The Rock Blogger

Oren Ambarchi - Intermission 2000-2008 . 4 stars .

Intermission is a meditative compilation of drone and ambient pieces from this prolific Australian artist. Consisting mainly of subtle guitar and bass tones, these plodding tracks are drawn out over long periods of time to the point where they loose their deliberate instrumental quality and become natural background noise. While the gradual processes of the record take their sweet time, the effect is quite stunning once it sets in - evoking calm ocean waves or a placid morning sky. Pieces like "The Strouhal Number" are weightless pieces of ambiance, only punctuated by the low rumble of bass tones and the sleepy crackle of static.

While the album passes through an otherworldly atmosphere, it avoids the symphonic excess of most ambient records - these are meticulously crafted experiments in sound manipulation that sift through your memories, rather than just lulling you to sleep. It is certainly a challenging collection, and it is not as forceful as the psychedelic drone of Birchville Cat Motel or Natural Snow Buildings, but it still carries on a deeply cerebral undertaking with care. Anyone interested in experimental music will be fascinated by its many crevices.

Natural Snow Buildings. Shadow Kingdom . 2009.

Another masterpiece (if not their finest achievement to date) from this prolific avant/drone duo. Delicate, ethereal folk songs are interwoven with wispy psychedelia, eastern-tinged guitars and mysterious, ambient noises. A soundtrack for levitation. Shadow Kingdom is an incredibly exhausting and expansive album (over 2 hours) that is full of awe-inspiring moments. It may take dozens of dedicated listens to unearth all of its riches.

Oceanus Procellarum. Amidst Nature . 2009.

Low, rumbling drones and minimal acoustic accents run through this deep and challenging album. Subtle transitions lumber in the caverns of these five evocative pieces, sounding like lost requiems, left to rot in the woods.

Starbird. Nanook of the North. 2007.

A very unique piece of drone/ambient/free-folk music inspired by the famous Canadian documentary about the Inuit in Quebec. Strange percussive instrumentation, chimes and woodwinds grant this album an authentic, indigenous atmosphere. The sonic landscapes may be sparse, cold and foreboding, but Starbird’s eclecticism also makes them strangely inviting, finding a primordial connection with the open North.

Tarkovsky’s Mirror set to Arvo Pärt’s Mirror in the Mirror

Tarkovsky’s images have always had a poetic resonance to them. His most famous sequences are slow, lyrical, symbolic, and can sow melancholia in an instant. The effect of these moments, when coupled with Arvo Pärt, becomes all the more deeper.

Vinterriket. Zeit-Los:Laut-Los. 2008. 4 stars.

Eerie winter ambient in same tradition as Northaunt and Paysage d’Hiver. Zeit-Los: Laut-Los features one forty minute track with drawn out ambient synth loops and atmospheric sound samples. It’s an incredibly effective release that conveys feelings of cold, rugged isolation. A suitable soundtrack for wandering the frozen landscape, as life falls to a quiet standstill.
While there is not much variety across this epic track, it is still an entrancing listen as its soothing lifts produce a hypnotic effect. With patience and reflection, the icy drones and all their subtle oscillations become more distinguishable.

“When, in the darkness of a winter night, a snow storm surrounds the shelter and covers everything, then the great moment of philosophy has arrived. Its questions must become simple and essential…”
-Martin Heidegger, 1934.

Vinterriket “Lichtschleier”
This is actually from another album, but the sound is essentially the same.

Deathprod. Morals and Dogma. 2004. 3.5 stars.

This album has the power to induce multiple nightmares. It’s cold, ambient drones washing across like floodwater through an abandoned city, Morals and Dogma pulls you into a strange landscape populated by specters and fallen angels. This is dark ambient to the core, with 4 slow-building movements stretching across 50 minutes of sullen meditation. Dense reverb, deep bass tones, unintelligable rumblings and eerie voices create an absorbing sonic environment to get lost in. While the mood is somber and the performance quiet, these pieces have a subtle, unsettling edge to them, as each droning composition burns with dread and tension. Its emotional power is intense and shows composer Helge Sten’s commitment to atmosphere. Each of these drawn out pieces seeps stealthily into your mind, giving you ample time to conjure evanescent imagery.

Given the deep impression this type of music makes on you, and its incredibly slow pacing, Morals and Dogma is an intimidating record. Its difficult to get into and the lack of sonic variety in some of the longer tracks can drag down the experience if you’re not in a completely reflective mood. That being said, Deathprod’s work is uniquely disquieting, managing to foster complete emotional engagement with great subtlety and minimalistic style. If you are willing to confront the demons living in your subcontinents, Morals and Dogma is a well-versed exorcist.

Deathprod - treetop drive 3
(not from Morals and Dogma, but its still a cool video)

Robert Rich & B. Lustmord. Stalker 1995. 4.5 stars.

A few months ago I wrote a post about Andrei Tarkovsky’s surreal sci-fi film Stalker and its meditative soundtrack, which I had tracked down thanks to a few intrepid readers of this blog. Now I’ve discovered an alternative score to that mind-bending film courtesy of ambient artists Robert Rich and B Lustmord who painstakingly create a haunted soundscape with the same spiritual energy as Tarkovsky’s masterpiece.

Like any great dark-ambient record, Stalker is rich with detail. Natural sound samples like dripping water, gusts of wind and disemboidend vocies fill the estranged spaces of the record. The compsoitons are not just rough collections of found sounds however, as they are driven by subtle rythms, synthesied loops, drones and unsual percussiive elements. While these densely layered compositions are as slow moving and hypnotic as the film’s images, they are still highly engaging, capturing one’s attentions in a ghostly ebb and flow.

Whether its taken in as a companion peice to Tarkovsky’s work or on its own merit, Stalker is a powerful work of art that is full of mystery. While its fullest spirtual thrust comes towards the latter end of the record, as beautiful choral voices make their way through the labryith of sounds, Stalker remains consistently powerful and immersive across its entire duration. If you have any interest in ambient music, or are simply looking for something to think or meditate to, you owe it to yourself to find this album.

Svarte Greiner . Knive . 2006. 4 stars .

This is a spine chilling dark-ambient album from Norway that strives to create a disturbing cinematic experience. Strange rustling, creaks, unsettling drones and haunting choral vocals make subtle exchanges in the black spaces of this record, creating an enveloping atmosphere that has been described as ‘acoustic doom’.

Like avant-garde contemporaries Set Fire to Flames and Northaunt, Svarte Greiner’s disc is difficult to get into but immensely rewarding once you let it slowly seep in under your skin. While there are some meandering sections that just sound like someone clumsily dropping a microphone repeatedly, the later numbers are completely absorbing, as the ghostly, wordless vocals glide across the primal percussion and field recordings. The more refined numbers like "The Black Dress" sound like lost tracks form a David Lynch movie, drawing you into moaning corridors and passageways with no clear direction or aim. All that leads you along is an inescapable sense of dread and unease, the fear of the unknown.

Despite the album’s unevenness, the later half of Knive is engrossing enough to deserve an attentive listen. The level of detail in these soundscapes will be sure to fascinate, as each creeping synth line, shimmering chime and estranged clang pulls you towards a deeper psychic plane. Organic and ethereal, the sounds of Knive will be etched in mind for some time.

Nick Cave & Current 93 - “Patripassian”

From: All the Pretty Little Horses 1993

Northaunt. The Ominous Silence . 2001. 4.5 stars .

Yet another brilliant and obscure record from Norway, Northaunt’s The Ominous Silence features chilling dark-ambient passages complete with sparse piano work and haunting field recordings from nature. Northaunt takes cues from black metal, chamber rock and the avant-garde to create a compelling listening experience that weaves between starkly beautiful melodies and menacing samples, pulling you into the black recesses of the unknown.

The Ominous Silence is exceptional for its painstaking attention to detail, as each drone, gargling vocal and effect is used subtly to create a mysterious soundscape. While the majority of the tracks here run long, they are still driven by underlying melodies so their efforts don’t become too outstretched and abstracted. Such a curious and unsettling work like The Ominous Silence demonstrates the evocative power of dark ambient and calls your attention to the quiet happenings around you. Every drop of rain, gust of wind and thundering storm is part of a wild, puzzling concert and Northaunt act as a medium for it. Powerful, if not often disturbing, material from one of the most underwritten genres.

A Funeral Inside

Darkspace . Darkspace III . 2008. 4 stars .

This album is total insanity. With open wintry keyboards and furious black metal riffs, Darkspace create a crushing atmosphere that swallows everything around it. If you are familiar with Switzerland’s Paysage d’Hiver, you will know what to expect here, as Darkspace features PDH’s Tobias Möckl on guitars and vocals. While PDH was barren, lo-fi and rustic, Darkspace’s sound sports slightly better production and its ragged guitar rhythms are given more room to breathe. The sound created here is cold, grim and bleak but is also feverishly paced, running through torrents of visceral blackness.

Darkspace are less focused on crafting songs as they are on developing a harsh sonic landscape, as all of these tracks run long, eventually becoming monolithic walls of sound. While it is often challenging to have no distinctive compositional elements stick out in the mix, as everything blends together in a sea of darkness, there are still some powerful melodies under the surface to move the episodes along. Every so often a brutal doom metal riff will come chugging along, providing a relentless current to pull you along.

Taken as an immersing experience, Darkspace III is an exceptional black metal record that successfully incorporates ambient elements and chilling keyboard sections to full effect. In terms of disticntive song craft and variety however, causal metal fans may find this to be rather inaccessible. Its their loss still, since albums with such relentless consistency and cohesion are hard to come by.