The UK’s Lonesaw takes inspiration from both traditions in their ritualistic performances. Lonesaw’s focus has always been transgressive, now they blur the line of what a sonic experience can be within a live setting. The group uses ritual as a tool to channel a deeper aspect within their own experience, but also to challenge their audience to encounter the performance in a new way.
Following the release of 2020’s Barbed Wire Church, and early 2021’s Lay in the Salt of the Soil, Liverpool’s frontline industrial occultists unleash a new live performance and ritual film.
Beltane, the Gaelic May Day festival, is traditionally observed on 1 May, or halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. The Ancient Greek myth of Persephone, interestingly enough, feeds into the ancient Celtic traditions as well.
“We always try to do something for Beltane (on which the ritual and performance was created) and this year we dressed the working up as a live music performance so we could better package the pearls…When Persephone returns from Hades, Demeter is appeased and allows the crops to grow; just as our own consciousness becomes fertile and illuminated as the waxing Sun dispels the fear and uncertainty of Winter,” the band explains. “Only when Persephone is found, can Hecate down her torches. The name of the piece is simply a timestamp for when the ritual began.”
This culminated in a live performance recording entitled Sol11°Taurus, Luna13°Capricorn (LIVE at Beltane), out via Spine Records. The title references a point where the sun hit eleven degrees in Taurus; the moon at thirteen degrees in Capricorn, a solid Earth conjunction.
The performance was filmed and recorded at Q U A RR Y Liverpool. The group again joining with producer Jack Wait from Q U A RR Y Studio who previously worked with the band on the tracks The Salt, Man in a Burning World and Yet I Am from the recent E.P Lay in the Salt of the Soil. This live experimental performance film is an amalgamation of the group’s last three years of work as a live force, giving a further document to their steps into the magickal world, incorporating ritual in a contemporary medium, with the intent to dismantle the boundaries between live musical performance and performance art.
The video was created in collaboration with Jonathan Stonehouse, who had previously worked with the band and currently serves as a “magickal advisor” to the group. The joint of forces tighten the grip on their viewers’ aesthetic jugular, creating an experience like no other.
Watch below:
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