It’s almost the end
of another year, so here is a post in which I look back at some of
the dark ambient music that has caressed my lugholes over the last
twelve months. The vast majority of albums mentioned actually
released during 2021, but I included some older releases that were
none the less, new to me in 2021.
When it comes to what I
decided to include, I chose the albums that I kept drifting back to
long after I had finished the review. Or, maybe I remember listening
to them tens of times during a certain period during the last year.
As I only tend to review releases that I feel reasonably confident
that I will enjoy, even the ones that I don’t mention here but are
sitting on this website, are still well worth checking out.
Before I get to the
list, I just wanted to pay my respects to Mount Shrine once more.
Cesar created some of the most dreamy and relaxing music, and I’m
still so sad that Covid took him in April. His albums have been in my
permanent rotation ever since I first listened to Ghosts On Broken Pavement. Shortwave Ruins is also an excellent album for
winter-based relaxing, in my humble opinion. Rest in Peace Cesar.
On to the list.
Xmas is often a time
when certain people listen to Gregorian-styled chants. This year, I
intend to make full use of Monasterium Imperi’s Warhammer 40K
inspired, chant-laced Dark Litanies of Terra (2020) and Mundus
Sanctorium(2021). While
everyone else can fill their minds with notions of beards in the sky,
I’ll happily be absorbed into a bleak mental world in which
humanity plunges into the depths of space, with a might and a
zealousness that surpasses anything we’ve seen in real life.
A similarly space-based
album is Sleep Research Facility’s dark ambient album Nostromo(2007). As I stated in my
review, I have no idea why an Alien
and a dark ambient fan such as myself, has taken so long to finally
get around to checking out Nostromo.
It’s like loving peanut butter and jelly and never thinking to try
to put them both together. Unthinkable! Nostromo
is a simmering, ominous journey through the decks of the titular
spaceship, one that skilfully evokes the feelings of the film. I
listen to it on an almost weekly basis.
After
two sci-fi albums, next up is one that sends the listener back in
time. Paleowolf’s Megafauna Rituals(2017)
fills the ears with shuddering drumbeats and crumping footfalls as it
conjures the spirit of the great mega beasts that roamed the planet
during the last ice age. Shortly after I picked up this album, we had
a few days of blizzard-like snow. As I walked across frozen
farm-land, looking down as the snow whipped past my feet, I listened
to Megafauna Rituals and it certainly added a wholly different
feeling to the raw elements. If you buy this album and you are
blessed with some harsh snowy weather, pop in your earphones and give
it a listen as you stride out into it.
The Owl’s dark
ambient album #44 - The Recluse (2021) is another that, at
times, felt wintery, particularly the second track Glacial Beauty.
#44 - The Recluse is an album that mixes warm smoothness with
harsher noise, and was initially one that I wondered if I’d gel
with. Well, I keep returning to it, and it’s still one of the best
albums I’ve ever encountered for quieting my mental chattering and
ruminations.
I
kind of want to move onto a heat-based album now, all of this talk of
snow and glaciers is decidedly chilly. BlackWeald’s 666 Minutes in Hell (2021) is just the ticket, as it’s an eleven
hour journey through the realms of Hell. Some of the tracks are as
long as some entire dark ambient albums! The soundscapes give the
listener a great variety of brimstone-laced vistas and sounds to
enjoy, from the impression of being buried alive, to a giant infernal
furnace and abyssal depths with distant cries and strange ululations.
Who needs eggnog when you can mentally stroll along the edge of a
lake of magma?
Finally, Cities Last
Broadcast’s The Umbra Report (2021) is an album that really
masters the “invisible threat in a quiet room” kind of vibe. This
album drip-feeds an ominous feeling of unseen forces shifting and
stirring in what could be an otherwise mundane vista. There are
strange warbling voices and notes that seem to ping from vast
distances, straining to reach your ear. A tense, very atmospheric
album, and like the others mentioned above, one I listen to
regularly.
***
That
about does it for this year. Thank you for reading, and thank you if
you are one of the regulars who often visits my website. I hope you
have a good Xmas and New Year.
When it comes to
fiction or the imagination, I’m a fan of strange rooms. These rooms
are often the kinds of space that might once have been a lounge or a
dining room, but that have since been converted or adapted for
peculiar experiments. Maybe a room has been cleared so that a séance
can take place. Maybe the room is untouched and scientific equipment
has been added to monitor something unseen. I just like this mixture
of the mundane and the bizarre. Cities Last Broadcast’s The
Umbra Report is a dark ambient album that embodies this feeling
in audio form.
My favourite track is
Disembodied. It begins with a rumbling drone, one populated with
scratchy higher tones and static. This feels like a trembling
soundscape, like everything is a quiver with strange energy. The
image that came to mind to describe this track is a group of fairy
beings, e.g. pixies, elves, etc. Said beings are coming down from a
magic mushroom high, sprawled about on the floor of a dilapidated
mouldy squat. A purer tone sprinkles a sense of sadness over things,
and the overall impression that I got was that of someone being out
of their usual place and time, disconnected, but not necessarily in a
healthy way. It felt very dark to me.
Stares Back is another
track that stood out for me. It starts with a raspy, sigh-like sound,
a deeper tone soon quietly blooming into life. An airy drone sits
behind things, a humming and resonant tone soon follow. The rasping
sound twists into a sense of tortured strings and squeals, and faint
impacts can be heard thudding at various times. This track felt like
what might be going on in someone’s mind as they stare into a
mirror, playing a game of “who is the real person” with the
reflection. I dare say that in this case, when they turn away, they
don’t see the reflection still staring daggers at their back. Just
how it should be.
Wherever the Heart Goes
is another rich and atmospheric track. Beyond the windy-feeling and
rustling, beyond the hints of breathing and static, there emerges
what sounds like heavy stone objects sliding. I couldn’t shake the
mental impressions gathered from watching many films in which stone
temple walls slide, sink or rotate, and with the track title in mind,
I fancied I was listening to some strange, dark oubliette of the
heart, a soundscape of shifting exploration and deeper ensnarements.
It was very cool to listen to.
The Umbra Report
is a scratchy, static-filled album, its soundscapes populated by
distorted voices, strange throbbing atmospheres, and drones that
cloak the whole in a warm, breathing darkness. There are hints and
impressions of musical melodies and singing, but they are soon
claimed by the more esoteric elements and shredded into a strange,
otherworldly waiting-room ambience. The album description hints at
the depicted events as being a possible depression, séance or
exorcism, but whatever is actually occurring, its certainly creepy
and fun to listen to.
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
Miles to Midnight is
a Dark Jazz Ambient album with a Lynchian Noir feel: A hotel trapped
between two worlds and a detective with a traumatized past. God Body
Disconnect's live jazz drums and cinematic wall-of-sound builds the
foundation of the mysterious hotel. Cities Last Broadcast brings
ghostly tape loops and melodies stuck in time. Atrium Carceri dusts
off his old pianos and shatters reality with low bass rumbles and
brings you into the other side of the hotel. For lovers of smokey
soundtracks to unwritten movies.
The
first line of the description above does an excellent job of summing
up Miles to Midnight’s tone and aesthetic. I’m not a big
fan of jazz, but I do like me some weird. Miles to Midnight is
an album that creates images of long, art-deco styled corridors, with
green lampshades and brass figurines holding them. It almost causes
you to taste the dust in the ruby red carpet that has lost its
lustre, and it brings about an unnerving feeling that the shadows in
the corners of the room are, somehow, a little darker than they have
any right to be.
The
jazz drum element is a tremendous fit for the dark imagery the
soundscapes create, its relaxed rhythm and brushed beats nestling
very comfortably amongst the more eerie vocal effects and bassy
rumbles. A Thousand Empty Rooms is a prime example of this. After a
delicate start of a few plucked notes hanging in the soundscape, a
slow beat begins, joined by piano notes that seem to fill out the
high spaces in the composition. When they tinkle into the rafters, a
birdsong like flurry joins them, creating a quirky space that seems
to have a life of its own. For me, this track brought to mind the
image of an extravagant chandelier hanging in an empty room, a sole
candle flickering nearby, its flame reflecting in the chandelier’s
myriad crystals. Relaxing and a little melancholy.
A
few of the tracks are like this, but others are more threatening or
strange. The Other Lobby is a prime example of this. It begins with
the sound of voices and some kind of bustling activity. There are
dings, and the impression of muzak, before undulating electro-bee
vocals and a strange alarm like sound create a further feeling of
whimsy. The track brought to mind someone watching an old episode of
The Outer Limits on a black and white bunny-ear bearing TV, the
soundtrack of the show crackling its way into the room just behind
the lightness and darkness of the images on the screen. Or, looked at
another way, it felt like finding the Museum of Curiosities at the
fun fair when you were just looking for the toilet.
Yet
other tracks are more threatening, such as Sorry Sir, You Are In The
Wrong Room. A deep, bassy space full of rumbling, crackling, darting
notes and muted piano. It creates a hanging atmosphere of menace. If
The Other Lobby was mistakenly finding your way into the Museum of
Curiosities, this track was more like stumbling into a room
containing shadowy people planning their next crime.
Miles
to Midnight is an incredible slice of dark music, its rhythms and
soundscapes lulling and threatening, heavy and yet sometimes light at
the same time. I know from the description that it is based on a
strange noir hotel, but I also got the impression that it could be an
excellent depiction of an insomniac getting through the night. The
isolated and spectral locations just seemed to create that general
feeling of being alone, which could be transposed into any number of
settings. If any of what I’ve said intrigues you, check out Miles
to Midnight via the stuff below, and if you do buy it, pop it on just
as the last light of the sun vanishes over the horizon one evening.
Visit the Miles toMidnightpage on Bandcamp here for more information, and be
sure to check out A Thousand Empty Rooms below:
I was given a free
copy of this album to review.
Album Title:
Miles to Midnight
Artists: Atrium
Carceri, Cities Last Broadcast, God Body Disconnect
Pär Boström of
cult project Kammarheit presents us with his side project Cities Last
Broadcasts second album, The Humming Tapes
On this album Pär
Boström explores his fascination with old seances and the early 20th
century. Reel-to-reel tape recorders and de-tuned instrumentation
combined with modern mixing techniques creates an album that sounds
haunted, but also careful and nurturing.
Pär has with this
work taken yet another step forward in his production skill set
squashing any doubt that he is one of the most unique artists in the
genre with his unorthodox approach to recording his sounds.
While the album
description above makes mention of seances and analogue-recording
devices, I must admit that the cover image of the album and the title
of this side project: Cities Last Broadcasts, all conspired to set my
mind to roaming a sinister and fog laden city. As any long time
reader might know, I often make mention of the mental images a piece
of dark ambient music might cause in me. Add in the fact that, having
watched the last few foggy episodes of Penny Dreadful, and my
recent reading of Edward Lee’s City Infernal series (Four
books... Hell as a city... you should check them out), I already
needed little to send my mind that way. The album track titles
suggest smaller, more intimate locations, but the city theme pretty
much dragged me through each soundscape, the dark architecture and
strange denizens that I thought I could hear insidious in their
echoing movements.
The Humming Tapes
makes tremendous use of static and ticking sounds, alluding very
nicely to the recording instruments already mentioned. The notes,
when there are some that can be recognised as piano or some such, are
often detuned and mournful, the hissing static backdrop certainly
lending the illusion of the listener hearing something from “behind
the veil”, gently muffled and twisted by the air in the ear (try
saying that when drunk), or just maybe, by a brain that can’t quite
process what it’s hearing. The tracks themselves often seem to
feature an ebbing and flowing of sound, the pulsing resumption and
departure of certain elements working in tandem with the various
ticking sounds that occur at intervals, creating a flowing rhythm
that is very enjoyable.
As far as standout
tracks, there were a few that produced some fine images in my mind,
and as is usually the case, these became my firm favourites. The
first was “The Sitting”, a track that is a great example of the
ebbing and flowing ticking soundscape that I just mentioned. There is
a background humming and what could be the whirring of machinery,
strange vocals that, for lack of a better way to describe it, put me
in mind of some kind of whimpering imp-like creature, maybe heard as
the listener mentally walks down a fog encrusted ally, the echoes
hanging in the air as something thrums in the darkness beyond sight.
The next track that I
wanted to mention, was in fact, the next track on the album:
“Anomaly”. This track begins with faint static and the gentle
humming of something strange. The image that came to mind was the
listener peering through a grimy window into a workshop basement, seeing a
clanking mechanical humanoid with its panels open, strange
“buddha-like” fairys flitting around humming and fixing as their
golden light plays over the pitch black metal. I know, my mind is
quite peculiar.
The final track that I
wanted to mention by name is “Fourth Floor”, a track that begins
with a hum and a popping/crackling sound that put me very much in
mind of laying back in the bath with bubbles bursting around my ears.
Delicate and not unpleasant. As far as my city analogy goes, I got
nothing in those regards here. I just enjoyed a quieter, more gentle
track that, with its drawn-out notes, lifted the oppressive feeling
inculcated by the ones that preceded it.
The Humming Tapes
is a very fine dark ambient album, one that creates dark soundscapes
with ease, yet in a quite simple way, seeming to only use a very few
sounds compared to some of the more grand and heavily layered
offerings that I often listen to. The static, pops and strange
distorted vocals really do create an uneasy atmosphere, and one that
any horror film would do well to utilise if ever the chance arises. I
give The Humming Tapes5/5, something a bit different
for me to listen to and a refreshing look at the themes of séance
and unseen worlds. It is also a great album to listen to on a hot and humid night, the heat making the oppressiveness of the album even more pronounced.
Visit The Humming
Tapes page on Bandcamp here for more information.
