Running Present – A Contemporary Log is a collection of reviews, descriptions and resonances on experimental, contemporary music and art from Austria. This edition’s focus: Bernhard Lang‘s Hermetika IX (released on Kairos 2026).
Hermetika IX is the ninth chapter in Lang’s Hermetika series, begun in 2008, exploring vocal and ensemble settings of hermetic texts – from ancient mystical writings to quasi-Dadaistic codes – transforming language into sound and meaning. Like its predecessors, this entry continues Lang’s project of turning esoteric material into physical sonic experience, but here a central female voice takes on a striking presence. This immediately suggests Gnostic ideas of revelation, drawing parallels with the Gospel of Mary, in which Mary Magdalene embodies secret teaching and spiritual authority. This interpretive lens guides the listening, tracing a thread of female perspective and spiritual centrality across the work. The voice is realized by Els Mondelaers, supported by the Nadar Ensemble, whose precision, agility, and interpretive depth make every fragment of the dense score perceptible.
In Osculetur Me, fragments of encoded text take audible form. Vocal chops, processed and panned across the sonic field, feel like information entering awareness, while Mondelaers’ live voice grounds the experience in a human sense of reception. The effect is abstract yet tangible, sustained by the ensemble’s exceptional control over timbre, phrasing, and spatial dynamics. Even when textures fracture into apparent chaos, the music remains coherent, inviting the listener to experience insight rather than analyze it. The instrumentation creates a multidimensional field in which every micro-shift in articulation or dynamics carries weight.
Nigra Sum expands the work into a macrocosmic field. Strings, electronics, electric guitar, winds and brass, and layered voices form a space where chaos and order coexist – creation, destruction, and revelation intertwined. At moments the density approaches overload, yet the performers’ virtuosity and sensitivity transform it into living sound. A bowing nuance, a breath, a minute dynamic inflection – these gestures allow the ear to inhabit the texture fully, mirroring the Gnostic cosmologies that underlie the work.
Le Tonnerre introduces a theatrical, ritualistic energy. Percussion, strings, electronics, and voice move in waves of tension and release – a proto-rave before rave, where comprehension arrives as much through movement and bodily resonance as through listening. The ensemble’s timing and dynamic range turn apparent excess into a coherent, immersive rite. Mortality, divine contrast, and incomprehensibility are not illustrated but made tangible, felt in the chest as much as in the ear.
Finally, The Angels’ Song reaches the work’s emotional and spiritual apex. Mondelaers’ voice folds and rises within the ensemble texture as if human and divine were inseparable. The performance is at once cathartic and suspended, leaving the sense that knowledge, revelation, and emotion converge in a single plane. The interplay between Lang’s compositional design and the ensemble’s interpretive clarity produces a space in which understanding is not conceptual but sensory.
Alongside its Gnostic sources, the work also draws on biblical poetic material – most notably the Song of Songs – adding a layer of sensuality and allegorical resonance that counterbalances the coded density of the hermetic texts.
Throughout Hermetika IX, Lang extends the series’ long-standing engagement with mystical and encrypted language into audible, physical reality, translating ancient material into present perception. The album is as much a meditation on female perspective and revelation as it is a demonstration of contemporary ensemble and vocal virtuosity. Veiled knowledge here is not merely referenced; it is made perceptible, offering insight and experience in equal measure.
Serge Bulat