German practitioners of psychedelic music Lares have woven together one of the most completely perfect pieces of sound sculpture your reviewer has heard in a long, long time with their latest symphonic expression of les beaux artes, Et In Arcadia Ego.

A phrase that has echoed through the millennia, the title of the record is as prescient today as it ever was, even at the time of it’s first appearance in the works of the Greek poet Virgil. A supposition on the fragility of life and the ever present triumph of death, the artists have taken the phrase and wrought it in to the image of the modern day; Even in our contemporary paradise (Arcadia), death lurks, whether it be at the hand of man-made disease or war, the ever present manifestation of both being a catalyst for the gestation and final birth of this piece.

Here the artistes weld a phantasmagoria of styles to the central premise, in the process delivering an ourobouric meisterwerk to those with the capacity to understand. Et In Arcadia Ego is a behemoth of progressive styling and mood, a titanic fusion of clanging dissonance and woozy delirium that demands every of the listeners comprehension and empathy if it is to have any chance of success. This is a piece the listener must give themselves completely to, a piece for which utter immersion is the only answer.

The section of the work – one baulks at calling it a ‘movement’, though that is what it resembles, which lasts between the twenty and twenty fourth minutes is complete perfection, a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of doom that offers strange feelings of salvation at it’s end despite the utter desolation of it composition and the crushing nihilism of the deployed instrumentation. If Virgil’s paradise is already lost, it is here that Milton’s vision of a terrible beauty in the same place is surely found here.

A wonderful piece, that, whilst almost certainly of limited appeal to a wider audience, simply demands to be heard by those for whom ‘difficult’ is an attractive word.

Et In Arcadia Ego Is Out Now.