Dark Ambient Review: Yokai

Review By Casey Douglass

Sometimes, the things that are the scariest, or the most awe inspiring, are things that you cannot see. Many horrors or creature features make good use of this, cloaking a giant creature in fog, only permitting you to hear the thundering of its movements or to feel the force of its roar. Yokai is a dark ambient album from The Rosenshoul aka Duncan Ritchie, and for me, takes the notion of vast horrors being hidden and puts it into audio form.

So what does the audio form of this concept sound like? Yokai is a blaring, rumbling album, with three soundscapes that pulse and groan with unbridled feelings of power. Early on, I got a metallic vibe from things, like edited and stretched gong or cymbal clashes reverberating around ominous horn tones. There is a hissing, breathless sound too, but one coming from something massive and certainly not human. At times, there seems to be a bestial roar-like element, like some great leviathan pounding hatred into the landscape with its fists. The image that soon came to mind was of the Talos statue coming to life in Jason and the Argonauts, but even Talos feels puny when compared to the size of the creature or creation in Yokai’s tracks.

The three tracks share a decent number of the sounds mentioned above, but each also managed to give me three distinct impressions as to what was happening. For me, the first track was filled with thoughts of a fog-cloaked colossal metallic creature or machine, traipsing across the landscape. Track two saw my perspective switch to some unfortunate souls sheltering deep in a mountain cave, hearing the thumps and rumbles of the creature battling their army miles away. The final track, for me, hinted at a lull where the creature was somehow mortally injured and was somehow giving birth to its successor before it died.

Yokai is a collection of tracks themed around supernatural beings from Japanese folklore, but as you can see, my mind did take me to other places. I can certainly notice the Japanese and martial elements to the music, but it just felt so perfectly leviathan to me. A really enjoyable album, one that cloaks you in an obscuring fog, hisses at you, buffets you, and presents you with ominous swells of bone-rattling sound.

Visit the Yokai page on Bandcamp for more information.

You might also like to check out Mombi Yuleman’s Storm-Maker Red Horse as that is another album that really struck me as embodying giant beings and creating a feeling of being small by comparison. 

I was given a review copy of this album.

Album Title: Yokai

Album Artist: The Rosenshoul (Duncan Ritchie)

Released: 25 Jun 2008

Dark Ambient Review: Kosmobushir

Review by Casey Douglass

If I could, I’d love to visit some of the dark, sci-fi universes seen in fiction. There is something soothing about bleak distance, from the comfort of your own armchair anyway. As I can’t go into space, dark ambient albums like Kosmobushir are the audio vehicle to carry my imagination there, and I’m so glad that they exist. Kosmobushir is a dark space ambient album from Anihila, which in turn, comes from the mind of Flowers for Bodysnatchers’ Duncan Ritchie.

The album description paints the picture of the Soviet Union beating the U.S in the space race, and by the year 2158, being the power exploring the fringes of the solar system. Many Soviet citizens live out on the various planets and their satellites, with others pushing further out all of the time. One such ship, Akademgorodok, went missing near Neptune, and 14 years later, a strange transmission is received hinting at what it might have found.

Kosmobushir includes a lot of the things I hope for with a dark space ambient album. I want to feel like I’m on a spaceship, drifting in the darkness, hearing the metal creak and groan, seeing strange sights, and feeling like I’m somehow alone, but not alone. I found all of this on Kosmobushir, a prime example being the track Further Aft. Dripping echoes along metal corridors, a fuzz or static seems to permeate the air, and a strange yowling sound gives everything a creepy tint. This track is full of straining metal and cascading rumbles, making me feel like I was exploring a doomed spaceship, but one with a story to tell.

Alongside the metallic groaning and shuddering, Kosmobushir also makes great use of the whine and sweep of radio signals. The very first track, Neptune, opens with a “shrill, whistle-like scanning sound” (from my notes), with other sounds around it seeming to take on the aspect of half alarm siren, half swarm. The knocking and deep vibrations that come later really created the mental picture of approaching Neptune on a space ship that has to fight against itself to slow down, possibly because its sensors have just seen something very strange out there.

I think the most captivating track for me was the final one, Far Beyond The Reach. It makes great use of changes in direction, the soundscape morphing at different stages. I can only say that it made me wonder if this was what it might sound like to enter a black hole and to return again: the feeling of death and doom as the ship sinks in, finding yourself in a strange place that seems at odds with what you expected, and then being spat out somewhere else, back in our universe. Maybe I’ve watched Interstellar too many times. No, I don’t think that’s possible.

Kosmobushir is a fun journey into the bleak mystery of a doomed spaceship. If you find the idea of being in space riveting, even with all of the peril and strangeness that it might entail, this album might be a great one for you. Not only does it give you ominous creaking and hissing soundscapes to relax to, but it also frames them with an alternative history-fuelled future, and a conundrum, to boot!

Visit the Kosmobushir page on Bandcamp for more information.

I was given a review copy of this album.

Album Title: Kosmobushir

Album Artist: Anihila

Released: 31 Aug 2020

Dark Music Review – Aokigahara

Review Written By Casey Douglass

Aokigahara (青木ヶ原), known as the Suicide Forest is a 35-square-kilometre forest that lies at the northwest base of Mount Fuji in Japan. Aokigahara forest is dense, shutting out all but the natural sounds of the forest itself. The forest has an historic association with demons in Japanese mythology, and it is a notoriously common suicide site.

Duncan Ritchie explores the long journey to Aokigahara through soundscapes ripe with lonely pianos on textural backdrops. Duncan spent countless hours field recording on the voyage between Tokyo to Aokigahara which creates the perfect atmospheric companion to the intricate instrumental approach. This is a beautiful dark ambient soundtrack culminating in the final choice between life and death.

Besides the above album description giving me great holiday ideas, Aokigahara the album sees a fantastic concept or theme brought to life by Duncan Ritchie’s clever composition of the subtle and not so subtle. Piano, strings and drum all give the tracks their own atmosphere and feeling: some like a depressive sitting in the dark, others full of furtive movement or pounding beats. That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for a variety of drones and field recordings, with a fair few tracks featuring all manner of sounds, from oozing dripping, to clanks and knockings that all seem to echo back eerily from unseen surfaces.

A number of tracks impressed me for varying reasons, and these I wanted to single out by name. The first is Field of Ink, a track that begins with gentle piano, delicately plucked strings and a distant knocking. What I particularly liked was the discordant relationship between the knocking and the more melodic instrumental notes, there is just something about the way they play off each other and keep the thing interesting to the ear.

The next track that I wanted to mention by name is Night Heroin, the longest track on the album. It begins with an uncomfortable bubbling mass of what sounds like boiling water. This is joined by a high pitched resonance and a chant-like noise that gave me the impression of someone walking through darkness and being plagued by pixie lights among the trees, our world bumping up against the next maybe. The sound of the track changes as the playtime continues, new sounds and instruments coming to the fore, before it returns to the bubbling water as it nears the end. Very enjoyable indeed.

The final track that I wanted to mention is also the final track on the album: The Games Foxes Play. A light resonance and gentle swell of sound gives this track a lighter feel, and I must admit that I took the title of the track quite literally. I mentally pictured two foxes playing and cavorting in snow as the golden light of the sun makes every dripping branch a mirror of rainbows. The track does change tone near the midpoint however, a dark rumbling and echoing space taking the place of the relaxing scene, as if the scene of foxes was only really being watched on a half-broken TV in a dark cave-like prison cell. Again, something that I found enjoyable in no small part due to the contrasts involved.

Aokigahara is dark ambient done a little differently to the usual, its delicate (or not so delicate) instrumental attributes sitting nicely with the echoing booming darkness that holds its melodies to its chest. If you like dark ambient and have any affection for Japanese flavours, Aokigahara might just be your perfect album. Even if you have no strong feelings one way or the other, the variation and theme of Aokigahara provides a welcome change of pace from other styles of dark ambient music. I give Aokigahara 4/5.

Visit the Aokigahara page on bandcamp here for more information and prices.

You can listen to Night Heroin by playing the YouTube video below too:

I was given a free copy of the album to review.

Album Title: Aokigahara

Written, Produced, Mastered - Duncan Ritchie

Artwork - Simon Heath

Label: Cryo Chamber

Release Date: November 3, 2015

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