Colin Self

Colin Self’s lemniscate is a statement of purpose, and a powerful reintroduction to the Berlin and New York based artist, composer, and puppeteer’s music, their first offering since the acclaimed 2018 album Siblings and companion EP, Orphans.

What many of us recognize simply as the infinity symbol is known mathematically as the lemniscate, a word whose Greek and Latin roots mean “decorated with ribbons.” On lemniscate, an opera seria written in four parts and an indication of an ambitious assemblage of music arriving imminently, it is Self’s voice which becomes this adorning ribbon, a shimmering, fragile sound that endures, even when subsumed into the rhapsodic terror of its surroundings.

Opener “parva lux” captures Self at their most angelic, using ancient Latin as a way to open channels to the long-deceased, a core facet of Self’s recent practice. But from there, terror reigns: from the punishing rhythms of “Involution of Spirit,” a distant voice calls out Colin’s name, now lost within a sense of inescapable terror, which persists in the glitched-out disorientation of “Darkness Visible.”

A coherent Self may not have survived this tumult. Yet within the lemniscate, the kind of radiant, limitless beauty, and its obverse form, that of boundless, inescapable terror, are there to meet in the middle, with no need to make distinctions separating the two. By the time they sing “That the infinite in you is the infinite in me” on closer “lemniscate,” the truth is already obvious: some small touch of the sublime has been made terrestrial, there for anyone willing to follow Self headlong into the abyss.