On July 4, Liturgy will unveil archival releases of recordings spanning 2004-2008 from the band’s early, lo-fi solo era that have yet to appear on DSP’s. These recordings document Liturgy’s Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s path from a ‘hyperborean’ to a ‘transcendental’ language of black metal. These albums are in the archival recordings: 2005’s The Paranoiac Miracle, 2007’s Immortal Life, and 2008’s Harmonium.
Starting in reverse-chronological order: 2008’s Harmonium, which was never publicly released aside from streaming on MySpace at the time along with a music video for “Beyond the Magic Forest”, directed by Michelle Scourtos and released that year on YouTube, documents the birth of the mature Liturgy sound, at least in solo form, pairing the burst beat with postminimalist guitar counterpoint and postromantic harmony.
2007’s Immortal Life, which had a number of releases with different album covers, marks the initial intuition and decisive shift from the language of black metal that had initially inspired Liturgy to something new. The 2024 Immortal Life II release provides additional context, coming after 2023’s 93696 which was widely regarded as the culmination of a creative trajectory. Immortal Life II, the cover of which restaged the original Immortal Life photo at Machines with Magnets.
Finally, 2005’s The Paranoiac Miracle was initially a hand-numbered edition of ten cassettes and is now combined into a single release with 2006’s three-song Eternal Void EP, recorded during the same sessions and also originally an informal limited cassette release. This body of work predates any idea about transcendental black metal, the burst beat, or any overt search for redemption or divinization.
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