Funeral Rain Press Corps

Genre: Dark Ambient 
Label: Malignant Records/Black Plagve

Geez. It’s been about six months since I’ve gotten my hands on some dark ambient goodness. I mean, I don’t have a shortage of this stuff (thanks to Jason Mantis), but it’s always nice to have more. Or maybe I’m just greedy, I don’t know…

Anyhow, today I get to sink my teeth into Black Plagve’s (a division of Malignant Records) most demented and psyche scorching bastard sons: Hypsiphrone. And guess what? Like just about everything else have I received from Black Plavge’ s mothership, I LOVE this album.

Unfortunately, I can’t really compare And The Void Shall Pierce Their Eyes to any of the other brilliant dark ambient releases I have received. (Being unique is definitely something to get excited over, but it can be a bitch to describe in this medium/genre.) The closest anything that I can even begin to describe what this album puts you through would have to be Stalaggh. Now, in the past, that would be an insult coming from me. But the years have been good to me so now I can appreciate the intricate goings on in such albums/bands. But yes, Stalaggh. The comparison is probably more true than even I think: a dense, oppressive gloom fills the room you’re in with dread, regardless of where you are (seriously, go to your happy place and listen to this album. By the time it’s over, you’ll need a new happy place). Screaming and crying mental patients (and throughout the track entitled Resurgence Of Mors Sexualis, it seems like you can hear the staff too) can be heard running through the halls of this absolutely malevolent (and fictitious) place of healing.

But that’s where all of those comparisons ends. The technique is completely different with Hypsiphrone’s brand of slow mental torture. It all feels genuine and it’s all from an honest place. It’s not just slapped on a platter and presented as something “shocking” or purposely “sick”.  Every track is water marked with blood, sweat and tears and that my friends is refreshing.

The only thing I can manage to critique would be the overall length of this album. I wish it was only a few minutes shorter since I always seem to burn out in the last bit of the closing track. Over than that though, if you’re a fan of this kind of thing, I can’t seem to recommend this album and label enough.

Overall: Yet another solid dark ambient release has found a happy home on my shelf and in my computer. But be forewarned;  And The Void Shall Pierce Their Eyes is not for everyone. Unless you get some kind of kinky satisfaction from having your wits tested and your psyche kicked repeatedly by a raving lunatic, then maybe, only maybe you’ll do ok against an album of this magnitude.

9.5/10

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Genre: Dark Ambient

Label: Shaytan Productions

Now this… is… fucking awesome! As soon as I received Jilwah (and after I read a brief description of it and separated it from it’s black metal cousins in the stack of CDs that Shaytan Productions had sent me), I popped it into my CD player, turned off the lights and plopped down on the floor. Twenty seven minutes and twenty seven seconds later I got up, hit play again and laid back down on the floor and waited for Dhul Qarnayn to work his magic one more time.

To recap, I was expecting this to be a black metal album. I was hardly disappointed to find out that it was a dark ambient single. Upon further research, I discovered that I was a split and EP too early to hear any of main man Learza’s minimalist black metal offerings. (Shucks!)

Jilwah is just a shade under a half and hour of meditative serenity, intermixed with moments of shocking turbulence that, while only lasting a few seconds at a time, makes quite the impact. They’re like spiritual potholes that test the listeners soul alignment. There are a couple of section where you come across chanting (I believe that it’s in Arabic, but don’t quote me on that) that comes off eerily soothing. They’re the only verbal anything you’ll hear through the entirety of Jilwah.

There are folksy flourishes from time to time as well. They remind me of something that you might hallucinate if you managed to get yourself lost in the desert and were succumbing to heat stroke (sunburn not included). But then, in the nick of time, you stumble upon a lush oasis. You plunge into the glimmering spring before resting in the shade of the single massive palm tree, of which you feast on it fruits that magically fall into your mouth, ready to munch… yeah, I know. I’m doing that thing again where I go off on a tangent that is more of an interpretation of what I heard rather than a review. But you know what? Bite me. Ambient music, rather GREAT ambient music makes you to crazy things to let you know how much you appreciate it!

Overall: Jilwah is immeasurably amazing! It’s everything that I’ve personally ever wanted in an ambient offering: complexity, emotion and provocation of deep meditative thought. Jilwah and Phelios’s Astrial Unity are tied from first on my top ten favorite ambient listening experience!

10/10

Dhul Qarnayn has since called it quits so no links for you!

Genre: Dark Ambient
Label: Malignant Records

I’m going to get the one piece of negative shit out in the open about Rasalhague’s Malignant Records’ debut release, Rage Inside The Window: Normally, I love to listen to ambient music when I’m dozing off into night-night land or when I’m floating down a Percocet high… the first time I listened to this album, I was doing both. And I almost shit myself because of it. If this one nasty little bit of coincidence didn’t happen, I’d give Rage Inside The Window a 10/10.

Embarrassing (almost) browning of the bed sheets aside, Rage Inside The Window is a dark ambient outing that’s based on actual events that revolve around an innocent young girl that was neglected and abused by her callous, evil piece of fucking shit mother. The little girl was starved, psychologically and physically tortured and imprisoned in her shit encrusted, cockroach infested room until the proper authorities were altered and came to the rescue… after the girl turned feral.

Every goddamned track places you, the listener, in the urine soaked place of this poor young girl. And you feel it. Rasalhague make damn sure of it with a myriad of tricks: demonic hissing, hellish swells, infernal booms and grating, solid-chunks-of-sulfur-being-bashing-against-your-skull crackles and pops. I don’t think that I’ve liked an album so much that simultaneously make me sick to my stomach…

Overall: Never have I ever been as emotionally jarred by an album… Rage Inside The Window WILL do one of the following things to you: A) It will make you cry. B) Cause you to punch a wall. Or C) Make you question why humanity is allowed to continue thriving when there are people like the monster this album is base on loose in the world.

I did all three.

9.5/10

Rasalhague On Reverbnation
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Genre: Dark Ambient

Label: Malignant Records

Wow… pretty box…

Er, hmm… yeah. This is the celebratory fifteen year anniversary re-release of one of the more groundbreaking dark ambient records ever recorded (or so I’m told by diehard fans of the genre), and it’s presented in a blood red box containing two discs! Disc one is the six tracks that made up the original Blood Music, re-mastered and with a couple of extra tweaks here and there and a previously unreleased track, Beneath The Sun. The first five tracks of disc two are from a limited edition cassette from 1993. While the sixth track is from a limited release seven inch vinyl from 1996 and the last track was a single from a compilation from 1997.

Within about a minute of the first track, entitled Infinite Domain, it’s no real surprise why there was need to re-introduce this ambient gem to the masses: it fucking owns! The Blood Music reissue is an intense ride from beginning to end, pulsing (probably an intentional sonic tongue in check joke. Or maybe I’m just reaching here) with a vibrancy and blazing spark that could of only been set by trailblazers of the genre. This reissue on it’s own was pretty much perfect. Now, let’s talk about the extras…

Immediately, Beneath The Sun feels unnecessary. The flow is broken since it goes from a smooth as silk ending in Absolute Zero to an abrupt beginning with Beneath the Sun. It’s not a bad song at all, it just feels tacked on. I guess that Yen Pox had it right the first time.

The material from the ’93 cassette is, on the other hand, very welcome in the realm of bonus material. So much so in fact, it rivals the aural badassery that was emanating off of the original Blood Music material! The same can be said about the remaining bonus material, just in a shorter sense. And unlike Beneath The Sun, all of the other extra material gels together in a complex weave of intense ambient music.

Overall: I usually turn my nose up at reissues and the like, but I’m all over this baby! Blood Music is bloody fantastic! It stands the test of time and still manages to tower over several other releases from fresher faces. Yen Pox did it right!

9.5/10

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Genre: Dark Ambient, Experimental
Label: Malignant Records

I was wondering how long it would take before I’d run into something from Malignant Records that didn’t do much for me. Ok, that isn’t quite true or fair. Wolfskin (featuring Last Industrial Estate) does a terrific job at creating depressing noises and setting up a more than enjoyable ambience for the listener to, say, study trigonometry or fall asleep to. But as for just plain sitting and stoning out to, I’m not all that sure.

Album opener Arrival, is a strong enough track to lead off with, with it’s slow to start build and powerful wind-ish effect. I find it to be reminiscent of standing in an arid plain where a sandstorm buffering you from every direction for hours on end. And then we transition into track two of five, Metaphysical. Now, with a title like that, I figured that this was going to be an eight minute journey of self-exploration, or maybe something a little less intense like a slow waltz on my own gray matter. Turns out, we’re supposed to be content with a continued variation of Arrival. Ok… that’s fine I guess. Just don’t let it carry over into track three, Stonegates Of Silence.

…you got lucky. Track three juts out from the grown like a seventy story tall monolith, casting a menacing shadow over the rest of the tracks on this album. Both figuratively, with it’s pulsing blasts of intensity and ringing of what I can only imagine was a bell the size of a small planet and literally by clocking in at fifteen minutes and twenty-four seconds long! I can honestly say that this is the best of the five.

The last two tracks end up being a bit of a wash for me. The feel like wasted effort on the artists part and sounded like something I’ve heard before in previous submissions. But to be fair, if I heard Stonegates Of Silence before those other releases, then the score may have been a little high. I guess this was just the luck of the draw.

Overall: Honestly, this album’s only crime was being listened to after the likes of Derelict World and Astral Unity. Otherwise, I say that this is another solid album from the Bastion of the Bleak, Malignant Records.

8/10

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