After very successful album Nearby Being (2006, in cooperation with Ad Lux Tenebrae project), we bring you a new album of mysterious project from Russian Ural. 74 minutes long composition called Noughtwards is full of dark harmonic drones and subtle pulsations, and is meant to multiply your inner self by zero and to take you off... noughtwards. The album is coming out in nice six pannels digipack in limited edition of 600 pieces.
Heathen Harvest:
Three decades ago it was kind of easy for a band to be mysterious. Back in the swap cassette era you just needed to make your music with some esoteric or even pseudo satanic contents, a picture of you (if you wanted) with grim face and covered by hair (later corpse paint would be replacing all this) and a lapidary quote to knock it all (kill yourself for the well being of jesus christ, for example). Anyway, in this era of Internet infotainment and banal TV shows playing with stereotypes as funny toys to sell everything it’s hard to be mysterious anymore, the best an artist can do is to hide his name, its gender and email and to refuse Myspace as a chance, anyway the only information we have about this band is that the brain behind it names himself as 121 and he is prosaically at charge of all the soundscapes from Closing the Eternity. The music from this band emits some kind of natural radiance, a mysterious link associated with the deep and more obscured side from nature; perhaps this character retains the very frequency of the Ural region where it was created, prepare for a very deep and large trip of one hour duration.
The introit is kind of nebulous, as if muddled chorals and opaqued orchestral sounds were crushed behind a wall of somber and repetitive set of rumbling drones that slowly slip into an analogue wave, pulsing in an unnatural vibration. Every sound is secluded by the hectic compendium, fading roars and decayed murmurs intermingle while progressing in a precipitated variation that creates a whole aura of mystic trance. In a word, ambitious. The first fifteen minutes presents a escalating process of multiple drone play, a cacophonic trepidation, obscured and relentless while transient waves continously oscillate like vibrant notes of tone variance and in the middle of all an organic tumult similar to a gigantic vocal humming. This is the atmosphere of a dream, a dream within nature, the lost dream of a god lost in the dream of another god, a never ending scale of crisscrossed cosmic stories. The constant repetition gets invariably replaced by tiny variations that starts to arrange complete different aural scenarios, but the constant correlates a mantric rhythm. The basic progression for the play is established by the strict formula of opposed drone layers, low tones vs high ones and multiple organic sound interplay with curious textures. An interesting thing in here is the analogue variation added to the generally organic atmosphere, with this set of layers made of transient waves of cold tones. The finale increments ostensibly the use from this effect delivering a set of ever descending high frequencies and gelid oscillations that highly contrasts with the beginning of the work.
The work presents anticipated strategies and resources within the genre of Dark Ambient, and even if it has, if occasionally one gets interested in the details in between or the contrasts, the constancy and over length of the phases simply knocks off all the interest in the end. Its clear that the work reports a trance inducing state and its efficient in its delivery though but aside from that there is not much further contribution to highlight. A nice set of occasional contrasts, nice play with organic sounds and clever incursion into analogue interplay keep an eye on that for further exploration and most extreme experimentation, there is still some more mystery you can get from these ideas.