Pazuzu - 1996 - Awaken the Dragon

 

Hammerheart Records – HHR114  379.74MB FLAC

The cover replaces the first album’s shadowed stone entrance with an image of circular entanglement. Dragons and serpentine bodies twist around one another inside an ornamental ring, their heads, tails and limbs becoming difficult to separate. The central creatures do not appear to be fighting so much as generating one another, a wheel of scales, teeth and perpetual return framed by fragments of old manuscript lettering. Awaken the Dragon works in much the same way. Melodies repeatedly coil back into themselves, synthetic instruments imitate the memory of older instruments, and the album’s medieval world seems to awaken not from historical ruins but from the electronic circuitry attempting to imagine them. The post presents the artwork from Hammerheart Records’ expanded reissue with almost no additional framing, leaving the dragon-wheel, catalog number and large lossless archive to identify the object.

Where And All Was Silent... sounded like a forbidden ceremony overheard beneath the earth, Awaken the Dragon steps into a wider and considerably more colorful fantasy world. Raymond Wells had become the project’s central composer, performer, vocalist and lyricist, with only limited compositional contributions remaining from his earlier collaborators in the Austrian black-metal network. The transformation is immediately audible. The massed ritual voices, primitive percussion and suffocating chambers of the debut give way to clearer melodies, brisker rhythms, harpsichord-like keyboards, imaginary folk instruments and compositions shaped more like individual songs. The darkness has not vanished, but it now shares the stage with taverns, emperors, thieves, spirit winds, moonlight and apocalyptic pageantry.

The eight-and-a-half-minute “Awaken the Dragon – Millennium Two” establishes this larger scale. Its title joins ancient myth to approaching modern catastrophe, placing the dragon at the threshold of a new millennium rather than safely inside a distant fairy tale. The creature can be heard as destruction, dormant power or history waking after a period of deceptive quiet. Repeated keyboard themes steadily enlarge the piece while spoken and sung voices give it the quality of a proclamation. Pazuzu’s electronic palette remains proudly artificial, but the arrangement is much more controlled than on the debut. Sounds enter with dramatic purpose instead of simply crowding the ritual. The result resembles an inexpensive theatrical production whose painted scenery becomes convincing because every performer behaves as though the kingdom beyond it truly exists.

“The Five Emperors” compresses that grandeur into a more formal procession. Its clipped, harpsichord-like figures suggest a royal court assembled inside an old computer game, but the synthetic quality is part of the pleasure rather than an obstacle to it. Pazuzu is not reconstructing medieval music with scholarly instruments. He is creating a remembered Middle Ages assembled from fantasy novels, horror films, metal records, role-playing games and whatever sounds a 1990s keyboard could summon. The emperors therefore rule no identifiable historical territory. They belong to an alternate Europe produced by electronic memory, where a ceremonial melody can contain several centuries at once.

“Bal of Thieves,” featuring Eugenie Hartzel, is the album’s most openly playful turn. Its title promises a thieves’ ball, and the music behaves like a crooked dance heard through the door of an overcrowded inn. The female voice gives the scene a human center while the compact arrangement avoids the heavy apocalyptic weight of the opening tracks. “In a Tavern” later returns to similar territory, making drinking rooms, wandering performers and temporary communities part of the album’s geography. These pieces show that Pazuzu’s fantasy world contains ordinary life beneath its dragons and prophecies. People still gather, dance, deceive one another and exchange stories while larger supernatural forces move beyond the walls.

“Royaume des rêves,” subtitled “Baronesse chap. II,” directly continues the baroness narrative begun on And All Was Silent.... Co-written with Protector and featuring Kasia’s voice, it is one of the clearest bridges between the two albums. The earlier chapter placed the baroness within a sinister ritual drama; the sequel leads her into a “kingdom of dreams,” where the atmosphere becomes more melodic and romantic without becoming safe. Dream kingdoms in Pazuzu are not retreats from darkness. They are unstable territories where desire, memory and supernatural danger use the same scenery. Kasia’s vocal presence makes the piece feel like a miniature radio play whose missing chapters the listener must invent.

The instrumental “The Messenger and the Spiritwind” allows the album to breathe after these densely narrated scenes. Its moving keyboard lines suggest travel across a landscape rather than confinement within a chamber. This sense of motion is one of the record’s major developments. The debut opened gates and descended stairways; Awaken the Dragon crosses borders. Wind, roads, courts and taverns imply a world extending beyond the limits of the recording. The music does not need to describe every mountain or forest because its recurring melodies persuade the imagination that unexplored regions continue behind the speakers.

The middle sequence darkens through “The King of Vermin,” “Verfall” and “Until the Sun Returns.” The German word Verfall means deterioration or decay, and these songs remind us that the album’s brighter folk colors belong to a civilization approaching collapse. Pestilence, fading light and political grandeur coexist, making the fantasy realm feel less like escapism than an elaborate model of historical anxiety. The project’s name adds another layer. The ancient Pazuzu was associated with destructive winds and disease but could also be invoked as protection against other demonic forces. That contradiction suits music in which the monster may be both catastrophe and guardian, awakened because something worse is approaching.

The self-titled “Pazuzu” turns the project’s name into a dramatic subject, while “Im Mondschein (Die Tragik des Todes)” draws upon the poetry of Georg Trakl. Trakl’s imagery of moonlight, decline, silence and death fits naturally within Wells’ electronic medievalism, but it also reconnects the fantasy to Austrian literary history. The imagined kingdom is not built only from dragons and occult names. It carries the melancholy of Central European ruin, where beauty often appears at the instant it begins to decay. The final “Outro,” composed by Silenius, closes the original album with a small surviving trace of Pazuzu’s earlier collective identity.

The Hammerheart edition preserved in the post adds “The First Dominion – Renewal of Ages” and “Rebellion,” extending the original forty-nine-minute sequence beyond an hour. “The First Dominion” had previously appeared on the Austrian Black Metal Syndicate compilation Norici Obscura Pars, connecting Pazuzu back to the scene from which it emerged. The bonus material slightly changes the album’s ending. Instead of disappearing after Silenius’ brief outro, the reissue reopens the gates and sends the listener through another cycle of dominion, renewal and revolt. The dragon on the cover becomes an image of the edition itself: an album ending, beginning again and swallowing its own chronology.

Awaken the Dragon is more accessible than its predecessor, but accessibility does not make it ordinary. Its melodies can be immediate, its rhythms sometimes danceable, and its fantasy scenes occasionally cheerful, yet the record retains the peculiar conviction that made Pazuzu distinctive. Wells treats synthetic sound as a tool for constructing private mythology rather than as a substitute for a “real” orchestra. The plastic harpsichords, sampled flutes and programmed percussion are now historical artifacts in their own right, carrying the texture of a period when musicians could build enormous imaginary worlds from equipment with sharply visible limitations.

That handmade enormity is the album’s lasting charm. A dragon does not awaken because the recording perfectly imitates wings, fire or an ancient court. It awakens because repetition, melody, voice and belief persuade the listener to complete the creature. The intertwined bodies on the cover leave gaps where anatomy should be, just as the music leaves gaps between its inexpensive electronic sounds and the world they represent. Imagination enters those gaps and finishes the construction. Awaken the Dragon may be less subterranean and frightening than And All Was Silent..., but it is more mobile, melodic and generously inhabited. The first album opened a dark passage. This one reveals the improbable kingdom that had been growing on the other side.