SIXTH COMM Fruits of Yggdrasil LP DEATH IN JUNE Eyas .6

$

56

  Sixth Comm / 6th Comm / .6 Comm
" Fruits of Yggdrasil "
Rare 1987 early goth vinyl LP Death In June vocalist's project EYAS MEDIA
The first edition of this rare record, with the song missing from later editions, and featuring an embossed sleeve in Runic design.  Freya Aswynn & O'Kill.
ONLY 669 COPIES WERE EVER PRESSED

 We will ship ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.  $5 US  $7 Canada $10 overseas

See the wiki info below.
 Record cover would be NM-.  Beautiful raised lettering, in reflective silver on the front and back.  Plus, the cover has all sorts of "quilted" lines all over it, giving it the feel of some sort of old gothic or victorian tome. LP is NM- and looks like it may have been listened to only once if ever at all.  Still in their earliest stages.  This was their third LP in 1987.  Probably the most aesthetically made cover, literally jam-packed with inserts, including lyrics, a book, merch inserts, all in like-new condition.  This is a beautiful collector's piece.

This was released in 1987.  Now 2 decades old and a year.
This has been kept in pristine shape for 21 years.
 See the photos.
Fans of magick, runes, Norse Mythology, shamanic practices, etc. will be enchanted to acquire this rare piece.

Please note that the song Nietsche, which has been omitted from subsequent repressings, both on LP and CD, is included in this original limited pressing.  The song is on the album, and the lyrics are inside the booklet.

Also included in the inserts is an ad for Dark Lily, which supposedly tells you how to use your "powers".

There is information on early Eyas records I've never read about elsewhere inside.  This album features the first recording ever to be made of this ancient shamanic practice based on Norse Mythology of "Galdr" / Runesongs. 
Genre:  Ritual Ambient / Northern Tradition


01 Havamal
02 Voluspa
03 Wotan
04 Invocation Of The Gods
05 Nithing
06 Sigdrifumal
07 North Star
08 Nietsche
09 Ragnarök

Freya Aswynn is a figure of considerable distinction within the Norse heathen community. A dedicated priestess of Odin and rune-mistress, Aswynn established The Rune Gild UK and later the UK branch of the Ring Of Troth, and also wrote Leaves Of Yggdrasil, originally published in 1988 and later reissued as Northern Mysteries And Magick: Runes, Gods & Feminine Powers by Llewellyn Publishing in 1998. This book is widely regarded as a modern classic of northern tradition occultism.

Freya Aswynn also has important links to the development of the original London neo-folk scene of the 1980s, largely due to the fact that David Tibet of Current 93 lived for a time in the Enclave, Aswynn’s house in Tufnell Park. Freya Aswynn contributed vocals to the 1988 Current 93 album Swastikas For Noddy, with her performance being reused in the later C93 releases Crooked Crosses For The Nodding God, Looney Runes, and Sixsixsix: Sicksicksick. She also worked with Ian Read’s project Fire + Ice, appearing on the1994 album Hollow Ways, and in 1997, Aswynn released Wolf Rune, a limited-edition split 7” single with French project Les Joyaux De La Princesse.

She has also released three albums under her own name, The Fruits of Yggdrasil, 1995’s Shades Of Yggdrasil and 1998’s Songs Of Yggdrasil, which was released to accompany the Northern Mysteries and Magick book. The Fruits of Yggdrasil was originally released as a limited-edition vinyl LP on Eyas Media in 1987. (THAT'S THE ONE YOU'RE LOOKING AT HERE) Eyas Media was operated by Patrick Leagas, a.k.a. Patrick O’Kill, who was a member of the original line-up of Death In June before leaving to found Sixth Comm (later known as 6Comm) and, with his then-partner Amodali, the techno-pagan project Mother Destruction. The Fruits of Yggdrasil was re-released in 2002 on the Austrian label Edition Ananael, with bonus tracks including Freya’s tracks with Current 93 and Fire + Ice, as well as two tracks with Wayne Owens originally released on Shade of Yggdrasil, and it has now been released by the Hau Ruck! label run by Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch, in a sumptuous eight-panel foil-blocked digipack containing lyrics and sleeve notes from the original LP version.

The Hau Ruck! edition of Fruits of Yggdrasil… contains eight tracks, totalling 40 minutes – the bonus tracks included on the Ananael edition are absent, presumably for copyright reasons. There is also one track from the original album which is listed on the sleeve but missing from the CD – ‘Nietsche’ [sic], which has lyrics taken from Also Sprach Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. I don’t know why this track is missing, but it’s a shame. And, after 20 years, couldn’t that egregious misspelling of the name of the western world’s most misspelled philosopher have been corrected?

The Fruits of Yggdrasil is a strange album to review, since it’s not primarily intended as a piece of musical entertainment. The album’s focus is on initiation into the northern mysteries, and any student of rune-lore will find this a rewarding listen, in particular for the guidance on galdr (the art of chanting the rune names in a correct and potent way)  that it offers. That’s not to say that the album has no aesthetic merit, only that this isn’t its principal purpose.

The album opens with its longest track, ‘Havamal’, which is based on the poem from the Norse Edda, using the English translation by WH Auden and PB Taylor. This poem describes the initiatory ordeal undergone by the god Odin, to win the secrets of the runes, and there follows a series of eighteen runic enchantments. Freya Aswynn’s powerful, commanding voice really does justice to the chanting of these rune charms. It’s worth pointing out, though, that the runes she associates with each of the charms aren’t specified in the ‘Havamal’ – this is her own personal interpretation. Patrick Leagas’ musical accompaniment blends disjointed fragments of orchestral brass with ambient electronics and heavy percussion to produce a turbulent, martial atmosphere, over which Asywnn’s voice howls like a true harbinger of doom. The following track, ‘Voluspa’, which is also taken from the Edda, begins slightly less alarmingly, but soon moves into a dark realm of its own. Aswynn speaks in the voice of Heid, a prophetess and witch who relates to Odin the story of the creation of the cosmos, and its ultimate destruction in the apocalyptic battle of Ragnarok. The music of ‘Voluspa’ is initially unobtrusive ambient, with low orchestral strings and piano, but as the witch Heid reveals more and more of the secrets of the cosmos, the music gradually becomes louder and more menacing, with looped crowd noise creating an almost NON-like wall of sound and the piano becoming driving and discordant. ‘Wotan’ has lyrics taken from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, and the music here is soft and soothing, with plucked harp and ethereal, angelic voices. ‘Invocation Of The Gods’ is written by Aswynn, and as the title suggests, this is an actual magic invocation designed to be performed in ritual conditions. Aswynn’s resonant voice rings out imperiously, invoking in turn Odin, Heimdall, Thor and Freya from the north, east and south and west respectively. There’s no musical accompaniment to this as such, only a few sound effects of wolves, battle-horns, thunder etc.

The next track, ‘Nithing’, is short, only a minute and a half, but unforgettably powerful. ‘Nithing’ is a Norse word for a contemptible, worthless person, and this song is a curse directed against an unnamed nothing. With malevolent forces being invoked against a chaotic backdrop of screaming, heavy percussion and dark ambient atmospherics, this curse really has a tangible power to it. If will leave you feeling limp and pitifully grateful that the fury of Freya Aswynn isn’t being directed towards you. The lyrics given on the sleeve are garbled, though – a section of the previous track’s lyrics have slipped into ‘Nithing’.

‘Sigdrifamal’ is taken from the Poetic Edda, like ‘Havamal’ and ‘Voluspa’, and it features runic galdr-chanting like ‘Havamal’. The sparing musical accompaniment, consisting of blasts of horns, low drums and orchestral strings, really allow the qualities of Aswynn’s distinctive voice to be appreciated. ‘North Star’ is largely instrumental, with only a briefcouple of sentences of text. The combination of airy pop melody and heavy electronic beats found here are quite similar to the direction that Patrick Leagas’ former bandmate, Douglas P., took Death In June in, at roughly the same time that Fruits of Yggdrasil was being recorded. The closing track, ‘Ragnarok’, opens with a passage of classical music which I’m pretty sure is Wagner, though I can’t place it exactly. The slow, elegiac pace isn’t broken when Aswynn’s voice comes in, narrating the doom of the gods. Only after her recitation has finished does the music suddenly surge into martial Sturm und Drang, with thunderous timpani and dramatic brass and choral accents.

Of the various Freya Aswynn albums available, The Fruits of Yggdrasil is undoubtedly the best. When I interviewed Freya Aswynn for Judas Kiss magazine in 2004, she commented:

Oh, [Fruits of Yggdrasil] was the masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned. Patrick O'Kill phoned me up because he'd heard Noddy, and he suggested that we did a record together. Then he moved into the Enclave. We did that record in three days. I did the vocals first, then he did the music. He tuned in to the emotional content of the tracks, especially ‘Voluspa ‘and ‘Ragnarok’, and added the music intuitively. He just sat down and did the business, and the two merged like that. Three days flat, no rehearsals, I went straight into the studio. It was a meeting of minds.

Shades Of Yggdrasil is a rag-bag of reworkings of material from Fruits of Yggdrasil… and other early material, and at least one edition of it was issued without Aswynn’s permission. The Songs… CD features re-recorded versions of a lot of the same material as Fruits of Yggdrasil…, with musical backing by Wayne Owens, but given that this was produced by the New Age publisher Llewellyn to accompany Aswynn’s book, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Songs… is considerably more anodyne and less eerie and terrifying than Fruits of Yggdrasil… Hau Ruck! is to be congratulated for making this important and worthwhile material available for a new generation of heathens and post-industrial music fans, though it’s a pity that the mistakes in the lyrics that I’ve mentioned weren’t corrected, and I don’t know why the song ‘Nietsche’ has been omitted.

WIKI SAYS:

Sixth Comm was a British experimental, rock and synth pop group founded by Patrick Leagas in 1986. Leagas also has training in special armed forces combat. They are heavily influenced from things such as Norse magic and mythology.

Leagas was vocalist and percussionist for controversial neo-folk/post-industrial group Death in June. The earliest recordings of Sixth Comm contain different versions of some Death in June songs, and the Nothing Life cassette was initially labelled as being a joint effort, although later issues made no mention of his former band.

Early works continued in the familiar neo-folk direction, but gradually Sixth Comm found their own voice. Leaving behind the imagery of Death in June, Leagas renamed himself O'Kill, and began to introduce electronic beats. The songs began to revolve more and more around pagan imagery, and somewhere along the line the female vocals of 'pagan priestess' Amodali (who is his real life wife) were added to the line-up, and the group headed further into an experimental direction. They began utilising tape-loops and tribal beats, to provide musique-concrete influenced soundscapes of a genuinely eerie dimension, a wild pagan passion driving unsettling atmospherics. These albums started to released under the moniker Mother Destruction.

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We will ship this ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. 

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