Style: Dark/Ritual Ambient
Country: USA
Label: Ravenheart Productions
Format: MP3@CBR, 320 kbps
Size: 99 mb | 96 mb
About Release:
The CD edition under review is a 2006 release by Sonic Tyranny productions and contains just three tracks - one by each act and a third on which the members of both acts collaborate under their individual names Set-Heru and Meldhkwis. Although Black Seas of Infinity only is listed on this website because of its former black metal background, I think it's worthwhile to review the whole CD and not just BSoI's part, seeing that the other act Aymrev Erkroz Prevre takes up at least half the listening time. I'm sure lots of people look at Encyclopedia Metallum as a source of recommendations and as an alternative to print-based music media whose agenda isn't always about music and musicians, and many if not even most of the website's visitors also listen to ambient, noise, improvised music and industrial, and these are represented on the CD as well.The entry by A.E.P., "Kamarupa III", is an all-instrumental dark ambient drone piece with perhaps some industrial influences. Some of the ambient and droney effects may have been done on piano. Those familiar with experimental and improvised music may have seen or know of musicians who put various gadgets including large clips or electric fans on strings of guitars or pianos to change the quality of sound that comes out these instruments, and possibly Meldhkwis may have done something similar here. The track has a very open, spacey feel which can be threatening and is very like what industrial / dark ambient musician Lustmord (this guy was a former member of the Australian late 1970s / 80s industrial band SPK and also collaborated with the Melvins on "Pigs of the Roman Empire") has done in his solo career. There are strange things that go bump underfoot here and metallic drones seem to reverberate through your head forever and ever. As the track continues, Meldhkwis starts stabbing out a deranged piano melody that often goes off-key and lifts the music into a completely different world. Drones and seething clouds of tone and grit build up into a sort of vague monster entity that almost but never quite engulfs him.The BSoI entry "As the Pythoness strokes the Lovely Sword" is a strong soundscape that starts with deep shifting shimmers of sound suggesting an inner turbulence that can't be understood by human senses. Metallic spidery lightning strikes alternate with high-pitched siren-like calls whose edges are muted by the cloudy atmosphere but occasionally come close to being screechy and jagged on the ears. Towards the sixth minute a droning aeroplane noise develops and the mood becomes a bit more serene though a metal siren intrudes. Suddenly everything erupts and becomes nearly chaotic with a gritty crackling edge, an echoing clanging tape loop, something like a tambourine that's been treated with echo banging in the background, and metal drone stomrs ebbing back and forth. This part of the track is actually quite repetitive but subtle variations in all the sound elements operating in parallel suggest an increasing build-up of turbulence and tension and keep your senses off-kilter and always guessing if and when things will really explode. This is the loudest and "noisiest" part of the track and of the whole split album.The collaborative piece "Betwixt the Words of the Dark Grammar ... lies the Gate of the Secret Horizon" is a secretive space-ambient tone work in two sections: the first part has a constant scratching rhythm in the background as though someone is combing through grass and soild looking for something while overhead dark clouds of drone pass. About the sixth minute all this changes into the next section: a piercing sonic laser leads into a different universe where ghostly sound images float in space plasma. Fragments of sonic flotsam and jetsam, all appearing to be part of something bigger and meaningful but lacking the means to connect them, pass by, not doing very much.Of the three tracks here, the BSoI contribution is the best: it's a forceful track with an inner rage and intensity that maintains tension in the last part of the piece by a combination of repeating tape loops of music and noise elements working in parallel and Set-Heru making changes here and there as they go. This track has got me curious enough to think about checking out some of BSoI's other releases. The A.E.P. track is also enjoyable, more so when the piano melody really gets going so that the piece becomes a soundtrack to some Gothic Grand Guignol play where the puppets murder each other in a frenzy and throw fake blood at each other and at the audience. (Ah, those must have been the days before people decided puppet shows were really for children and so had to be cleaned up ...) As for the collaboration, it's very subdued and too well-behaved compared to the rest of the CD and I get the impression the musicians erred on the side of being polite to each other and respecting one another's work too much to do very much apart from gilding it. It's possible the musicians simply exchanged pieces of music and worked on the other guy's stuff without doing something very different on it, then put the results together and released the combined work as is: a lot of musical collaborations these days are of this nature, without the people involved having to meet at all. This probably explains why the collaboration piece seems to divide into two phases quite neatly and isn't more what it could have been.If you are keen on dark ambient music with strong leanings to experimentation and improvisation, and you don't mind forays into noise and industrial, this split release would be of interest, though it's not the kind of album you'd necessarily keep in your collection permanently. I see this split mainly as a way of introducing people to the work by BSoI and A.E.P. and once you start listening and collecting their other releases, you'd probably pass this split on to other people who might be similarly inclined towards this kind of music. The bulk of the rating I have given for the split is for the separate A.E.P and BSoI contributions.
Written by NausikaDalazBlindaz on August 26th, 2007 (metal-archives.com)
2006 Tape Version
Download from Depositfiles.com
2007 CD Version
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