Dark Music Review – Path of Dissolutions
Review Written By Casey Douglass
Hoshin, also know under his alias Esylt, presents us with a soothing ambient music album. Ripe with field recordings of lush forests and damp ancient temples. Layered with mechanical undertones it creates a unique atmosphere. An enlightening voyage to the center of Mysticism. Blackened machines summon dread, while the spiritual world knocks on the door of reality. The stench of decay stand in stark contrast to the awakened mind. We feel throbbing bass one minute, the other surrounded by murmuring crowds. From within them the cough of pestilence echo through halls that never end. This is fresh twist on the dark ambient genre and drone music.
There
is a great app on the Google Play app-store called Tao Mix. It
lets you make your own simple soundscapes, dragging icons around and
resizing them to change the sound’s position in the scene, its
volume, and things like that. One of the sounds the app lets you drag
around is the noise from a busy coffee shop. Add a hint of rain and
some wind-chimes, mess a bit with the volumes and you find yourself
in a surprisingly relaxing scene. It was while using this app that I
realised how relaxing the sounds of conversation can be, so long as
it isn't jarring. The first two tracks on Path of Dissolutions
feature scenes that use this idea, only a hundred times better than
the simple things I could create in Tao Mix (it’s an app
well worth checking out to make your own simple relaxation
soundscapes though). As I listened, I did kind of hope that Path
of Dissolutions would feature this kind of human-based soundscape
throughout, but sadly that wasn’t to be.
Hoshin
makes tremendous use of field-recordings, from the dripping rain and
bustle present in Souvenir From The Sacred, to the echoing crackles
of a bonfire in The All is A Flame. The other tones that tend to
surround these recorded sounds are, as the album description states,
deep bass rumbles and lighter, sustained up-swells, to add a bit of
balance. I particularly enjoyed the muted rumblings contained in the
final track: How It All Ended, a composition that seemed to portray
massive tectonic upheaval, maybe as some catastrophic force causes
the ground to crack open and flame to rain down from the sky.
Path
of Dissolutions contains a nice mixture of tracks, from the quiet
echoing spaces to the aforementioned rumbling goliaths. My initial
disappointment at the disappearance of the human-based soundscapes
was tempered by the obvious quality contained in the ones that
follow. I particularly liked the tracks that sounded as if they
featured some kind of eldritch machinery grinding up through gears in
the distance. An example of this is the rhythmic muffled thumps
contained in Ruins in Focus, which put me in mind of some kind of
giant press working somewhere far away, the soundscape
becoming more violent as the thumps turn into stabs.
Path
of Dissolutions is a quality dark ambient album, with something
for most tastes contained inside, but also the drive to push into
more novel areas, such as the human-based soundscape scenes. I give
it 4/5 and certainly feel that it is an album that I will return to
again and again.
Visit the Path of
Dissolutions page on Bandcamp here for more information.
You can listen to Tender Deadlocks below too:
I was given a free
copy of this album to review.
Album Title: Path of
Dissolutions
Artist: Hoshin
Label : Cryo Chamber
Artwork & Mastering
: Simon Heath
Released:
September 13, 2016
