Ad Infinitum

Ad Infinitum sounds nothing like the traditional work of Astrofaes. Where Astrofeas is usually known for making heavier, faster driven black metal with a touch of ambiance, their first demo borders on the line of experimental music, featuring a number of effects that don't appear on other albums, and some strange songwriting. I am actually not sure what they were trying to accomplish here. Most of Ad Infinitum is a random mess of ideas that can be interesting if you're open minded, but otherwise not very essential for anyone's collection. Nevertheless you sure won't find anything like this on most of Astrofaes' other releases.

If I had to name a perk of this demo, it would be about how creepy it sounds sometimes. I love the buildup for "Ad Infinitum (Dark I) ". It starts off quietly with eerie synths - it sounds like something from a 50's horror movie! This is well complemented by the ever accelerating drums and accoustic guitars. Then, all of a sudden, the heaviness pops in and the music becomes a chaotic wave of noise. Nice. And that's about where I decide to skip to the next track. It seems the members are fighting each other to see how can claim victory over this mess of sound and this happens during the rest of the track. In the midst of it all, bad vocals triumph. I don't know whether it's a production issue, but the vocals are nothing more than cloudy, thick grunts that add very little to the music.

"Nothing (Monologue) " sounds like something from a demo from the LLN. Again, the creepy synths appear and are accompanied by dull accoustic guitar performance. The vocals are sort of a harsh-spoken voice type. I suppose the end product is pretty creepy but as far as making dark ambient is concerned, if you've heard your fair share of it before, then this is nothing too substantial. For what it's worth though, I do find the atmosphere it produces interesting enough.

Ultimately, everything is somewhat tolerable here, but that can be pushing the envelope. Why did they make two versions of "Fire of the Eternal Time". The second version is merely without the vocals! Depending on how badly you hate the vocals here, that should determine which version you like better. Then there's the obligatory crappy, rehearsal version of a track that later appears on another release with slightly better production.

As I said, depending on your mood and your opinion with this band, you may find some of this interesting, at least in an esoteric sense, but that's pushing the envelope. There's nothing flat out objectionable here, but perhaps if the band spent a little more effort on this demo rather than putting everything together half-assed at the last minute like a 9 year old's science project, the band's potential could have been more present here.

I was really interesting in listening to Astrofaes' demo, Ad Infinitum when I saw it is the name of a track from their The Attraction: Heavens and Earth demo (which I really liked) and had one track from it. After managing to get a copy for cheap, I eagerly opened the case only to see a gothic-like picture in it featuring the two members faces with corpse-paint. I was also wondering why they would actually put an instrumental version of one of their track and a rehearsal track recorded later. So the length of the demo drops from 27 to 17 minutes.

My surprise wasn't over when I put my tape in the radio, some odd gothic keyboards with a touch of eeriness invaded my ears for almost 5 minutes with someone speaking with a bizarre voice at some moment. The track was repetitive, had almost no variation and unoriginal. In other words: boring.

Then the only real track and redeemer of the demo, ''Ad Infinitum (Dark I)'' started. I actually recognized the song because it looked to be some more primitive and gothic-sounding version of ''Ad Infinitum (Dark I: The Expectation)''. The track is definitely good, but with the horrid vocals, annoying keyboards and bad production they pretty much only showed their potential. And it is what this demo is all about, the potential of the band in one track because the rest is pretty much fillers and attempts at gothic instrumentals.

The actual last song of the demo, ''Nothing (Monologue)'' isn't much more than the name of the song itself (I will spare you any bad joke); a simple guitar riff with no distortion repeated again with almost no variation with one of the guys speaking in the background and again for something like 5 minutes. So more than half of the demo is pointless instrumentals.

Oh and then comes the real fillers, an instrumental version of ''Fire of the Eternal Time'' as if it was not instrumental enough and a rehearsal version of ''The Unity (Space of Unconsciousness)''. Though I like that song, I don't see why they would release it on their demo as it was recorded a year later and show some improvement over the demo. The sound is pretty much as bad as the rest of the songs but is better played, the keyboards sound better (while not being too exciting) and Thurios has improved a lot his vocals. But to me, these tracks were inserted either: A) To fill space B) To make the listener put more attention on a latter, better Astrofaes and to take out one of the bad point of the first song of the demo (though your attention is more on the crappy keyboards) or C) Both.

It comes as a surprise that Thurios, one of the main guys behind Hate Forest, Drudkh and of course Astrofaes, ever released something like that. I also never thought he could do vocals that bad, he sure has improved a lot. You can clearly see some potential here but this is a much pointless demo, probably to satisfy their urge to release something or a song they were really proud of. I can't really recommend this to anyone, maybe Astrofaes die-hard fans but this doesn't sound like anything they ever did with the exception of the rehearsal track (and if you take out some elements of ''Ad Infinitum (Dark I)''). Being ''really'' curious may be a good enough reason to bother finding this tape. Other than that, you have been warned.