Destroying Symmetry

Improvised, channeled and recorded in one take at Tunefork Recording Studios on the 9th of August, 2013 – Beirut, Lebanon. Mixed and mastered by Fadi Tabbal on the 10th of October, 2013 – Beirut, Lebanon.

A unique figure in the international noise and industrial music scenes, Osman Arabi is a composer, producer and sound designer from Tripoli, Lebanon. His work elicits images of desolate industrial landscapes and shamanistic rites. From his beginnings in black metal, Arabi has progressed through such genres as dark ambient, industrial, tribal, psychedelic, electro-acoustic, power electronics and noise. His many projects have included Seeker, Kafan, Veinen, Shamanic Death Trance, The Ritual Inclusion of Code, harsh electronics outfit 20.SV, as well as nihilist Dutch collective Stalaggh. In 2000 Arabi stopped performing live - vanishing into the underground, not resurfacing until 2009…

For the past decade, Arabi has been developing – in complete secrecy – his 'occult guitar' playing, based on the sigil work of Austin Osman Spare. This new thread to his work was only recently unveiled, in late 2013, and is set to become the backbone of his live rituals hereon in.

Osman Arabi writes…

"Symmetry is humanity's nightmare, God's shape, the cosmic trap, the great fear, the ever controlling weakness, the illusion of perfection, the fraction of randomised patterns in endless chaos.

There was I and the other self who played guitar in praise of his idols and heroes. There was I and the 'I play guitar' sentence. They never met nor was there a unity between the two.

It was my existential crisis for the past 17 years… What I have always listened to, opposed what I wanted to play. I did not know how to play what I wanted to play; I only knew what I did not want to play.

Austin Osman Spare's sigil approach is a gateway to the subconscious to manifest a specific will. Reversing the actual process of sigil making intensifies the energy of the will yet not the will itself. Through drawing sigils based on what best visually represents the energy within, the sigil works as an intensifier of the inner flame. Overloading the conscious mind with different energy sigils will push the inner flame to a climax resulting in an intense formless subconscious flow. With repetition, the conscious mind memorises the visual representations and pushes them into the subconscious resulting in an automatic electrified flow when required.

Destroying Symmetry is the channelling of an electrified energy captured on the afternoon of August the 9th, 2013." – Osman Arabi, Tripoli, Lebanon, 9 April 2014.