SETNA — Cycle I (review)

SETNA — Cycle I album cover Album · 2008 · Jazz Related Rock Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
Sean Trane
French sextet that produced one of the most exciting 90’s and 00’s Zeuhl album, along with maybe One Shot’s debut album; the album’s subtitle of From Darkness To Consciousness speaks mountains of the music held within its coded information sealed in some type of silicone matter. Under a very bland artwork, the double Fender-Rhodes attack sextet give you one of the most essential Zeuhl adventures, helped out by a few buddies, namely a third Rhodes player Bugela and especially One Shot’s guitarist James Mc Gaw, who offers an amazing and lengthy spine-chilling guitar solo on the closing Unité track. A striking feature of this album is the simply amazing sound of the album, partly due to the awesome work of Udi Koomran.

Nine superb and melancholic mostly-instrumental tracks (even though Natacha Jouet’s superb vocals appear frequently) ranging from almost 3-mins to 13-mins bring plenty of musical orgasms to anyone willing to simply sit back and surrender to a spellbinding music. Indeed the early part of the album starts hypnotizing slow with the album-shortest Ombres (shadows), but slowly picks up speed with the awesomely chanted Tristesse (sadness) and reach grandiose status with the amazing Intuition. Incredibly enough Jouet’s slightly ethnic chants manage to push even further the spell on the chilling Voir (see), which sets your average Magma track back to the drawing board (IMHO) and the crescendo continues with Ouverture-Conscience, and the intense Connaître where main composer Nicolas Goulay switches to a deep-droning minimoog underlying Laurent’s superb soprano sax.

Definitely one of the 00’s best oeuvre, one that saw a first sequel into their offshoot project of Xing sa, where three of the Setna members develop a similar but rawer or to-the-bone oeuvre of Création Du Monde. Less than a year after that XS release, Setna will release the second Cycle of their oeuvre, and I just can’t wait for it.
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