and haunting, free of any context outside of the sheer sonic power of the music. There are many artists that have tried to work with indigenous vocal traditions and ceremonial music in a contemporary manner, but noone does it like Phurpa. For over forty minutes, the group leads you into a dark, fire-lit yurt that slowly fills with a mutant strain of khöömei, the ancient throat-singing tradition of indigenous Russian tribes. If you are familiar with Phurpa's music, then you know what to expect: deep, intensely deep chanting and eerie vacalizations, slowly building and joining, rumbling outward from a huge, reververbamnt space, the sound spare and earthen.

Listening to "Lta Zor", it's easy to slip into a trancelike state - that is, as a matter of fact, exactly what the musicians and vocalists in Phurpa are engaging. The simple, powerful essence of ritual incanation and repetition, guttural language being stretched and pulled by the human throat into a vast hovering presence. Primal drumming and clanging percussion moves in and out, emerging with jarring gong-like crashes and brief passages of heavy, primordial rhythm. All as one, this combination of sounds reaching ecstatic heights, pretty imposing at times as the main voice chortles and stutters. Deep meditation sound drawn from a distant past, carefully mixed to create a singular listening experience. More voices join the primary as the reverie continues, and strange conversational fragments invade the space (this definitely has the sound and feel of a live performance in front of an audience); these never detrtact from the brute power of that bottomless throat, though. Strange wailing instrumentation drifts in and out, chased by bursts of chaotic metallic clatter. Ghostly drones of unknown origin flicker in the gloom. Monotone horns bleat out furious streams of sound, while a smokelike layer of low, growling ambient drift appears in the second half of the performance, sprawling out through the space and cloaking everything in a massive nocturnal haze. Towards the end, a huge stomping drumbeat slowly pounds away , breaking through that thick sonic miasma, making way for the vocals to return for one final extended howl into the abyssic infinite, building to a frenzied and almost frightening climax that sounds like standing before an open door to another world, a transmutation from the human to something beyond.

It's beautiful and monstrous, ominous and rapturous, best heard at high enough volume that you can feel the reverberations fropm Phurpa's voices penetrate you in the head and chest. This is physical, visceral music, to be fully heard and experienced.

Zoharum's vinyl release of this live ritual experience is pressed on 180 gram black vinyl, with silver on black printing for the sleeve, issued in an edition of 300 copies.