Perila i(Alexandra Zakharenko) s a composer from Berlin of Russian roots releases one of the heaviest and, frankly, bleakest albums of the year. I spent today trying to unwind a bit as the snow looked pleasant, but after watching Juraj Herz’s The Cremator, hearing this album left me in a somewhat dark place. The sounds…
Tag: Dark Ambient
E.U.E.R.P.I. – Timid Memories
We have a new band to follow, and they’re out of Bulgaria. E.U.E.R.P.I. produce a sonorous and pleasantly dark ambient music that sounds heavily influenced by the works of Steve Roach, Matthias Grassow, or even Lustmord. E.U.E.R.P.I. have proven to be as masterful at using field recordings, blending them into their live performance as documented…
Scott Lawlor – The Mountains Cast Long Shadows
Scott Lawlor is an incredibly prolific composer out of Corinth, Texas. He’s collaborated with scores of musicians and has many fine albums under his belt, but this is a one-track piece clocking in at a bit over 1 hour and 14 minutes. It’s drone laden, cavernous in sound, and surprisingly warm, a bit like going…
Taphephobia & IDFT – Kandu
For the Halloween season, our friends at Reverse Alignment Records (now run by the Unexplained Sounds Group Empire) out of Sweden and Italy have released an album which has roughly the same spirit as such post-Industrial/dark ambient musicians as Lustmord or Steve Roach. Taphephobia is the brainchild of Norwegian composer Ketil Søraker, and on this…
Lonsai Maïkov & New Orthodox Line – Sobornost
Breton musician Thierry Jolif (who records as Lonsai Maïkov here) is a fellow Orthodox who also happens to make boomingly dark experimental drone music. It’s quite something to hear both worlds collapse into each other so violently, but if I could trust anyone to pull of such a feat, it is him. This is an…
William Ryan Fritch – Built Upon a Fearful Void
Soundtrack composers don’t seem to need films to cue inspiring, haunting scores anymore. Take, for example, the new double album by Californian composer William Ryan Fritch. The story that goes along with this fabulous artifact is as impressive as the music is. We let the label, Lost Tribe Sounds, tell the story below, courtesy of…
Santiago Fradejas – The Light Through The Springs
The guitar, all by itself, can serve as tool for making a haunting orchestra’s worth of sounds. My good friend Santiago Fradejas, now resident in Kent, of all places (!) presents a mini-LP’s worth of brooding, swelling, lilting soundscapes. There is a menacing element tying the album together, as though one was taking a stroll…
JOHN 3:16 – Yoldath Aloho
I have to catch up and see what has been going on with our friends at Alrealon Music. This release is two tracks of a horrifying soundscape that conjures up images of characters like Pinhead from the classic horror movie Hellraiser. Though the movie had no effect on me (I grew up watching far better…
Xerxes The Dark – Soundtrack To The Blind Owl
I feel a bit silly admitting this, but for some reason, I thought I had Soundtrack To The Blind Owl previously. Iran’s foremost dark ambient composer Xerxes The Dark has been active for many years now, and is part of a pretty amazing scene developing in one of the least likely places on Earth. Then…
Various Artists – Anthology Of Exploratory Music From India
India is a country with such an embarrassingly rich musical history that it boggles the mind as to how good it is, and it’s not merely their traditional music. Jazz, pop, progressive rock, metal and everything else you can imagine seems to flourish there, yet there is only one problem. There is very little effort…