3 years in the making, Atrium Carceri is back with another visceral masterpiece entitled Souyuan.
After careful psychological observeration of test listeners, Simon Heath has done it again - renewing the genre through careful planning and painstaking attention to each fragment and detail, however minute. With fresh atmospheres, and a depth previously unfathomable, Souyuan will amaze initiates and pundits alike with its complexity and pureness of form. Never before has the artists innermost recesses been so sublimely conveyed to any medium.
About the Book:
In 1877, two gentlemen, Messrs Tonnison and Berreggnog, head into Ireland to spend a week fishing in the village of Kraighten. While there, they discover in the ruins of a very curious house a diary of the man who had once owned it. Its torn pages seem to hint at an evil beyond anything that existed on this side of the curtains of impossibility. This is a classic novel that worked to slowly bridge the gap between the British fantastic and supernatural authors of the later 19th century and modern horror fiction. Classic American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft lists this and other works by Hodgson among his greatest influences.
About The Album:
This musical adaptation of The House On The Borderland is the result of a collaboration between German musicians Rüdiger Gleisberg and Mathias Grassow, the founding duo behind Nostalgia, and Italian Luigi Seviroli, who suggested the concept to Gleisberg and Grassow. Track titles closely follow William Hope Hodgson’s original narrative, which concerns two friends on a fishing holiday in Ireland who discover a manuscript in a ruined house. The manuscript tells of its author’s encounters in the house with evil supernatural and extra-dimensional beings, culminating in the cosmic horror of helplessly watching throughout countless aeons as the earth and its solar system are consumed by the ‘Dark Sun’.
"In the second installment of the Somnia series, a Portland based modern classical composer, Evan Bartholomew, continues his meditative descent through Secret Entries Into Darkness. The minimal ambient sound slightly curves around the deep entrance, brushing the wet moonlight on the cave's bold stone, before it breaks into sheaths of white, and vanishes with echoes.
Unlike its predecessor, this journey is more rhythmic and darker, sustaining an eerie and desolate feeling, as the composer dissects the abstract lines between the realms of life and death during our weightless dive into Xibalba. In his streaming hypnotic voyage, Bartholomew perfects his production and the art of revealing his soul to the listener through music. The gravity of the emotion is immediate and heavy; for when the album ends, we are left alone and helpless, at the bottom of the void, only to be born again."
-Headphone Commute
CD limited to 777 copies worldwide, soy ink on recycled paper, sewn, sealed in wax, signed and numbered.
In addition to the 777 numbered copies it appears there is also a promo batch relased as "PROMO/777".
1- Exposition
This is the re-release (limited to 500) of the second Apoptose album originaly released in, 2002 nearly two years after the release of the CD "Nordland," this time treading on unexpected musical paths. Only occasionally does one still feel a faint breeze from the barren landscapes of the north, for on "Blutopfer" a special ritual of the south is celebrated: the Easter drumming processions of the little Spanish village of Calanda. Following a stay in Calanda in 1998, Apoptose could not forget the impression this festival made, since the primordial power of these archaic rhythms and the magic of the blood that flows from the hands of the drummers touches anyone who has ever witnessed it. The decision was made then to compile an album from the hours of documentary recordings which came into being during this time. However, it was not until the year 2001 that the time was finally right to start the project that in 2002 reached its final form in the CD "Blutopfer." The title is the German term for "blood sacrifice".
Contains drum samplings from the 1998 annual Semana Santa holy festival in Calanda village, Spain.
Purple-tinted disc packaged in an embossed digipak.
David Darling is a cellist, and on Dark Wood he plays all the parts, multitracking himself playing in various registers and alternating between bowing and pizzicato techniques. The program consists of four suites, titled "Darkwood IV" through "Darkwood VII." However mannered the presentation may be, this music is really stunning. All of it moves slowly, like a dark cloud formation, as spare lines pile up on one other and pizzicato sections nudge up against long, sustained tones. "Dawn" and "New Morning," which are virtually identical compositions, bracket the program, and they are the loveliest tracks of all; where pieces like "Returning" and "Searching" hover in a sort of harmonic stasis, "Dawn" and "New Morning" move deliberately and gently through a definite chord progression, and the effect is almost cathartic. Highly recommended. - AMGTracklist:
The all new album of Herbst9 is a step further into the depths of the Assyrian and Asian mythologies, using authentic audio and visual fragments of sacrifices, lamentations, prayers and ancient rituals. The result is a deep labyrinth of sounds with meditative percussions, ghostly vocal fragments and singings which melts with detailed and multi-layered tones of various traditional instruments. All this is constructed around a core of dark and ongoing floating drones creating an atmosphere of true archaic music which has been developed by Herbst9 to perfection. This soundtrack is the secrecy from the deep and hidden places of the sacred earth transcending us beyond the real world to the inner realm of ourselves.
The CD is presented in 6-panel digipack.
"When humanity comes before you in awed silence at the terrifying radiance and tempest, you grasp the most terrible of all the divine powers. Because of you, the threshold of tears is opened, and people walk along the path of the house of great lamentations. With the lamenting balag drum a lament is struck up."
This pan-European group of tape manipulators and guitar explorers have delivered something peculiarly beautiful to Aurora Borealis, an industrial folk album that harks back to the playful, pastoral era of Cosmic Couriers as well as the more recent Jewelled Antler Collective discography. Opener 'Rosicrucian' swells with spiral-picked melodies and thin electronic tides, evoking the serene cosmic folk of Witthuser and Westrupp. Elsewhere, the synth pulses and samples of 'Sovnig' shimmer amid the heat-haze of interlocked guitar mantras, grazing and unhurried. Knives Ov Resistance's gentle methods are more akin to long-lost troubadours such as Tom Rapp than Boards Of Canada; the mournful closing track 'Outremer' roars with operatic vocal cries and radio dispatches, the tendril-guitars diffused and murmuring. A precious and elegant debut. - Rocka-A-RollaBrain melting stuff punctuated with a sound that is somehow inherently evil. - boomkat
"Moss & Memory" is Chet W. Scott’s third full length work as Ruhr Hunter, one that has come a full decade since 1996 to this collection of telluric drones and cryptogamous soundscapes. In the face of modern humankind’s paring of nature, "Moss & Memory" evokes an atavism and reawakens the animism, which despite being overlooked by a technologically advanced society still pervades all essential beings but truly finds home where nature is unfettered. Gneissic mysticism, as layered as time is immemorial, "Moss & Memory" serves as postern to the wonder of the microcosm as it relates to the macrocosm, an embrasure through an isthmus of modernism and materialism.Tracklist:
The instruments subsumed into this album are too numerous to list here (though detailed in the liner notes of the album’s packaging), but range a gamut of acoustic instruments to organic samples of animals and the breathing of seasons, the oscillation of day and night. Susurrous drones shiver the undergrowth of the grove, eld and numinous, guitars meter languid melodies and dulcimer rills thread the boscage. With all bar one track pushing beyond ten minutes, there is a sense of changing landscape, of “journey”, as Chet W. Scott so enunciates on the very first track, signaling the cycle of life and death.
Terrene acoustics constantly drag the listener into fecund soil, hollowed animal horns and thunder chime together with throat singing shamanic observances as the forest endures, rain and congeries of birds and insects proscenium for ritual. Ruhr Hunter’s ambience is far from cathedrals of despair or the sealed caps of rotting cities, preferring to walk naked that chapel of life. - aural pressure
A three inch CDR that continues the experimental nature of the Cam Deas CDR. Fans of Dirty Demos and Blackest Rainbow will appreciate the long extended dark drifts, guitar and FX generated noise, vapours of tones and droning clouds of grey lustres. It's like a soundtrack to a film made somewhere in the former eastern block back when it had a reputation for all things totalitarian. On the other hand, it could be the soundtrack to a slow motion ballet, particularly the closing drawn-out finale. - Norman records
