Ambient and post-industrial project Lotus Thrones is a meditation in self-acceptance, healing, and self-awareness, and the ability to channel darkness and demons into a healing catharsis through music.
Formed in the wake of a five-year hiatus from releasing music, Lotus Thrones’ Heath Rave took action during the pandemic. Utilizing the freedom of isolation, coupled with the availability of new technologies that enable ease in embarking on creative journeys alone, Rave was able to reassess his artistic process. It was with this that he was able to put his time in lockdown to good use by investigating a wider array of instruments and recording methods while exploring and revisiting styles and genres of music he grew up on, including post-punk, industrial, goth, post-metal, dream pop, shoegaze.
Though at times a nostalgic journey, with an occasional acknowledgment to his origins in hardcore, Rave was able to organically fuse a melange of underground music influences stemming from the 80s and early 90s with aural allusions to artists such as Killing Joke, Sisters Of Mercy, Neurosis, Danzig, Justin Broadrick, Portishead, The Cure, and more, while handling all of the instrumentation of his new project on his own.
A key track, highlighting this journey on Rave’s Lotus Throne debut LP Lovers in Wartime, is “Fatigue”. The song is a stark and lonely affair, with a greater intensity ever-looming, yet tempered like gauze on a caustic burn. Thematically, the song is an introspective meditation on isolation, whether it is social distancing, or a misanthropic exercise in self-imposed exile.
“Fatigue was one of the first songs I wrote when I started experimenting as Lotus Thrones.” Rave explains, “You can hear the influence of the more minimal NIN and Jesu sounds on this track, I was trying to create a cold, isolationist vibe. While the song itself is certainly a reference to social distancing, it’s not dated just to the lockdown. It’s more so a reference to having too many secrets and those secrets burning your life by having people get too close to you. Let’s be honest, a lot of us have been practicing the idea of social distance well before it became a term in daily existence and in this case, to avoid the general disease of humanity.”
Watch the video for Lotus Thrones’ “Fatigue” below:
Lotus Thrones is the Philadelphia-based solo project formed by former Wolvhammer and Across Tundras drummer Heath Rave, and “Fatigue is a track featured on this solo project’s debut album Lovers in Wartime.
As Rave told Treble recently: “Five years ago, when I sold my drums, I swore I’d never play music again. There was too much self-induced trauma; I would literally get panic attacks if I thought about my old music and lifestyle let alone try to listen to it. I think it took something like quarantine happening after almost four years of pure sobriety to make something like this come out. I definitely didn’t sit down and just decide to make a record. It all happened on its own; maybe the record even made itself, just using me as a vessel. Subconsciously it was a healing experience, I’m able to once again listen to music and enjoy it even at its darkest moments. It’s been a freeing experience for me psychologically and spiritually and happened for me when it was supposed to happen. Now the waterfall is flowing.”
Lovers During Wartime is out now.
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