Hermetika IX – Vox Angeli II pushes Bernhard Lang’s obsession with loops, fracture and stylistic collision into explicitly metaphysical territory. Centring the female voice, the piece takes its texts from the Nag Hammadi scriptures, a body of early Christian and Gnostic writings in which the tension between spirit and flesh, transcendence and fall, is particularly charged. Across four sharply contrasted movements, Lang treats those texts less as doctrine than as volatile material: sensual biblical fragments, visionary utterances and apocryphal images are broken apart, repeated, and set against musical worlds that pull in opposite directions.

Mezzo-soprano Els Mondelaers stands at the work’s core, embodying both angelic and demonic presences. Her line is required to shift constantly – from pure, almost early‑music clarity to spoken grain, from whispered confidences to forceful, near-rock projection – as if different entities were flickering through the same body. Around her, the musicians of Nadar Ensemble and live electronics thread a dense weave of references: modal shards and choral voicings that glance toward Palestrina, nervous jazz‑inflected rhythms, distorted rock gestures, and electronically transformed vocal and instrumental material that fractures the acoustic surface. These strata are not blended into a smooth synthesis; they rub up against each other, loop, cancel out and reappear, creating a sonic theology of interference rather than harmony.

Each movement explores a different facet of this unresolved fusion. One might place Mondelaers’s voice against a halo of quasi‑Renaissance consonance that is gradually infiltrated by noise and irregular pulse; another plunges her into a more overtly rhythmic, groove‑driven environment where rock and jazz idioms are cut up and reassembled. Throughout, electronics double, stretch and warp both voice and instruments, creating ghost tracks and negative images that complicate any simple reading of “heavenly” or “earthly.” Lang’s characteristic use of repetition – phrases caught in obsessive circuits, gestures replayed with slight mutations – becomes here a metaphor for spiritual and psychological stuckness, the inability to resolve conflicting forces even as they continue to exert pressure.

By the time Hermetika IX – Vox Angeli II reaches its final bars, no synthesis has been achieved. Angels and demons, Palestrina echoes and electric distortion, scripture and its breakdown all remain in charged coexistence, their contradictions deliberately left open. That refusal to close the gap is the work’s point: rather than offering transcendence, it holds the listener inside the unresolved space where the divine and the human, the sacred and the profane, continually intersect and clash. The result is a demanding, visceral music theatre of the ear, and one of Lang’s most striking recent explorations of how contemporary composition can grapple with ancient, still unsettled questions.