Liturgy of the Equinox: Mabon

A Bluegreen Records LP

Liturgy of the Equinox: Mabon – Full Album (1:05:00)

There is a night, once a year, when the scales hold even, light and dark resting in perfect balance before the year tips toward shadow. I didn’t want to write a mere album about that moment. I wanted to build a room you could stand inside of while the transition happened.

This is Mabon.

Call it an album, if you need a word for it, but I think of it as a rite, something closer to liturgy than pop record. I wrote and recorded it at the turn of the season, chasing the particular quiet that settles over a world getting ready to let go.

Second harvest.

Quiet gratitude.

The long exhale before winter.

There are no lyrics here, not in the usual sense. I couldn’t find words that didn’t get in the way of the emotions, so I let the voices become weather instead, wordless vocalizations, cascading and choral, rising and falling like something older than language.

If Dead Can Dance and Enigma ever held a vigil together in a cathedral with the electricity half-cut, this is what I imagine it might have sounded like.

Each piece moves the way the season itself moves. It opens ungrounded, pads and reverb drifting with nothing to hold onto, no floor beneath you yet. Then the pulse arrives as a deep kick, hand percussion, something ancient and something programmed shaking hands. The dynamics swell, drones, strings, layered voices stacking toward their fullest height, the way color peaks right before the leaves let go. And then, in the end, I strip it all back down. The rhythm falls away first. What’s left is only the choir, fading, the way light begins to fade in September, not suddenly, but by degrees, until you’re not sure exactly when it left.

This isn’t a record to play in the background. It’s a record to sit with, right at the threshold, while the day and the night are still deciding who wins.

Welcome to the equinox. Stay a while, the dark is on its way, but it isn’t here.

Yet.