Dark Music Review – Deinonychus

Review Written By Casey Douglass

Stateslaver Zero returns with his first full-length collection of cinematic, breakbeat-infused industrial music: Deinonychus!

The album contains six diverse pieces that blend multi-layered breaks with dreary soundscapes.

This should be a fun thrill ride! Deinonychus ends with an enhanced version of Stateslaver Zero’s signature piece I’m Going Home.

Reviewing Deinonychus is a bit of a departure for me from my usual dark ambient and heavy metal reviews, as it probably contains more beats per minute than anything I have listened to recently, but with Deinonychus, that is very much the point. At its heart, Deinonychus is an album that revolves around the beat, be it breakbeats, drum and bass or its more electronic sounds.

Things open with the smooth Future Warlord, an easy going track that eases the listener into the album with a relatively relaxed rhythm that is scattered with harsher sounds around it. Mental Wolves follows, a composition that begins with gentle high notes before frenetic, almost bubble popping notes emerge, soon to be joined by a fast paced beat. Hydross is next, a more relaxed track in which space opens up and the beat, along with its bassier slower cousin, can frolic in a more expansive way.

Deinonychus is up next, a mid-tempo track (when compared with those that came before it), spiraling electronic sounds lift and fall above a pleasing beat, the final third of the track seeing the beat ramp up and become more aggressive. Temple Enforcer is up next, a track that opens with ominous whispered voices and a creaking bass that meets the beat with a sense of dark embrace. Around the midpoint sacral chant/vocals merge with a gong-like sound and moments of quietude that then launch back into the previous beat. I’d say that Temple Enforcer was probably my favourite track, it just seemed darker and had more elements that appealed to me personally.

The final track: I’m Going Home, is another track that seems somewhere in the middle of the scale when it comes to tempo. It also features what sounds like violin notes turning into vocals, or vocals that sound like some kind of string instrument. It's quite catchy and the dark swells of deeper sound that blares around them just makes a great rhythm. The track changes at intervals, the last third in particular taking on a more plucky, fluty tone for some moments, that sets up a nice contrast to the darker sounds that came before them.

So there we have it, six tracks that all feature plenty of drumbeats of various speeds, a nice range of other notes and sounds, and a variety of tones, from the light and airy ending of I’m Going Home to the darker and more sinister Temple Enforcer. I would say that these last two tracks are my favourites but the others were certainly likeable in their own way too.

If you are a fan of breakbeat-infused industrial music, I think you will enjoy Deinonychus. As far as myself and my limited exposure to this genre of music, I found a lot to like and little to criticise, although I will say that I am not sure if it is really a genre for me, besides some of the elements that I also came across that are also in my beloved dark ambient. If I was forced to give it a rating, I would say it would be a 3.5/5, based more on the fact that only two tracks really grabbed me in a noteworthy way, but as I said above, its a nice listening experience and one that I urge you to check out if you think it is in line with your own music tastes.

Check out Deinonychus on bandcamp at this link.

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

Album Title: Deinonychus

Artists: Stateslaver Zero

Label : Nakrikal Records

Released: October 1, 2015

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Dark Music Review – Echoes from Outer Silence

Review Written By Casey Douglass

Cryo Chamber welcomes Iranian Mehdi Saleh from Alphaxone back with his 4th album on the label. A space voyage ambient album of drone mixed with electronic overtones and a healthy dose of field recordings.

Echoes from Outer Silence take us through space and to the archaic signals of civilizations beyond the stars, Mehdi this time packing some serious analogue warmth to his droney dreamscapes.

He once again polishes up his already splendid sound quality and excellent production to reach new heights. This is an album best enjoyed when relaxing with a cup of freeze dried coffee in zero G.

Listeners to Alphaxone’s Echoes from Outer Silence can expect a dark ambient album that is, for the most part, a gentle and smooth listen with sounds that ebb and flow in a relaxing way but interspersed with harsher electronic and metallic noises. As the album description above also states, there is a good amount of field recorded sounds too, from birdsong to the more static-based noise of wind and rain. It is with this latter point in mind that I found myself gravitating more towards those tracks that make more use of these sounds.

“Outfield” is the first track of the album and begins with the rumblings of a distorted storm, the sounds of sliding movements and fabric-like undulations seeming to rotate from ear to ear. It conjured to mind an image of some abandoned space dock, the denizens in the nearest bar or strip joint waiting out the rain. The fabric sound also had an ASMR like quality so may trigger this response in some listeners, although it didn’t do much for me sadly.

A track that takes a different tack is “Sphere of Change”. This track begins with high hanging notes, a gentle buzzing sound and a light drone, the buzzing distortion becoming longer lasting as the drone builds. Delicate ticking noises bounce and echo from ear to ear before a range of field recordings come and go: bird song, whispers, water and other sounds like brushing noises. The variety is interesting and the way they all seem to dove-tail and not be jarring is a pleasing thing to reflect on. This track put me in mind of an artificial intelligence, possibly medical or therapeutic, sorting through its memory banks.

Another track that I particularly liked was “Altered Xone”, a track that begins with the whining sound of a radio scanning between stations, the female sigh and snatches of voices found soon fading into warbling notes that echo out into the darkness. I particularly liked that some of the more electrical sounds seemed to take on the aspect of an old dial-up modem handshaking, a sound that I’d not heard for a long long time.

Echoes from Outer Silence is a fine, space-infused dark ambient album that seems to take the listener to the moments between events in the cosmos: the space-port before the activity begins, the contemplative field recordings in a medical AI program arranging them for its next patient. It is the calm before the storm, the big breath before the plunge, the gathering of strength before the final push. Sometimes, that’s what we want from our music, the space to reflect and to take stock. I give Echoes from Outer Silence 4/5, an album that sits nicely between more brash and more minimal dark ambient creations.

Check out Echoes from Outer Silence on bandcamp at this link.

You can listen to “Altered Xone” below:

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

Album Title: Echoes from Outer Silence

Artist: Alphaxone

Label : Cryo Chamber

Released: February 23, 2016

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Dark Book Review – Tart Cards: London’s Illicit Advertising Art

Review Written By Casey Douglass

Synopsis:

In London, sex has been sold through advertising cards posted in phone boxes since the early 1980s. Tracing the history of these "tart cards" provides an opportunity to explore the real example of the evolution of vernacular design. This tour through illicit printed solicitation includes interviews with the "service providers," the marketers, "the carders," the printers, and the local authorities who have sought to control the content of the cards.

I’ve not been to London more than a couple of times, but on each occasion, it was difficult to not notice the bright colours and skin tones of the “tart cards” that plastered the insides of certain telephone boxes along certain streets. On my first visit to London, I even took a picture of one particular box because I was surprised at the glossy quality and array of colours used. Who’d have thought that more than ten years later, I’d buy a book on sale that looked at the topic from the artistic angle: Tart Cards: London’s Illicit Advertising Art. (For only £3 to boot!)

The book feels nice in the hands and as you turn each page, the layout of the text and illustrations does a good job of making it a pleasant read. Although I will say one thing. If you are like me and try to read everything on the page, including the picture captions and other incidental text, don’t worry about doing that too much. A good amount of the label/quote text is actually in the main body of the text so you are just reading the same information twice. Not a big issue if you treat it more like a prolonged magazine article, but I don’t often see this in a book.

As far as the topic itself, it was truly interesting to see how the cards have evolved, the way the designs were tailored to get around various laws, even down to the way the carders stuck the cards in the phone boxes. The book also looks at how, as technology has evolved, the advertisers were able to put out higher quality adverts, but also the effect that the internet and computers has had on the art of the copy writing, which in a brief few words is that they have lost their soul or are less skilfully created.

Tart Cards: London’s Illicit Advertising Art also looks at the effect of the cards on the communities in which they are found, be it as litter, the possible “corruption of innocent minds” and even the way some choose to collect them. I had to chuckle at the information that some school kids take them and use them as a collectible card game in the playground. I can totally imagine one kid saying “Ha! This one does spanking!” and his mate going “This one does Two-Way spanking!” and the cards being angrily snatched from the loser’s hand.

So in summary, Tart Cards: London’s Illicit Advertising Art presents an interesting topic in an easy to read way, with insights from people involved at different stages of the process. Is it worth the RRP of £19.99. Not for me. It was readable in around 60-90 mins and I can’t see me looking back at it for reference again. It being on sale for £3 was very cheap though so I would say if you could buy it for around a tenner, that would be the sweet spot. I’d rate it 4/5.

Book Title: Tart Cards: London’s Illicit Advertising Art

Author: Caroline Archer

Publisher: Mark Batty

ISBN-10: 0972424040

RRP: £19.99

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Four Years On...

Once again I find myself at the birthday of my website, another year has passed and in that time, I have done various things and am now taking the time to mull over what a few of those things were.

Thanks to an opportunity through Geek Syndicate, I managed to get a couple of my articles on the blog portion of the Huffington Post website. (These were: Gaming Rituals and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Version 2.0). I’ve continued to write and edit for the guys at Geek Syndicate, including a timely Xmas article about Mindful Bingewatching, and hope to continue doing so for a long time to come. 

My fiction “Unravelled” made it into the Irrational Fears anthology from FTB Press. This was another nice milestone for me as it was someone else publishing some of my fiction and paying me for the privilege.

I’ve reviewed lots more dark ambient music and, as always, I am thankful to the people who send me their creations to listen to. Alongside heavy metal, dark ambient is my other music genre of choice.

I wrote a number of articles for ME/CFS website Foggy Friends which looked at mindfulness, electronic relaxation aids and ASMR. This was a nice change of pace for me and they were topics that I found very interesting and relatively easy to write about, as they fall into areas I already have a fair amount of knowledge about.

I’ve seen some great live metal bands: Coal Chamber, Soil, Skindred, Crossfaith, and most recently, Machine Head.

I’ve also lost a few stone in weight and seem to have stamped out a lot of my more minor Obsessive Compulsive Disorder behaviors, even though certain large areas of anxiety still remain, so it’s some progress at least. It’s a shame my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is still a total fucker however.

I don’t have specific hopes for the year to come as I’m sure it will be shit in ways I can’t imagine, and good in other ways I can’t imagine, so why bother trying. I just hope I can progress and get my writing to a higher level in the ways that matter.

Thanks for reading, and if you know anyone looking for a freelance writer, particularly in the areas mentioned, please send them a link to my website, that would be amazing.

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Dark Gig - Machine Head

A couple of nights ago, I was lucky enough to be able to spend an evening with Machine Head at Norwich Open, one of the first metal bands that I was introduced to when I was at college. I don't really want to write a review or go too in-depth but it was a great night, very tiring, but well worth seeing Robb and the boys belt out some heavy medicine for my ears to feast on. Come back soon chaps!

Dark Game Review - Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 Mercedes-Benz DLC

Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 is a PC game that I've been playing for some time. When the chance to review Red Dot Game's latest DLC, themed around Mercedes-Benz, for Geek Syndicate arose, I was more than happy to take a look. Click here to go to my review.

Car Mechanic Simulator Screenshot © Copyright Red Dot Games

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Dark Music Review – Cosmic Irracionalism

Review Written By Casey Douglass

Album Blurb:

"Once I had a dream in which I saw a fascinating picture in space. I was bigger galaxies, like the scientist I watched in the microscope as the fundamental laws of physics form a vivid picture with many fine details and colors. I could move the pieces and change this picture. When I woke it was a powerful experience and I could not Express it in music. Creativity is the power over chaos!" Because I purposely broke the physical laws in the world, which created the soundtrack. (Carst)

Carst again pleases us with dark collages. Album was created 3 years, strictly maintaining the concept and idea will trigger great emotion and excite your subconscious.

Cosmic Irracionalism is a dark ambient album that certainly seems to have a strong sci-fi thread running through its design. Echoing guitar notes hum in soundscapes that seem to reflect sound from hard metal surfaces, giving many of the sounds and notes heard a pleasing metallic overtone. That’s what I got from Cosmic Irracionalism anyway, but reading the blurb above, I can see how watching the cosmos in a more nebulous way might create the same kind of impression.

There were a number of tracks that I wanted to comment on individually, as they conjured some great mental pictures to mind, or at the least, made a lasting impression on me. The first of these just so happens to be the first track on the album: Signal. Signal is a track that repeatedly builds into peaks of screechy static and tortured strings. The track intersperses these peaks with more subdued spells of looming drone and smaller detail sounds. I must admit though that my favourite aspect of the track is that the electro-sounds seem to take on the aspect of wolf-like howls at one point. This might just be down to my own appreciation of wolves and the things that resonate with me, but it felt like a great way of adding another meaning to the track title of Signal.

The next track that I wanted to mention is Acquire Through Awareness. This track starts off with the gentle sounds of what could be described as a colony of frogs coming to life, their calls becoming more numerous as time passes. This strange sound is then met with the metal of strings and what sounds like an echoing distorted response. As the track continues, things take on a higher tone and at times, more relaxed, with some components of the sound seeming to take on the aspect of female vocals softly singing.

The final track that I wanted to write about individually is Mimicking The Magnetic Fields. A harsh sound becomes a gentle string with a rustling clattering heart-beat underneath. The sound of the track becomes more desolate over time, but not in an unrelenting way. There are some sounds that seem to be distant screams and doors banging, or at the other end of the scale, shimmering high notes and almost sacral chanting. A track that seems to have a lot going on that’s for sure.

Cosmic Irracionalism is an interesting and nicely dark, dark ambient album. The sounds used and twisted into the soundscapes have enough variety and textural differences to keep the ear engrossed and the mind alert. I give Cosmic Irracionalism 4/5 and would especially recommend it to anyone that might like space-based/sci-fi tinged dark ambient music.

Check out Cosmic Irracionalism on bandcamp at this link.

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

Album Title: Cosmic Irracionalism

Artist: Carst

Label : Black Mara

Released: February 17, 2016

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