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From Ikon

Dubh CD

This album draws together a rich blend of ambient scapes and sparse lyricism in an album crafted in such a way as to take the listener on an inner journey through darkness and melancholic yearning to the point of mystical joy and divine expectancy.

Here is an excerpt from the inside cover:

The Secret

A secret loses its secrecy when shared, for once exposed to the light its darkness dissipates. Yet God, if we may speak of God at all, can be understood precisely as the One who remains secret in the sharing. In the same way that art withholds its message in the midst of its manifestation (remaining open to the play of multiple meaning) so God can be understood as remaining concealed in revelation.

Every month a disparate group of theistic atheists, atheistic theists – and everything in between – quietly descend upon a bar in Belfast in the hope of being transformed by the radiance of this secrets incomprehensible beauty. We are neither a community of alchemists, seeking to expose the wealth of this secret, nor a gathering of magicians, desiring to harness its power, rather we are fragile, fractured lovers, who attempt to bow before the ineffable mystery of this secret. In that sacred place we lay down our desire to grasp in favour of being grasped and temporarily relinquish our need to know so as to experience the wonder of being known.

As such we celebrate ambiguity, complexity and doubt as we seek to dwell faithfully in that God shaped void which is formed in the aftermath of the divine – a void which is not filled by faith but rather forged by it. Dubh (the Irish word for black) seeks to draw the listener into that place in which we are nourished by our hunger, fulfilled by our desire and at home in our homelessness.

The first Ikon CD was offered as a free gift to those within Ikon and came with the guarantee that, if the listener was open, they would be exposed to the voice that calls.

The CD was blank.

‘Dubh’ is not, and yet the hope remains that while you listen to these fragments the recorded music would slowly dissolve and the music that lies silently beneath would be heard.

(Ikon's CD Dubh is available from Proost Records.)

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