Leather Music Review: Delerium ~ Spiritual Archives

I was a fucking spoiled bottom I tell ya. I love Leather, I love the scenes, I love flogging and whipping (Which are in no way the same thing at all.) and I am known to go into a jealous trance anytime I see a complicated and dangerous suspension scene done just right with that display of connection mixing utter dedication, trust, and passion. I get immediately hard observing the look, the sounds, and remembering intimately all the dynamics, the process, and well frankly… the fucking theatricality of it all.

There’s a bit of a mental trip for a bottom doing those actions on stage in front of observers, like when I was suspended, enclosed in chains and a professional grade medical defibrillator battery was attached to a wand so that several feet of arcing electricity was surrounding and cascading around me. ***WARNING*** Do not try this at home, YOU OR THE PERSON YOU ARE DOING IT TO WILL DIE - OK? I remember John and I spent months working out the actual trick to do it (It involves proper grounding and no I won’t tell you how. It's bad enough I'm mentioning what we did, it's actually against Basic Leather Protocol for me to tell you the how-to's especially in some stupid blog.) and not flash bake the bottom, namely myself. You might remember this demonstration done at MAL one year, if you do and have pictures please send them to me I was the one hanging around with the hood and the burning leg hair. Yep that’s me.

Anyway, I also love discussing all the little things that took me to that headspace and made even the briefest scene that John and I did, intense, memorable and worth every inadvertent scrape and burn mark.

One of those little things, namely music, helped make that all happen which I’m about to reveal here.

Back in 1990 and 1991 the German record label Dossier published a series of these little gems of what I can at best describe as the most excellent dungeon music and the industrial trance legend that is Delerium (Two guys by the names of Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber from the old Wax Trax! Records label industrial band Front Line Assembly.) began. The beauty of these albums at the time was everyone trying to figure out what besides Enigma and Art Of Noise to play while doing the nastiest things to each other. I mean you spend the vast sums of money to put together an actual fully furnished basement dungeon then you have to figure out how to work music into the scene without it sounding like a bad euro-trash drag show. It’s got to be more than just naked people and expensive torture equipment and bad disco music, you need some truly diabolic tunes to go with all that, at least in my opinion.

I have heard it all too, some tortured me with Enya, and others were I guess attempting to put me to sleep with various new age dreck and atmosphere albums that made me long for Enya. Art Of Noise and Enigma were always sorta acceptable, but over played... Then I heard Delerium’s Spiritual Archives and it was all over, WE HAVE A WINNER!

Now these three albums I'm showing you here are from early in Delerium's career. Back in the, like I said, good old Wax Trax! Experimental, Industrial, 4AD, days when no one cared if you got remixed by some big DJ because you were the cutting edge and they (the DJ's) were still trying to recreate Disco and call it House. In fact if you do pick up Delerium's current albums you will be listening to what I now call Electronic Chill or Trance music. I miss Wax Trax!, those were the days my friend, we thought they would never end...

These early import albums though are the thing to collect. They go in and out of print all the time and originally could only be bought from specialty shops (Behold the power of the Internet.) in fact I still recommend the imports even though they are more expensive by far because they have more music. Due to the expense, if you want to test the waters first, start with Spiritual Archives which I consider the sampler edition of the three and if you like it try Syrophenikan which is more dreamy and sorta gothic and slower and then last Stone Tower which is more soundtrack like with heavy dramatic drumming in places which some might find distracting in a scene.


Here are the total running times and line ups for each album just so if you get a "best of album" or something like that you will know where it is pulling the songs from. *Click the highlighted songs for a sample*

Stone Tower
1990

1. Lost Passion (8:30)
2. Bleeding (7:59)
3. Stone Tower (4:50)
4. Aftermath (7:09)
5. Tundra (8:55)
6. Spirit (5:21)
7. Red Hill (6:18)
8. Sphere (5:52)
9. Relics (5:10)

Syrophenikan
1990

1. Embodying (5:06)
2. Shroud (4:44)
3. Of the Tribe (5:10)
4. Fallen Idols (5:13)
5. Mythos (6:18)
6. Prophecy (5:17)
7. Twilight Ritual (6:32)
8. Rising (7:21)
9. Covert (5:05)

Spiritual Archives
1991

1. Drama (7:37)
2. Rise Above (6:46)
3. Aftermath (7:34)
4. Ephemeral Passage (6:28)
5. Barren Ground (7:30)
6. Fathoms (6:19)
7. Awakenings (10:40)
8. Deceased (7:24)