Album of the Week Rn Rn (Staff Review)

Rn is the self-titled debut from Irish trio Ran Trench (Crispy Jason / Solar Bears / Panikatax), Jim Henson voice, sound and visual artist Tara Baoth Mooney, and Diarmuid MacDiarmada (The Jimmy Cake, Nurse With Wound, The Tycho Brahe, brother of Lankums Cormac MacDiarmada). The album is an impressive, evocative work that draws on folk, psychedelia, noise, drone and more across seven eclectic, engrossing tracks.

Opener Paidir Poball begins with Baoth Mooneys gentle invocations, recalling the foreboding tones of Portisheads Beth Gibbons. Her vocals soon give way to a tangle of noise, drone and fuzzed-out, curdling doom-metal broth. It has ritualistic, dark psychedelic edge like an increasingly bad trip into the bowels of the earth. Mounting riffs, pounding percussion and synthesised howls are joined by detached chants and whirring electronics before crumbling into buzzing static and plucked acoustic throbs.

Its a gothic dirge, in the best sense, of heavy psych, yet rather than repeat the formula, Rn switch things up on Your Death My Body, with complex, dance-inflected rhythms and spectral sprechgesang vocals that morph into primal yells, evocative of Swans Jarboe. Echoes of Swans post-industrial, primordial post-rock recur throughout the record, and like much of the best music of that ilk, Your Death My Body grows at its own pace, undeterred as bass pulses provide a somewhat groovy bedrock for ghostly noise and siren-like synths.

At the centre of the album is Terror Moon, foregrounding a ceremonial, incantatory rhythm beaten out with hypnotic precision, over which mysterious vocals drift before being consumed by fuzzed guitars and flickering synths, the whole thing eventually collapsing in on itself amidst waves of distortion. Its a serious sonic assault that proves psychedelic rock, freed of pastiche, still carries real transportive power. Such Is the Kingdom follows with drones, clangs, warped speech and uneasy ambience. It presents 3 minutes of relative respite in the wake of Terror Moons aural assault, albeit down a darkened corridor of haunted ambience recalling textures and atmospheres one may expect to find on a Zoviet France record.

Strike It unleashes an unrelenting cacophony of fierce riffs, crashing cymbals, tape-loops and Baoth Mooneys versatile vocals, veering from cold, spoken passages to banshee wails and yells. Finally, the patient Caoineadh closes the record. Beginning with Baoth Mooneys folk-inspired vocal, tinged with mystical echoes of Middle Eastern and North African religious singing, it builds with drones, plaintive synths, steady rhythms and dub-inflected textures toward a majestic, heavenly ascension. An ascension that is interrupted by the stuttering of tape, grinding the album to a halt, rendering it a lost transmission, once buried and now uncovered.

Rn - Rn is OUT NOW on Vinyl LP & CD.

Highly recommended for fans of XN, Lankum, RIS, and also Swans, Sunn O))), Earth, Bardo Pond.

The Irish word Rn can mean secret, mystery, or love, or perhaps some elusive combination of the three, reflecting the many aspects of life that defy easy explanation. In wrestling with these, it can become necessary to commit oneself entirely, to jump in at the deep end in search of the vibrations and feelings at hand. This is where the band Rn comes in.

The debut album of Rn is the result of three powerful artists Tara Baoth Mooney, Diarmiud MacDiarmada and Rian Trench locking horns and forming a spiritually intrepid outfit who alchemies experimental methods and improvisatory states to reach intimidating heights of sonic and psychic intensity. An extremely diverse range of musical influences also make their presence felt here, from William Basinski and Pauline Oliveros to Om, Coil and The Necks.

A centrepiece of the album drawn from such is the potent Terror Moon, on which a thunderous percussive backdrop is matched in intensity by potent chants and mantric ululations from Tara as well a ferocious tumult of layered noise and fevered invective. Your Death My Body meanwhile projects exorcising vocal meditations through a musical prism that touches on the lineage of spectral beat-driven atmospherics that connects Portishead and Tara Clerkin Trio.

The stakes are high in the creative realm of Rn, with the records ritualistic approach leading it to the territory of the truly elemental and primal. Yet this is a record with the metaphysical firepower to cleanse the spirit even whilst it stares darkness full in the face.

As Ursula Le Guin once said - In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void in the increasingly materialistic and inhospitable realm of 2025, there can be few better companions than Rn to embrace reality and confront this void.