Bank Myna is a treasure. Like all treasures, this band is rare, shrouded in mystery... and, above all, has to be earned. A few dreamlike appearances on stage since the release of Volaverunt, a fascinating debut album, have confirmed that these four have decided to make their mark neither by saturating space nor by speeding ahead. Bank Myna weaves a web in which, rather than being trapped, the listeners find a comfortable cocoon that pleasantly isolates them from the outside world. So it was with real anticipation that we awaited their second album, EIMURIA. We're already intrigued: what a strange name! From the ancient High German for "embers", Bank Myna explains that this album is “like the warmth before the fire ignites, the remnants after the flame. It’s the unrest beneath the surface, the turmoil that never fully rises but always lingers, waiting.”: this already gives us an idea of what EIMURIA will be.
With Bank Myna, time has always been an essential component: unlike painting or sculpture, for example, music is an art based on time. The quartet is accustomed to suspending and stretching it. Yet it takes them only a few seconds to capture our attention with the opening moments of No Ocean of Thoughts: a telluric thickness, a sonic magma flirting with drone, then a spectral voice emerging from the silence. Unless it provokes it, almost religiously. We're already lost in contemplation. Sound becomes matter that can almost be felt, haunted by the voice. Matter and ghosts, as on the superb artwork: it's no longer just a question of balance, but of suspension. Suspension between two states, suspension of time, and, already, a height that announces either a dizzying plunge or a soaring elevation.
If the crescendo we can guess seems to call for a descent into visceral doom, Bank Myna have us on the edge of our seats and we have to wait ten minutes or so before EIMURIA, on the masterly The Shadowed Body, ignites for good. They have played with our nerves, imposing a mystical tension, a hypnotic opaque atmosphere to better carry us along their cathartic explorations. To find the treasure, you have to pass the tests: Bank Myna's music is like a treasure hunt, both labyrinthine and playful. It's fun to get lost, to go round in circles, to wander through abandoned rooms filled with memories hidden by dust, not knowing if we've been there before or if something imperceptible has changed since our last visit. With its poetry, its melancholy, its play on textures, its approach that invites a form of esoteric contemplation and its exorcism-like quest for the sublime, Bank Myna evokes Messa and Anna Von Hausswolff.
Embers: the metaphor is definitely apt. With “post-things” labels and ten-minute tracks, one can always fear a tendency to over-cerebral self-indulgence. Once again, Bank Myna never loses itself in the narcissistic trap of stretching music in vain. EIMURIA is an album that, even in its most tumultuous torments (the incantatory Burn All the Edges or the apocalyptic whirlwinds of L'Implorante, a track dedicated to Camille Claudel in a synesthetic gesture that is absolutely relevant, as the music here evokes colors as well as concrete matter), exudes a welcoming warmth. The shadows are lit by candlelight, and the sound is organic, deeply human and immersive, inviting us to join them rather than oppressing us. The spectres dancing here are not frightening: they're just another version of us, perhaps past, perhaps yet to come. The listener, for his part, lets himself be carried from reverie to reverie.
Bank Myna, without losing its richness or its power of fascination, offers a second album that's just a tad denser than its predecessor, giving it a new intensity, an extra nervousness even, and making it less hermetic. You come out of EIMURIA like you come out of a dream or a trance. Did all this really happen? We still carry traces of it within us, but we can't put our finger on them. To find out, you'll have to dive back in: this blend of atmospheric doom, dark rock and “post-stuff” is as seductive as it is haunting.
