dark ambient / electronic / noise

Well, time to dive into darker territories and what better way to do that than with a haunting release by dark ambient label Sombre Soniks. For this one, we go to France, where we meet the Arcaïde project. According to the project the album "takes us on an inward journey contemplating the two inseparable and indispensable phases: fire and ice, yin and yang, Solve & Coagula".

Musically, that concept results in overwhelming pieces of music, where dark ambient soundscapes meet intense noise and industrial patterns, all coming with a fierce atmosphere and dressed in sheer darkness.

The album consists of two main parts, "Solve" and "Coagula". Each of them is a collection of four tracks, or parts if you will. The whole thing opens in an intense and crushing matter. This is dark ambient noise with the audacity and atmosphere of black metal. "Solve Part 2" brings me back to the glory days of Cold Meat Industry. "Part 3" is minimal and gloomy while "Part 4" drives on industrial electronics, pounding beats and rhythmic ritual noise, complete with the harsh, distorted vocals. Impressive.

The second half of the album, "Coagula" opens with a long dark ambient set, something impending and mystifying. But this act, too, quickly adapts elements from noise and industrial in order to evolve into a baffling whirlpool of sounds and noises before once again toning down towards calmer areas. No, it's not an easy album but I am quite sure that adepts of harsh ambient will adore this rough and gritty piece of work. 


​Serge

ambient / noise / experimental

Usually I'm not very wild on reissues but in some cases reissues are an excellent way to make sure the music does not get lost. That is almost what had happened to this one. Initially released as a handout promo tape in 1995 'Mutus Liber' is now finally available on CD, thanks to EE Tapes. According to sole member Steve Cammack, most of those tapes have been lost by now. It was a collection of live recordings, released two years before Dieter Mûh's first official album. But now, so many years later, the compilation receives a new life, and I think ambient noise fans will appreciate that.

Because yes, ambient noise, constantly balancing on the edge between both genres. With six lengthy tracks, Dieter Müh creates odd sonic trips with an industrial feel. Opener 'Empty Mirror' immediately delivers that immersive yet haunting set of drones and noises while 'Decoding The Ritual Of Frequency drives on deep droning bass lines, almost tangible. 'Ibruksin' is a minimal yet captivating piece, surprisingly somewhat of a breather after its intense predecessor.

If you want references, try acts like Zoviet France, Taphephobia, Predominance, Luasa Raelon and perhaps a milder version of Brighter Death Now. The great thing about this album is that it's actually well varied. I've heard many ambient noise albums over the years and most of them are quite similar. Here, it's different. Each track has its own set of soundscapes and drones, which clearly distinguishes them from the others. Of course, all still well within the range of the genres.

So there you have, a solid and nicely arranged ambient noise trip, almost twenty five years old but still massively relevant today. If I were you I wouldn't hesitate to get your hands on a copy of this gem.


​Serge

psychedelic rock / garage rock / stoner rock

experimental / jazz / drone / ambient

Ormo Records

doom / stoner rock

drone / ambient / experimental / noise

Attenuation Circuit

electronic / techno

bandcamp

drone / doom / shoegaze

ambient

equanimity. Those twenty minutes of Sublime Silence contain healing and reposeful sounds which are welcome in this over-stressed society we live in. If you are into this kind of meditative sound creations, there is a lot to discover from this artist on his Bandcamp page.

ambient / dark ambient

Dark and melancholic ​moods change into spacey ambient tonalities, sometimes kittenish, other times filled with doom. The world of Sílení is covered with alienated sounds and moods. This is an excellent piece of work. Dark ambient lovers, if you listen to Sílení’s Long Forgotten Bowers, you will get hooked. We sure did!

dark ambient

Mother Destruction above standards in this genre. The album is a varied piece of work caught in a deep haunting, emotional prison. Sacrifice and dedication are translated in penetrating sounds and choruses. The nightmare never seems over in this pungent journey of hellish fires. 
Another quote from Empty Chalice: ‘… the lost ones are retracing the path of the oldest fairy tale: coming home’. Well, we did come home and we still feel home between the moods and vibes of this wonderful dark ambient recording.

dark ambient

Winter Light

over a ten year period. Nimh is active since 2001 and has already more than twenty physical albums released. Sound chasers will be pleased and excited with the multi-layering of soundscapes, field recordings, voices and the experimental manipulations of samples this album contains. The sustained drones create darkened and emotive moods. Beyond The Crying Era is an outstanding soundtrack for a SF/horror movie that does not exist. It’s time to dig deeper in Nimh’s music history. Speaking about a discharge!

dark ambient

the world of Anantakara. We’ve noticed psychedelic influences appearing in the mysterious structures of  the tracks. The eight adventurous ambient pieces on Momentum Lapses are filled with a variety of lovely compositions and moods. Rumors told us that this album will be released on CD in the future. Anantakara stands for “ to make infinite” in Sanskrit. In some way this album does.

Serge (1-6)
​Patsker (7-11)

dark ambient / electronic / experimental / noise 

Karl Records

Heterogeneous Cell Information is another marvelous release by veteran experimental German sound artist Hans Castrup, that is always pushing up the boundaries in exceedingly original, gracious and unexpected creative horizons. Officially released on mid-March, the album has eight tracks: 1) Cell Information; 2) Beyond Quantization-Free Mirror Axes; 3) Plain Cutting Edges; 4) Re-Finition Of Formal Construction; 5) Opaque Water On Canvas; 6) Perfect Present; 7) Elongated Circulum; 8) Secret Of Fragmented Control; pervasively sinister and nefariously lugubrious – basically turning three hundred degrees to a dark ambient atmosphere – Heterogeneous Cell Information sounds meticulously elegant, as well as ambiguously afflictive. As your sensitivity decreases to a labyrinth of desperate and delusional perceptions, you feel yourself transported to a frivolous dark dimension, where everything is imperiously dense and tempestuous, and you feel yourself susceptible to a horrendous nervous breakdown. The first track, Cell Information, already sets a fearful tone for the album in a very effective spiral of mortuary anguish towards a despondent and aggressive emptiness. 

Definitely, this is the most cohesive, dense and dreadful album on Hans Castrup discography. Within an intuitive layer of agony, anxiety and sometimes even explicit horror, the style of the artist seems more dispersed over the creation of a nefarious world of infinite darkness and abominable obliteration. With a diluted, but at the same time consistent cosmogony entirely made of morbid sonorous tonalities, Heterogeneous Cell Information reveals itself to be an unrestrained, oblique and sensible abstract universe, whose expansive agony slowly captures the quintessential elements of everything unexpected, with the most bestial elements of suggestive human behavior perfectly captured in the metamorphosis of an ocean of sound so flexible, yet so impenitent, that a universe of infinite shadows envisioned in the solitude of distant dreams becomes the excruciating reality inherent to your perceptions.   

Getting close to perfection in the most sinister passages – and with an impressive sense of unity that ties one track to another – this is the best Hans Castrup album so far. With a marvelous degree of originality, yet respecting the boundaries of the genre, the artist’s style becomes somewhat recognizable, while at the same time he is perfectly capable of surprising the audience with an audacious and genuinely effective musical turnaround, but presumably always to a more sinister and deleterious abyss. 

A splendid album – that it’s impactful as it is concise – Heterogeneous Cell Information delivers darkness as it should be: brutal, resonant, malignant, hostile and horrific, for you never to listen to this genre of music the same way you did before. In what concerns the development of dark ambient music, very soon there will be a before and after Hans Castrup. 


​Wagner

ambient / classical

Sound In Silence

experimental / noise

alternative rock / psychedelic rock

death metal

post rock

ambient / classical

doom / black metal

black metal

hardcore

metal / death metal / metalcore

facebook

free jazz / free improvisation / experimental

Glass Modern

‘Klangfarbenmelodie.. And The Colorist Strikes Primitiv' is a very interesting title! If you've heard Arnold Schoemberg's Op. 16 you know what Klangfarbenmelodie is. Schoemberg wrote at the end of his book ‘Harmonielehre’ that the color of the sounds are a dimension itself which could be succeded like melodies. Boulez, at ‘Relevés d'apprenti’, wrote that at that time the timbre was used by itself, functionally. This technique opened several doors, from electroacoustic music to rock. Thurston Moore is a name known for using sounds as colors in “rock paintings” and on this album, with Tom Surgal, he used his instrument directly connected to his spinal cord and his cerebellum. 

The original CD version contains just two tracks: ‘Klangfarbenmelodie.. And The Colorist Strikes Primitiv’ and ‘Phase II’. The first one has more than 30 minutes and the second one has more than 7 minutes. Because of that, the vinyl version has the first track splitted in two parts. All the three tracks of this edition are the recordings of a live set with many different colors created by Thurston and Surgal (plus the audience reactions). There isn’t a conscient way to describe this music because it’s primitive, it’s an experience, and because of that, you need to experience it with your mind and heart opened to any color that they used in this “music painting” with Jackson Pollock’s style!

History needs to be recorded, no matter in which way. A good example is the compilation of the very important Brazilian punk rock festival named ‘O começo do fim do mundo’ (The beginning of the end of the world), which has an infinitely more lo-fi audio and was released on vinyl at 1982. For me, the most important fact in 'Klangfarbenmelodie.. And The Colorist Strikes Primitiv' is that this mind-blowing free improvisation live set was recorded, and even today we can hear one of the most influential names of the electric guitar playing in total contrast to what people expected based on his most famous releases with Sonic Youth. Originally released on CD, this album is available for the first time on vinyl by 'Glass Modern' label. This is a must-have for any lover of Thurston Moore’s free jazz/noise works!

​
Glauber

ambient / electronic / experimental / noise

Unexplained Sounds Group

Here in Belgium, as in most parts of Europe, the Americas and Australia, we know many different musical styles. From autotuned R&B to blackened doom metal and everything in between. If it's possible, it exists, that's the basic idea here. Yet, in all our musical indulgence we often seem to forget that there are other areas with a surprisingly varied musical scene. In the past, we have seen bands from unexpected places, like tiny villages in Siberia or crushing death metal from Iraq. Yet, the public opinion about Africa, music wise, is this: rhythmic, repetitive drums and weird chants, which pretty much explains why the sound of Die Antwoord is far from original. 

Anyway, who else than Raffaele Pezzella to dive into that vast continent and come back with some amazing tunes. Pezzella can be seen as the Steve Irwin of underground music: searching for the rarest gems and showing them to the world with the upmost respect and admiration. This continent is another baffling example of Pezzella's perseverance and passion. The compilation contains fourteen tracks, each one a unique piece of music. I'm not going to describe all of them. I'll leave the joy of discovering to you. But there are some jewels I'd like to pick out.

FRKTL delivered the opening track, one which immediately puts you in your place as far as your knowledge about African music goes. The opener, titled 'Hverfa af himni heiðar stjörnur' apparently puts everything back to Germany, more specifically the Berlin School. Klaus Schülze and Tangerine Dream clearly come to mind here. I wasn't expecting that so I was pleasantly surprised. A few interesting acts follow, combining ambient with traditional instruments and melodies. Fans of acts like Zoviet France might be interested. Flashes of dark ambient, drones, jazz and noise give the respective tracks their own identity. Some are beautiful, others plain weird.

Healer Oran is one of those act that deals in strangeness. Traditional chants and drums seem to have been processed through an array of effects which gives the track 'TaP{-' a somewhat unsettling atmosphere.Abdellah M. Hassak comes up with immersive drones and ritual vocals. His cooperative track 'Yearnings Complacency (feat Aziz Nadif)' brings some works of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to mind. I think that's a pretty neat compliment. In_o 's track '(J. Krishnamurti)' is a glitchy piece of electronics, excelling in minimalism and a pitch black atmosphere.

Then there is the bewildering closer of AMET and the confusing track 'Imposer Le Savoir'. This is definitely one for fans of musique concrete and everything avant garde. It's an adventurous finale for an adventurous compilation, one I will recommend to every fan of unusual, abstract and enigmatic music. Pezzella has done his ultimate best again, resulting in a mesmerizing set of odd tunes to enjoy.


​Serge

electronic / experimental / noise

Here is another one of those albums that not only defy the laws of music but also smash all genre boundaries to pieces in order to create something utterly unique. In fact, this thing often crosses those boundaries so blatantly that even the term "music" is no longer in order. Welcome to the strange but wonderful word of Juhani Silvola, composer, musician and producer working across multiple genres and disciplines. Juhani has a master’s degree from the Norwegian Academy of Music, where he studied electroacoustic composition with the world-renowned composer Natasha Barrett. He also worked with Sara-Jane Summers and several others.

And then there is this album, a confusing and often suffocating mishmash of electronic ambient, freaky synths and harsh noise, coming at you in six unique and bizarre pieces of music. The whole things opens with 'Ritualrytmikk', something that brings back memories of the old electronic noise and musique concrete pioneers like Pierre Henri or Karlheinz Stockhousen. 'Machines Of Loving Grace' adds some Merzbowian noise, or any other crazy Japanese harsh noise act you can image. Another artist that comes to mind is Machinefabriek. So yes, noise, mostly noise.

'Vaster Then Empires' feels like the soundtrack for an avant garde sci-fi movie while '20th Century Meditation' delivers at least a hint of calm, soothing ambient. Title track 'Post-biological Wildlife' sounds exactly as you would expect: electronic animal noises, a bit like a haunted house. Closer 'Speculative Phonography Pt.1' feels like some sort of megamix from the previous tracks. I know that sounds dry and unimaginable but this album is simply weird.

Fans of noise and avant garde electronics will undoubtedly love this. For them, this is another unpredictable sonic adventure. Other people might frown upon these eerie sounds. Strange, weird and odd, those are the keywords here, but the second half of the closing track is simply brilliant. 


​Serge

dark ambient / noise / drone / experimental

Cold Spring

The Cold Spring label celebrates their 250th release with a 29 track double CD. This UK label is specialized in all kinds of extreme music. This compilation contains a broad view of artists who create uncompromising underground music. All the tracks were already previously released. The only exclusive and unheard song is from Coil with Spastiche (Trumpo).

The songs are drowned in the darkest  and coldest atmospheres you can imagine. From the harsh noise of Merzbow to the addictive dark ambient sounds of Sonologyst, or from the doom punk escapades of Zeni Geva & Steve Albini to the creepy sounds of MZ.412. There is enough to discover on this sampler.

​The most curious artist on this release is Barry Adamson, former bass player of The Bad Seeds (Nick Cave). In collaboration with Pan Sonic, Barry Adamson composed this ice cold vocal song, The Hymn Of The Seventh Illusion, that ends this compilation in beautiful darkness. The sampler is a true guide in dark music for beginners and for experienced listeners. This double CD,  limited to 4000 copies in a gate fold Eco-pack is more than worth its money!

black metal / industrial metal

Debemur Morti Productions

During the darkest days of the year a flock of blood sucking bats were released with the compilation of Servants Of Chaos II. The French label Debemur Morti Productions indicates fifteen years of dedication to dark metal music. In fact, this is a very original release that contains fifteen exclusive tracks of fourteen bands. Au Champ Des Mort has the honor of having two hunting and atmospheric black metal tracks on the album. The variety of this extreme metal compilation is high. The psychoactive guitar riffs of Blut Aus Nord and Throane next to the more experimental and industrial approach of Terra Tennebrosa and Manes and the old school attitude of Behexen and Wallachia, show us the broad spectrum of the label in extreme metal. With no doubt Servants Of Chaos II leads the black metal fans to a dark and scorched heaven.

folk / celtic

With a fiddle and Hardanger fiddle as the only instruments used on Solo, Sara-Jane Summers shows her diverse talents on these folk instruments. She has already made several  live performances at rock, jazz, folk, country, and noise festivals worldwide. Sarah-Jane Summers  is releasing music as a duo with her husband Juhani Silvola and solo since 2008. She has made already many recording contributions in the folk-scene. Her playing  embraces the historical Celtic melancholic mood.  This release of old folk covers received an intelligent input. From happy dancing tunes to the sad sounding fiddle vibes, Solo, has the wisdom not to be boring or sleepy. Sarah-Jane Summers  managed to revive Celtic music from a different perspective. 

folk / acoustic

Stvannyr is a project of the Hungarian guitar player István ‘Musicformessier’ Csarnogursky. This artist from the Carpathian basin is a multi active guitar player involved in several projects. From guitar ambient (Musicformessier) to black metal (Realm Of Wolves) and much more (Silent Island, Black Hill). István Csarnogursky has the talent to create special floating guitar sounds that make you drift away.  With Secrets Of Black Ruins he brings a more  folk touch to the ambient guitar licks known from his other project Musicformessier. Six beautiful atmospheric folk instrumentals overwhelmed us with day-dreaming peace. Only available as digital download. Do not hesitate to have a listen to this artist’s other projects.

ambient / electronic

bandcamp

Evan Bartholomew has been performing electronic music for nearly 20 years as Bluetech. He has also credits in composing music for video games and TV/movie scores. With Liquid Geometries this American electronica artist from Portland joined the DiN label of Ian Boddy. Evan Bartholomew explores the electronic sounds  like the old masters of the Berlin School did. A lot of sequenced vibes  are put together into an interesting trip of soundscapes. Nothing new on the horizon but the recording has a high quality production and sounds refreshing. Bluetech  provided nicely constructed and moody tracks on this release. This is a grower. 

heavy metal

Athrox plays a groovy kind of old school metal, a mixture between Armored Saint and Anthrax. This hardworking band from Italy released with Through the Mirror their second album. The songs have lots of variety in style and tempo. When they speed up  you can feel and hear fragments of Metal Church. Athrox perform their music with finesse and deliver good melodic tracks. The down tempo songs don’t lose strength and have no disturbing effect on the album. Some compositions contain a welcome input of thrash metal. Athrox released with Through the Mirror an old school metal album carrying a wide range how heavy metal should sound. Nice work.

​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