Label: Malignant - TUMRCD117
Format: 5xFile, Album
Released: 08 Jan 2018
1. Logos 05:11
2. Pneuma 05:34
3. Nekros 08:35
4. Nyx 09:18
5. Eschaton 12:20
"With its great textural depth, sepulchral atmospheres, and exotic, richly detailed ritualistic passages, the stunning, self-titled debut from the Greek male/female duo Martyria signifies the arrival of a vital new entry into the world of ritual/dark ambience and a welcome addition to the Malignant roster.
Running 41 minutes spread over five tracks, the disc opens with “Logos”, a haunting piece track of gorgeous female keening, angelically drifting over a bed of primitive Byzantine rhythms and liturgical chants. It deftly sets the tone and lays the foundation for the proceeding pieces, which move from bottomless, subterranean drift and luminescent drones, to more sinister realms marked by slow, tribal percussion, resonating wood instrumentation, and elongated vocalizations. All of it flows seamlessly, rising from tendrils of wood smoke and incense, rooted in spiritual and ceremonial darkness, and bound together by atavistic and organic means.
For fans of Shibalba, Caul, Herbst9, Funerary Call, and Voice of Eye."
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https://malignantrecs.bandcamp.com/album/martyria "29/12/2017
You walk into a huge, empty religious building. It's hard to say what part of the world this is, but fact is that the door has been locked behind you. There's no light in this place. You move a few steps forward and start hearing Voices that will remain your company through your stay. Lamenting, commemorating, imploring, despairing, celebrating. Men, women, children; are they ghosts? Or is this a nightmare where you can't wake up from?
The beauty of this album is its minimality. The vocals are the building stones of all the songs, very elongated and mostly monotonous - the term 'circular breathing' came to mind. They resonate with each other, with the minimal percussion that sometimes appears, with the didgeridoo in 'Pneuma', with the icy layer of noise in 'Nekros'. My favourites are 'Nyx' and 'Logos' because of the more peaceful and meditative atmosphere as compared to the other songs but the whole album is totally worth checking out.
Artists that I can compare these sounds to are CHVE, Herbst9, Ashtoreth and Raison d'Être.
I followed my own advice and listened to this pearl eyes closed, without having read any info, and I'm amazed: the Greek project Martyria consists of only two people. And it's their debut album. George Zafiriadis and Lena Merkouri have a fan in Belgium, that's for sure.
Eline"
http://www.merchantsofair.com/albums/martyria-martyria "Posted: 27 December 2017
Christopher Nosnibor
Greek ritual ambient duo, Martyria promise ‘5 stunning tracks of textural depth, sepulchral darkness, and exotic, richly detailed atmospheres’, and are pitched for fans of Dead Can Dance, Funerary Call, Voice of Eye, and Shibalba. I’m not going to feign superior knowledge: I’m only aware of Dead Can Dance from that list, but I have a hunch I know what’s reasonable to expect here. I’m braced for dark, haunting, atmospheric. I’m anticipating compositions which emanate subterranean spiritualism and mystery. And this is precisely what Martyria deliver.
This is dark. Dark in the sense of ominous, eerie. Dark in the sense of foreboding. Dark in the sense of the occult and the otherworldly. Dark in the sense of the unheimlich. Rhythms clatter and patter as wordless invocations float and drift above eternal drones. Dolorous bells herald the arrival of an elongated drone and an ethereal, choral female voice. Bells chime in a whorl of what sounds like didgeridoo as heaving chants and vocalisations conjured from the depths of the diaphragm in monasterial intonations.
At the mid-point of the album, ‘Nekron’, plunges into deeper, darker depths: dank rumblings and distant thunder which registers low on the sonic spectrum, churning at the gut, conjure dark, shadowy visions. It bleeds into the even longer darker, more sinister ‘Nyx’, dominated by cavernous percussion, muffled by distance and depth. It evokes flickering images of candlelit rituals held in carved temples far beneath the surface in secret cave networks.
The final composition, ‘Eschaton’, stretches out over some twelve and a half minutes with wordless vocal evocations and intimations of ancient occultism. It’s not music you can readily understand or cognise: it registers on a level far, far beneath the surface of comprehension. It’s the calling of the earth, the rocks, the trees. It registers and calls to a part of the psyche long-buried. Martyria speaks to the resonant brain, to genetic imprints, to the soul as conveyed through generations of heredity. It speaks to ancient history, knowledge buried through centuries of ‘progress’. Martyria is not a work to comprehend, but to allow to bury its way into the canals of the mind devoted to instinct. Its impact is difficult to quantify or even to explain on a rational, scientific level. And yet, it has impact and resonance – deep, slow-register resonance."
https://auralaggravation.com/2017/12/27/martyria-martyria/ Martyria - Logos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klf6_6e1ngY 
// ritual ambient. Greece
