dark ambient

Fornjörð is an album released on November 22, by a Serbian dark ambient artist, known by the alias of Gaetir The Mountainkeeper. With four long tracks – Sögumaðr, Fornjörð, Ísbirnir and Nýjörð – the style of the artist departs from a very dense, cohesive and substantiated approach to the genre. With a sinister premise, that definitely knows how to elaborate a pragmatic, intense, lucid and prominently dark atmosphere, Fornjörð reveals itself to be a vehemently tense album, upon which the harmonies are slowly conceived over a linear aphorism of lugubrious demise, that compels the listener to dive deeply into a universe of primordial, lancinating and tempestuous omniscience, where his existence gradually dissolves into an abstract void of despair, never being capacitated to materialize again, or to rearrange the algorithms of reality to its former pattern of normality. 

Each song on this album is a sinister journey on itself. With descending principles of lucid abandonment and mortuary gravity, the nefarious and excruciating elements that compose the harmonies embrace solitude and emptiness as the only acceptable realities, converging to a realm of unspeakable desolation, where the human presence is simply out of the equation. The atmosphere of solitary darkness, inhospitable hostility and perpetual isolation is so drastically conceived, that you feel yourself permanently involved by an ulterior dimension of infinite madness, somber frivolity and abnormal disgrace. Don’t dare to close your eyes while listening to this album, or you will definitely feel yourself transported to a malignant parallel universe of unimaginable expansive confinement. 

The artist really knows how to create an effectively dark and sinister atmosphere. His technical devices are simple, but his musical abilities are profound and graciously hallucinating. Gaetir The Mountainkeeper definitely knows how to perfectly sculpt anomalous, but subtle harmonious disturbances. He skilfully defines his own personal style, more grounded in a psychological and inner suggestive alliance of fear – that can be just imaginary –, than the proximity of fear on itself. 

Fornjörð definitely departs from a very consistent and original premise. Gaetir The Mountainkeeper is a very creative and authentic artist, capable of redefining the genre in a very discreet proposition, astutely conceiving a more fearful, obscure and deceptive, but concomitantly more humane, tangible and credible expressive phenomena, delivering dark ambient as an intuitive conjuncture of sophisticated standards, grounded on more elegant, mysterious, original and unknowingly unprecedented elements, than what we are used to experience. 


Wagner

drone / ambient

death metal / grindcore

death industrial / dark ambient

Exabyss Records

post rock / ambient / electronic

ambient / classical

funeral doom

gothic rock / alternative / metal

drone / ambient / folk

dark ambient 

alternative rock / funk rock

facebook

indie / dreampop

industrial / electronic

Perc Trax

​Serge (2 & 3 by Patsker)

dark ambient

bandcamp

Jon – Psalms Of Annihilation is an album released in October 22, by Norwegian dark ambient project The Deadly Quarters. Forty eight minutes long, the record has fourteen tracks: The Thin Veil, Sanctum Regnum Infernal, Imma Ila'a, Aeshma-Deva, Fulci's Ghost, Awakening The Four Kings, Annihilation – Nullification, 13th Chapter – Naginah, Qlippoth Adoration, Zalanes - Trouble Bringer, Weeping With Demons, Intranquil Spirits, Solace In The Hercynian Forest and Rofocal. With dense, fearful and very sinister harmonies, Jon – Psalms Of Annihilation departs from exceedingly morbid and lugubrious premises, remembering a little the dreadful scores of classical horror movies, like The Omen and The Legend of Hell House. The sound is effectively macabre, grotesque and hallucinating; you definitely feel teleported to a parallel dimension of ghostly delusions, and even the feeling of horror becomes somewhat impulsively suggestive, impossible to avoid, if you listen to this record completely alone in your room, in the dark, at midnight. As a matter of fact, I dare you to do so. 

Definitely, it is one of the most effective and sinister dark ambient albums that I’ve ever heard. The atmosphere is tense and intense, the melodies are genuinely frightening. You feel a deep sense of imminent demise expanding through the vastness of your conscience all the way through, as empty cathedrals comes to mind, and an everlasting night of deathly downfall ruins encircles all eternity, with the transgressed embryos of its latent fugacious splendor. 

All along the way, the impeccable talent of the artist behind the project becomes highly prominent. With some synthesizers that occasionally brings a more colorful “life” to its more black and white doomed “substance”, even in its surreal ocean of despondency, the versatility and the proficiency of the artist is incredibly natural. With an inherent sordid reality that comes clean in the surface of its delightful harmonies, there is an imponderable ghostly sensibility easy to be felt, as tension is built mostly in the protuberant vicinities of the melodies, that dives deeply in the somnolent eminence of its fugacious tapestry, where a monumental restlessness, that is not always apparent, but it’s there, calmly rises, with the aim to be filtered and appreciated with all the melancholy and anxious agony that the rhythmic dissonance of its malevolent nature is able to dispose.  

The artist really understands everything about timing and dissonance, the profoundness of the harmonies play high levels at the insidious expressiveness of its dense and marvelously lurid musicality.  Jon – Psalms Of Annihilation is a very tense and restless album, that explores with marvelous competence the most abrasive, sinister and macabre elements of the genre. Definitely, it’s not for beginners. You have to have a strong stomach, and a very urgent sense of self-reliance. Believe me, this is one of the most brutal and tense dark ambient albums ever created. As the album plays, skeleton machines leaves the forums of a tormented agony, to reach you fast at the darkness of your ever latent despondency. Never to be the same again. 


Wagner

dark ambient / dungeon synth

bandcamp

Yūrei no hi is an album released on October 10, by a French ambient music artist, known by the alias Aokigahara. Fifty minutes long, the record has fifteen tracks: I'm sorry..., Dust & memories of a bygone era, Fullness in death, Quiet demon inside, Yūrei no hi, Your shadow haunt me, Shiki, Broked inside, Pray, Razor blade on your skin, Untitled depressed song, Beyond pain, Until ended life, Blood all around your cold body and Epitaph. With a very characteristic and peculiar sound, Yūrei no hi is an interesting, quasi-minimalist ambient music work, that heavily concentrates on the sonorous dilapidation of gracious and symbolic atmospheres, that are more inventive, inquisitive and restless, than melancholic, sorrowful or degradedly empty. Touching the correct notes in precise periods, in a lucid panorama of poetic and evocative disturbances, the album certainly can be considered a good work, that inhales versatile influences, like Japanese post-classical harmonies, delivering to its audience a salutary and dense horizon of colorful sound distinctions, that easily ordains the skills and the subtle traces of its own atmosphere.  

Very audacious and deeply authorial by any perspective, the work presents harmonies that are driven by a lucid and sensible creative conscience, that marvelously exposes the consistence of its infallible diagram of artistry. Despite the fact that the songs are somewhat concise – which is something unusual for the genre –, they express a great volatility of consonantal flavors, mostly diluted at the vastness of its own sonorous tapestry of evocative, but lugubrious serenity; the record evolves, and the harmonies evolve altogether, in a convergence of patterns that makes the strength of the sound to gracefully contrast with its everlasting horizon of invisible tranquility. A marvelous liturgy of somnolent allegories become trapped in the fragile oceans of a conscience that never sleeps, but quietly waits for the world to dilute.  

With a consistent serenity built all the way up to its frontal axis of silent glory, the music of Aokigahara is simple, but vehemently captures a rapturous stream of life at the insight of its fantastic conception of an introspective universe of timeless despondency. Despite the extension of the album, the profoundness of the work really incorporates and disperses elements of transcendental mordacity, that elevates its creative splendor to a more peculiar degree of latent sensibilities. 

With a great degree of experimentalism on minimalist symphonies, Yūrei no hi is definitely a very competent musical statement, that showcases in the strength of its delightful drama placid, but expansive pieces of surreal majesty, that, at the same time, recognizes the efficient and composite structural boundaries, that never allow the harmonies to be too dispersive nor overtly dimensional. The album has its deficiencies, though, as sometimes seems too vague and drastically diffuse; nevertheless, represents the genre of folk ambient music with a very original premise, and laborious skills that knows how to introduce precise elements into it, without sounding artificial nor generic. Yūrei no hi is definitely a very good album, with gracefully lucid compositions, perfectly aware of its abilities and dispositions. 


Wagner

drone / dark ambient

Eighth Tower Records

Drones always get our attention, particularly when they originate from mysterious parts in Europe. Jeton Hoxha, an artist from the Republic of Macedonia, has just released a new one-track album entitled Vowel. The track offers 45 minutes out of this world droning.

Vowel was recorded live in Struga, Macedonia in June 2018. The recording is mainly based on loopy electro acoustic sounds created by sources like field recordings, computer and synthesizer. This fusion has been treated through various filters, plug-ins and hardware signal processing. If you long for the time to stand still, your solution is Vowel.

The droning kicks of gentle but with a lot of tangible tension. Haziness clouds of buzzing surround your thoughts the first ten minutes. Layer upon layer the drone gets darker like you stand on the verge of entering a black hole. Space and time fade away while slipping in deep meditation reviving your memories.

Fifteen minutes later you are in a vast void, droning further away from reality. The soundscapes are intense and opaque, the vibes are transcending you. The choral works and distortion are deep and frightening. Time has no purpose anymore, twenty five minutes are gone and the tension still rises. 

This outstanding work never loses grip on you. It’s like a poisonous industrial nightmare, killing all the life in the solar system. The drone is coming more in waves and giving more secret antagonism after twenty, thirty minutes. The last part is pure tremendous grumbling noise. 

Deformed chiming of church bells give the feeling of getting somewhere without any awareness of time. It’s like the sun that rises on the horizon, rebirth, salvation and hope. We took off to land and see if promise is our savior. Jeton Hoxha’s drone Vowel is something that is not of this Earth. Awesome dope!

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Patsker

dark ambient / noise

GH Records

What is this? A question my son asked when I started to listen to Abattior & Satori’s  Megaloschemos  for this review. Well, we can insure you that the transubstantiation  wasn’t a light one. The second partnership between Italy’s Lorenzo Abattoir and legendary UK project Satori is not an easily digestible piece of work. Lorenzo Abattoir is an underground harsh noise artist and sound engineer. His work is connected with contemporary art. The previous project of Abattoir (Psicopompo) was a collaboration with German composer Hermann Kopp. An experimental occult death opera was the result. Dave Kirby is the only original member of the power electronics-dark ambient project Satori which has already released more than a dozen stunning recordings. 

Megaloschemos starts with a dark ambient intro. The whirring and echoing machinery teeth on The Great Vow give the track a scary depth. The hunting electronic choruses are inserted many times more than in their previous work (Aether) and create an obscure atmosphere. There is a little more mercy on this album. Second hell: Hesychasm, starts with noise but instantly changes into Gothic movements sending us to immense deep loneliness. This is no music for untrained ears.

Sabasius (God on horseback) and Adrastus (King of Argus) refer to the Greek Mythology. The deep distortion and religious chants take us back to the days without light on this planet. The nightmare continues with Eschatology and Hermetism. 

Octoechoes took us back to their first album Aether, noise brutality with pauses filled with deep pitch black chants. Abattoir & Satori serves us tracks filled with dark obscurity, glitchy noise and Gothic breading engines colored with jabbering soundscapes. 

Megaloschemos is an experimental search of sound boundaries and emotions without a knowing end. This is a grotesque, brain boiling work with very doom and frightening sound architecture. Dark ambient lovers will be very keen with this profound album. CD limited to 300 copies.


​Patsker

dark ambient

Quote from Antonius Stark aka Ravin:  “There are no limits to how art is created!”

Blind your windows, move to your cellar or dig a dark hole somewhere near a graveyard. Don’t forget to take your headphones with you. Ravin creates dark ambient and drone music. He released his debut album Daemonography on Darkon Records. This Canadian artist gets his inspiration from the dark and humming nature where he lives. Eight frightening dark ambient tracks where born during long insomniac nights he was suffering from.


Unhuman Presence In The Flesh starts with an evil hart beat surrounded in drones that will cave you in. Daemonography takes you even deeper to that dark dungeon, doubting that you probably will never get out. The drones are boosted with strange noisy sounds just like cold winds freezing the door of your prison cell. The tension is build up and vanishes slowly while you lose starting the grip on your senses. The compositions contain enough changes to keep on the undergoing journey in this cinematic world. The Circle Downstairs and Desolation guided us in an Archeronian SF mood. 

The next trip Sofia Is Not Alone felt like we wanted to quit listening. The droning stays too long on the same level. It takes a long while when something happens. Something Is Here Within has more variability but has the same problem like the previous track. Turmoil wants to give some turmoil with beats but gets stuck in the noisy drones.

Unmarked takes us back into the grim atmosphere like the first part of the album. Dark sounds coloured with choirs confirming your hell. Unmarked  and  Daemonography are the best creations on this album by far.

Conclusion: Ravin composes interesting dark ambient sounds with a noisy touch. The first part of the soundtrack is very good but loses after track four in strength, due to lack of variation. The ending gives us back the thoughts of buried evilness. I need a drink.


​Patsker

dark ambient

Common Eider, King Eider creates deep, creepy drones that bring you to a dark alien universe. A Wound Of Body should be the first part of a two album series. The music collective is based in San Francisco California and has already produced some good dark ambient albums since 2007.

The members of this fellowship explore the boundaries of the psyche, creating shivering soundscapes with the experimental use of strings and choirs. Darkness will be your friend while listening to this album.
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‘Remembrance A Threnody’ starts with a drone, slowly  opening the gate to an interesting dark ambient journey filled with desolated landscapes and abandoned places. The strings and the drones generate an atmosphere filled with doleful reflections so addictive that you want to stay in. The same tension continues with ‘Sinew Stretched Over Crumbing Bones’.

A viola rules the track ‘We Sing Over These Bones So That They May Rise Up And Run A Way Into The   Night’, and makes you feel the absolute loneliness with no escaping from mind disintegration. The intensive drones with some ritual sparks on ‘Helene’ will energize your fear of walking in dark woods, because the sounds make you feel like something is waiting for you behind every tree.

The last track, River of Blood, ends with drones and soundscapes which paint hallucinating images of unknown creatures in your mind. The mournful viola pushes your thoughts further into the shades of Hades and beyond.  Common Eider, King Eider succeeds in keeping up the dark cavernous vibes with enough variation to have this album in your music collection. I am already curious what the second part will bring.

Patsker

doom / sludge metal / drone / dark ambient

This EP, or single, is long, seventy minutes but in that timespan Boobs Of Doom takes you on a trip through your own darkest imagination. Just download the album, because this is a full length, turn the volume knob to neighbour levels and drift away. Carrie will appreciate it, Boobs Of Doom will appreciate it.

drone / ambient

death metal

gothic rock

bandcamp

drone / dark ambient

Sombre Soniks

drone / dark ambient

dark ambient / ritual / drone

death metal / black metal

drone / dark ambient

ambient / experimental / downtempo

dark rock / art rock / blackgaze

traditional / folk 

ambient / experimental

I'm not sure if Troum really needs an introduction. Formed in 1997, these Germans have been paving the path for ambient, dark ambient and experimental drone acts for twenty years. Armed with a wide array of instrumentation, Troum inspired thousands of people to explore the world of drones and soundscapes. 

So it's no wonder that, for Troum's twentieth birthday, an international bunch of likeminded people have decided to remix, rework and transform the band's sounds. Nineteen acts appear on this compilation, each one of them honoring Troum in their own way.

The whole thing opens with a gloomy, minimal and droning remix of 'Times' by Allseits. This track plunges the compilation right into the darkest regions of the ambient scene. 'The Silent Fish' by Contrastate adds heavy percussion and an almost violent atmosphere. Inade answer with another cinematic ambient piece, one quite typical for both Inade and Troum, which obviously is a good thing. So three tracks into this tribute compilation and I'm already sold. There are sixteen more to go, with well known names like Nadja, Raison D'Etre, Cisfinitum and Reutoff patiently awaiting their turn.

One of the longest tracks is 'Giascei' by Vance Orchestra (the longest one being the vast droning experience of Mutler). This one is a pitch black river of meandering drones, haunting soundscapes and intense noises. Halfway through it becomes rhythmic and repetitive while maintaining that angsty atmosphere. That being said, it will probably be quite clear that there is few percussion and even fewer beats to be expected on this compilation. Tarkatak's rendering of '_vs_brinnan' has percussion but not in a danceable kind of manner. This nudges more towards the ritualistic side of the soundscapes spectrum.

Looking for highlights on this album is not an easy task. Every track has its own identity, depending on the character of the respective artists. Yet, what Raison D'Etre did with 'Ananke' is brilliant. He turned the track into a classic dark ambient piece, perfectly capable of standing next to many Cold Meat and Cold Spring releases from back in the day. Also bringing out their classic sound is Nadja, who calmly sail on the everlasting drones of 'Mirrored in You'. The masters themselves appear too, along with Martyn Bates. Together they bring the song 'An Untitled Protest', a blend of neo folk and ambient soundscapes.

Disc two opens with 'Kapotte Muziek by Troum', remixed by QST. At first there is noise. Then glitchy beats appear, turning the track into the most danceable yet. This is one of my favorites, perhaps because it adds the necessary amount of variation to this compilation. I mean, most of this album can be categorized as dark ambient. Acts like Ure Thrall, V.O.S., Dual and Bad Sector have delivered splendid version of Troum classics. Supplementing that, the earlier mentioned QST and Θ16 vs. Myrrman add electronic beats. In the end, Markow C., Cisfinitum, Reutoff and Moljebka Pvlse deliver some more beautiful ambient pieces. More of the same? Yes, but also more of the same high quality.

So, what to think about this album? I guess it's quite clear. 'Troums Transformation Tapes' is an excellent tribute to a groundbreaking band. Most of the contributing projects stayed quite loyal to the original sound and to their own. Some stepped outside of the genre's boundaries, with nice results too. For Troum fans, this is an absolute must-have and for aspiring dark ambient aficionados, this is a fantastic introduction into the genre. I can only recommend this album to all fans of dark, lingering and hypnotic music, that's for sure.


​Serge