• Music

    Perila – How much time it is between you and me?

    December 4, 2021 - By 

    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 are deep and cavernous.  It is, in fact, my favorite style of ambient music, as it becomes easy to get lost in the sonic abyss the artist is projecting through her lens.  There are two standout tracks on this album; Vaxxine, with gives me the…

  • Music

    E.U.E.R.P.I. – Timid Memories

    December 2, 2021 - By 

    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 on this record.  One to watch out for.

  • Music

    Scott Lawlor – The Mountains Cast Long Shadows

    November 23, 2021 - By 

    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 for a walk under a volcano and feeling the magma and steamy water while you journey ever deeper into the bowels of the earth.  Well done.

  • Music

    Taphephobia & IDFT – Kandu

    October 24, 2021 - By 

    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 album he is joined by the Iranian sound designer Behnoud, working on this album as IDFT. The tones one this album are long, sweeping, and as bleak as black water pouring out of a nightmare.  Perfect for the season.

  • Music

    Lonsai Maïkov & New Orthodox Line – Sobornost

    October 9, 2021 - By 

    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 EP’s worth of music, time-wise, but genres covered include ambient, drone, noise, darkwave and there are spoken word elements which tie the album together well.

  • Music

    William Ryan Fritch – Built Upon a Fearful Void

    September 30, 2021 - By 

    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 their Bandcamp site: ‘Built Upon a Fearful Void‘ was an album seemingly fated to never be completed. For the last 8 years the album had been recorded and either lost or discarded three times; a leak that water logged and ruined most of the half…

  • Music

    Santiago Fradejas – The Light Through The Springs

    September 29, 2021 - By 

    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 near the 6th ring of Dante’s Inferno.

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    JOHN 3:16 – Yoldath Aloho

    September 26, 2021 - By 

    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 horror movies from Spain and Italy), the music JOHN 3:16 (perhaps my favorite, and certainly the most hopeful, verse in the Bible) conjures up left me feeling slightly uneasy.  Disturbingly enjoyable.

  • Music

    Xerxes The Dark – Soundtrack To The Blind Owl

    September 8, 2021 - By 

    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 again, with the Internet, I am expecting mind-blowing post-Industrial music to pop out of Togo or Burkina Faso eventually. To the music.  There are six tracks of ominous drone on this album.  This isn’t a typical drone or ambient album, however.  Xerxes expertly mixes in…

  • Music

    Various Artists – Anthology Of Exploratory Music From India

    September 4, 2021 - By 

    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 exerted to spread their fine music culture outside their borders in the way, say, South Korea or Japan have. As this blog is focusing more on outside music, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and our friend Raffaele Pezzella have compiled a list of the best experimental musicians from…