On July 4, Liturgy will unveil archival releases of recordings spanning 2004-2008 from the band’s early, lo-fi solo era that have yet to appear on DSP’s. These recordings document Liturgy’s Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s path from a ‘hyperborean’ to a ‘transcendental’ language of black metal. These albums— 2005’s The Paranoiac Miracle, 2007’s Immortal Life, and 2008’s Harmonium— “… trace my creative and emotional passage from a straightforwardly black metal language inspired by Xasthur and the French Les Legiones Noires scene from the 1990s towards something more angelic, vitalist and affirmative drawing from totalism, sacred music, screamo and shoegaze. These are all bedroom (technically dorm room) recordings made by tracking guitars, drum machine and whisper vocals through an Ibanez guitar pedal directly into a four track (in the case of The Paranoiac Miracle / Eternal Void) or computer (in the case of Immortal Life and Harmonium),” comments Haela Ravenna Hunt-Henrdrix.
She continues: “I was studying classical composition throughout this time and immersed in the aughts’ art-adjacent Brooklyn music scene as well as the art world, although I felt a strong sense of alienation from all of these contexts. Much of this music started out as harmony and counterpoint exercises before being translated to guitar, and there has been a lot of discussion of the philosophical influence behind transcendental black metal, especially that of Nietzsche and Deleuze. But what I want to foreground here is the emotional progression. I needed to make these albums and needed for the music to evolve in the way it did, there was an urgency to it that is simply impossible to put into words.“
Starting in reverse-chronological order: 2008’s Harmonium, which was never publicly released aside from streaming on MySpace at the time (along with a music video for “Beyond the Magic Forest”, directed by Michelle Scourtos and released that year on youtube, documents the birth of the mature Liturgy sound, at least in solo form, pairing the burst beat with postminimalist guitar counterpoint and postromantic harmony.
2007’s Immortal Life, which had a number of releases with different album covers, marks the initial intuition and decisive shift from the language of black metal that had initially inspired Liturgy to something new. The least accessible and simplest of the early recordings, Hunt-Hendrix says it: “…holds a special place in my heart. This album was accompanied by my first US tour. While it’s been floating around on the internet since it came out, it is going up on streaming platforms and DSPs for the first time, following 2024’s full-band remake ‘Immortal Life II.'”
The 2024 Immortal Life II release provides additional context, coming after 2023’s 93696 which was widely regarded as the culmination of a creative trajectory. Immortal Life II, the cover of which restaged the original Immortal Life photo at Machines with Magnets (the studio that worked on 2019’s H.A.Q.Q., 2020’s Origin of the Alimonies and mixed 93696), began an exploration of the beginning of that trajectory, which continues with this archival release.
Finally, 2005’s The Paranoiac Miracle was initially a hand-numbered edition of ten cassettes and is now combined into a single release with 2006’s three-song Eternal Void EP, recorded during the same sessions and also originally an informal limited cassette release. This body of work predates any idea about transcendental black metal, the burst beat, or any overt search for redemption or divinization.
Find these archival releases on streaming / DSP’s for the first time on July 4th, and see Liturgy on the road this summer. More news soon…
Liturgy, live:
Jul 02 Guatemala City, GT ^
Jul 03 Mexico City, MX ^
Jul 06 Brooklyn, NY ^
Jul 18 Duisburg, DE
Jul 19 Hamburg, DE
Jul 21 Munich, DE
Jul 22 Schorndorf, DE
Jul 23 Karlsruhe, DE
Jul 24 Berlin, DE
Jul 25 Warsaw, PL
Jul 26 Wroclaw, PL
Jul 30 Olumpiada, GR %
Jul 31 Tasov, CZ %
Aug 01 Matra Sasto, HU
Aug 02 Bratislava, SK
Aug 03 Ljubljana, SI
Aug 04 Ljubljana, SI %
Aug 07 Orom, RS
Aug 15 Haarlem, NL ^
^ Solo Performance
% Philosophy Presentation
