Dark Ambient Review: Black Stage of Night
Review by Casey Douglass
The Victorian era
always seems to be such a rich vein for media that likes to draw on
the dark side of life. From the opium dens and the diseases that
dogged the huddled masses, to the dabbling with the occult and
emerging sciences, there are plenty of places to look for darkness.
Black Stage of Night is a dark ambient album that hits a rich
vein in this regard, and whether that vein is found by a sad soul in
a mine with a pickaxe or by the prick of a needle, it doesn’t
matter. Black Stage of Night is dark and twisted, and is a
fantastic album.
Dark and twisted though
it maybe, there is a gentle melancholia to many of the sounds and
tones, from delicate piano notes and acoustic tones, to a hissing
static and warping notes. It very much comes across as an album of
the night, the time of the day when the shadows deepen and the world
feels more closed in, the universe ending at the reflection in your
window panes. It’s very easy to imagine a Victorian lady or
gentleman standing vigil at a window, the light from their lantern
hindering their view as they struggle to peer past their own
reflection.
Chaos Unmade is my
favourite track by quite some distance. It opens with a repeating
rhythm that put me in mind of the arrangement you might find in some
kind of warped country music. It wouldn't be a song about cattle
wrangling or unrequited love though, this one would more likely be
about a skeleton on a horse trying to capture errant ghosts in a
misty, moonlit valley. A tone rises and falls with this repeating
rhythm, later joined by a more trilling, whistling sound. Things
quieten near the end of the track, with it ending with a staticy
looping sound, maybe hinting that the skeleton horse-rider has
disappeared over the hill.
The Great Order of
Things is another track that stood out for me. It opens with a
howl-like sound and a deep stuttering tone that pulses into life
every now and then. An “Ahhh-like” vocal meets the howls as the
track progresses, lending the track a church-like feeling. This track
could be about another misty, moonlit valley, but this one has a dark
church at its centre, with people huddled inside praying for the
wraiths outside to go away. The howls become more cat-like in the
last third of the track, which to me, made me think of someone on an
opium high, sitting near a flickering fire and being woken from their
reverie by the family cat wanting to go outside.
The other two tracks
I’ll mention are the first and the last: Mind Turns to Night and
Night Becomes Morning. They are great bookends for the other tracks
as the first seems to deepen as it continues, while the latter
lightens. This felt very fitting for two tracks that could be the
soundtrack for the fading daylight at night’s approach and the
lightening effect of the sun rising the next morning. Almost like an
hypnotic induction and a “Wake up” call, they smooth the way
from, and back to, reality.
Black Stage of Night
is a ghostly dark ambient album, the cobwebs and coal-smoke of
another age mingling with the mind that is looking back at the past.
For me, brings up all manner of Victorian aesthetics, the one thing they
all have in common being the way that they are tinged with the lust
for things to be different to how they are, whether that be by dream
or occult means, wishful thinking or prayer. Atrium Carceri and
Cities Last Broadcast came together to make Black Stage of Night
the welcoming, dark thing that it manages to be, and if it is based
in the world of dreams, I’d be eager to see what the nightmares
that come after may contain.
Visit the Black
Stage of Night page on Bandcamp, and check out the track Mind
Turns to Night below:
I was given a review
copy of this album.
Album Title:
Black Stage of Night
Album Artist:
Atrium Carceri & Cities Last Broadcast
Label: Cryo
Chamber
Released:
October 22, 2019
