Sacred Nothing

This is a profound work of art that is too ambitious to fit into the narrowed aperture of the Black Metal/Dark Ambient genre. So if you want reaffirmation of genre staples, forget about this release, because it is something else. And to highlight my point, here is the first track “Tih Drassenex” – a weird piano/guitar/drums piece that Ms Crowley used to refer to as “a girl dancing in a field”. When first I heard it, I used to listen to it on repeat through my headphones at work and on an on for hours, I would be in that weird, pupil-dilating world.

To be more precise, this artist has a unique approach to dissonance, creating lucid, multi-layered textures and extro-black metal arrangements that result in incredibly deep, often very sad, but mostly emotively undefinable and always grandiose atmosphere. It is so refreshing to hear an original release!

My Basilisk Productions edition is 2CD set. The first disk bears the part of the release that is more identifiable with metal, the second being entirely ambient. The central piece on the first disk is the 16-minute “Succir Ob Laanfen Ex” – an exhausting (but not rambling) multi-part composition that once the vocalized part is over embarks on a contemplative, meandering journey bathed in crystalline distortion and disharmonic layers of guitar ringing out meditatively onwards and onwards. Next comes the most accessible piece “Tessellation” a fairly straight-forward blast of dissonant, choral Black Metal. The vocal performance stands out on this as being particularly inspired with multi-layered clean chants and shrill, neurotic rasps. The rest of the disk is instrumental. Landscapes of dissonance unfold for another time that may be 10 minutes or an age as the first part of the record comes to its premature end.

Then second disk, very deceptively begins with a guitar/synth piece but as it progresses, the music strays more and more into instrumentally unidentifiable territory. If you have taken note of the synthesizer pieces in Francis Copola’s film “Apocalypse Now”, they would be a good comparison to what these recordings sound like.

The feeling of euphoria one might experience walking unharmed though a rainforest of an alien planet or contemplating pale crystalline formations in the absolute FFFF blackness of cavernous digital silence is what I hear in these recordings. Being early works, they hint at great things ahead, whereas the artist may choose to never take this path again…but therein is part of its charm. Those more inclined towards the metal side of the equation, I hope you will give the second disk its deserved second chance and perhaps this time enjoy it.

Originally published in Procession of Black Doom Zine Issue 1, 2008