Hiemal - The Seventh Continent

Album: The Seventh Continent

Artist: Hiemal

Label: Self-released

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist:

     1.      Glaciers and Antarctic Mountain Ridges

     2.      A Shipwreck by Polar Lights

     3.      Sheltered in a Frozen Cave

     4.      Drifting Icebergs by Nightfall

     5.      White Horizon, Black Waters

Hiemal appears to be quite a prolific gentleman, Bandcamp listing 53 releases of his, two of which came out this month (August 2019). I recently reviewed Shoreline Inertia, the first of those releases, and now along comes a second, The Seventh Continent. The term seventh continent is a real thing, referring to Antarctica – indeed Hiemal states that the inspirations for this five-tracker are the Endurance (1914 – Ernest Shackleton) and Terra Nova (1910–1913 – Robert Falcon Scott) expeditions to that continent at the bottom of the world, which is probably one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. And the one thing that truly emerges from this THREE hour album (apart from its brilliant value for money - just €5!) is just how microscopic we humans are in comparison to the magnitude of this last continent.

Opening proceedings is forty-six minute long ‘Glaciers and Antarctic Mountain Ridges’, a freezingly cold blast of frigid air, over which Sir Ranulph Fiennes describes Scott the man and his expedition in an interview (Fiennes himself is a noted explorer). That wintry backdrop is a portent of the tragedy that played out later, the insignificant human scale pitted against the immovable and implacable forces of nature native to the continent. Winds pile upon winds, battering and demolishing, stifling and pummelling relentlessly. And, having just introduced my new headphones to the wonders of dark ambient, the bass frequencies are absolutely seismic, physical entities in themselves, appearing able to move things just on their own. One can easily imagine vast chunks of glacial ice cracking and moving, fracturing off their parent walls of ice and plummeting into the seas. Seen in this context, is it any wonder that failure and tragedy more often than not accompanied those early expeditions?

Both sets of men were at the mercy of the elements which they couldn’t do much to counteract. ‘A Shipwreck by Polar Lights’, another 40+ minute epic, probably refers to the Endurance expedition, led by Shackleton, the ship ultimately being crushed by frozen sea-ice. Soaring flights of drones ride high above the ice-bound continent and into the unnaturally clear air, the wonders of the heavens twinkling unashamedly on the canvas of the night sky, the aurora shimmering and shimmying, lifting its skirts and moving to the music of the spheres, patently oblivious to the human drama unfolding below. The enchanting light-show, a marvellous wonder for a little while, would have paled by the time the expedition crew would have realised the situation they were in.

Then follows ‘Sheltered in a Frozen Cave’ and here the battering of the wind and elements has abated somewhat, at least for the time being, but it’s only warmer inside by a few degrees. Outside, though, it’s still an icy maelstrom of obliterating gales and white-out blizzards, a place where no unprepared human would last long. At times like this, one cannot do anything more than ponder on the fragility of existence: survival depends on so many factors, where an excess of one factor or the lack of another can mean the difference between living and dying. There must have been a point at which the crews of both ships would have wondered whether they’d ever make it out alive.

‘Drifting Icebergs by Nightfall’ must have presented a spectacular sight, floating mountains of ice sailing majestically past by the light of the stars, soundlessly and unstoppably, like ghostly ships. Stately high-flown washes and drones drift serenely past, just like the monoliths of compacted ice themselves, the silent waters carrying their bulk effortlessly and purposefully. And, finally, ‘White Horizon, Black Waters’, another long and epic track, sets down in sound the perfect summation of the continent and its immediate environs – vast open spaces of unbroken white stretching from one horizon to the other, often leading to snow-blindness where everything is covered in a disorientating blanket of white. The seas around the continent are another world, a dark wonderland that, like the rest of the world’s oceans, has yet to be fully explored. No wonder that HP Lovecraft set one of his Mythos stories, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, on this continent.

The music on here, all three hours of it, reflects Antarctica itself, with its sweeping drones and heavy ambiences that appear to have no limits or end. In spite of the knowledge we’ve gained about most of the world we call home, the southern landmass is still a substantial mystery. The music here on The Seventh Continent carries with it a deep sense of the unfathomable and indecipherable enigma that is Antarctica, a place where very few have ever visited or are likely to visit. Above all, it delineates the immensity of the riddle of ice-enclosed geography that sits at the southern extreme, a puzzle that perhaps we might never solve. There are some who would say it would be better left that way.

Available as a digital download via Bandcamp on this link:

https://hiemalambient.bandcamp.com/album/the-seventh-continent

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Hiemal - Shoreline Inertia.

Album: Shoreline Inertia

Artist: Hiemal

Label: Self-released

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist:

     1.      Shoreline Inertia

I have always been fascinated by edgelands and margins, those liminal transition zones and dimensions which are neither one nor the other, yet simultaneously both. As an example I can cite the very outer margins of a town or city, where built-up areas give way to the rural. Where is the exact point at which one becomes the other? Is there a thin sliver where it’s neither, or a combination of both? Seen in the abstract, even the present moment we live in is a kind of liminality, as it exists briefly between the past and the future. Hiemal’s latest release is focused on another such zone, the thin stretch that divides the land from the sea. It has its parallel perhaps in the diffuse zone between atmosphere and the vacuum of outer space, at least in one obvious respect; one side is essential to our well-being, the other side completely inimical to it without artificial aids. However in both instances there’s an indefinable transition zone where it could be argued that the qualities of both sides are intermixed, a rarefied belt of some intangible existence where the normal rules don’t apply.

Where does Hiemal fit into all this, you may wonder? Shoreline Inertia focuses on that very liminal space betwixt land and sea, that tiny sliver of geology that is both real and imaginary. The single album-length composition, lasting a little over an hour, is essentially an experimental ambient piece, consisting of ever-evolving drones set against a backdrop of waves lapping a shoreline. The waves do duty in anchoring us to reality while defining the zone’s limits and the exact point where the transition between one state and the other is at its most intertwined: the soaring orchestral vibes connect us with the latent possibilities suggested by the existence of the marginal space. When you really think about it, this is the very point at which land-based life came to be, where the first sea-creatures evolved into air-breathing animals. If for no other reason than that, the notion that it isn’t a magical place can be dismissed.

The soaring drones are like a billowing curtain of glimmering auroral light, a barrier hanging at the exact intersection between here and there. It’s a demarcation, a wall of flimsy, fluttering gauze that nevertheless sends a strong message declaring that ‘beyond this point everything is different’. It is at once a physical and spiritual boundary, a signal saying, yes you can pass through, but its deeper mysteries and secrets will be forever beyond your reach. It is vital and alive, animated by processes and biological systems alien to anything we would be familiar with. The waters on its other side contain a dimension of myth and fantasy embedded within it (‘Here be monsters’), a globe-spanning liquid inner space as unknown to us as the furthest galaxy, and yet the extent of its virility and potency is prodigious.

This is the species of music for those times when you catch yourself between moments, when you’re on the verge of some revelation, or more prosaically when you seek some lilting sounds to accompany your meditations/guided visions/occult practises. It’s soothing, of course, plunging you into the womblike waters of Mother Earth, or perhaps lofting you into the rarefied region of the exosphere, but that I think is its ultimate purpose. It’s warm here, nurturing, and comforting, invoking ancestral memories perhaps of our prehistoric point of origin in the long ago aeons of the past. I suggest that you let yourself float along with whatever currents it sends you along, embrace the power inherent in those streams, and let its deep wisdom wash over you. There’s plenty to discover here, on both the inner and outer levels.

Available as a digital download at the link below:

https://hiemalambient.bandcamp.com/album/shoreline-inertia

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Sonologyst - Phantoms

Album: Phantoms

Artist: Sonologyst

Label: Unexplained Sounds Group

Catalogue no: USG054

Tracklist: 

1. Phantoms

2. Three Options Collided

3. Shamanic Rite Passing on a Table Equipped with Azzax and Trumpet

4. Memorex

5. Dahomey Kingdom

6. Fragments of a Winter with a few Other Cards to Play

7. An Index of Maths Philosophy

8. Codified

9. North-South Crossing

10. Orient Out of Tune

At this moment, there appears to be a lot of great experimental material emerging from Italy, and Sonologyst is no exception. Furthermore, whilst this is undoubtedly firmly in the ambient camp it’s also fair to say that it defies being put into any particular slot within the broad spectrum of ambient styles. There are elements of the dark, occult, ritual, isolationist, and industrial subcategories of the genre, but it’s all mixed together with such craft, skill, and attention to detail that it all melds together into one seamless whole. 

Above all, this is a discourse on the truly alien – using modes of sound and expression that are at once familiar and yet dissonant in some bizarre way. Noises that we hear every day, the constant soundtrack to our daily lives, form the substrates of these ten slices of ghostly surrealistic mirages, fleeting and illusory: voices, machines, natural environments, wailings, screeches, scrapings, and some eluding description. They’re the aural equivalent of fleeting memories flashing stroboscopically on the inner screen, or perhaps a series of hallucinatory snapshots of a distorted hypnogogic dream in disrupted time: before we’ve even had a chance to grasp their significance they’ve already dissolved and segued into something else. 

The beauty of this album is that it refuses to stay still, with sounds and images tumbling over one another in a rush of creation and instantiation. It’s as if this is the point at which everything came into being, with the ghosts of all that was, is, and will be suddenly blooming in one grand gesture, a singularity of focused ideation, an etheric collection of blueprints stamped with potential. It’s a flowering of overflowing chaos, a madhouse of colour, form, and shape, all exploding at once in an act of endless imagination. It’s all here – darkness, light, good, evil, bright, dull, natural and supernatural. In just the same way that we humans are microcosmic reflections of the macrocosmos, so too is this album – it’s a reflection of the all in the singularity, and the singularity in all. 

For people who want quality ambient that defies easy pigeonholing, that’s both uplifting and yet threaded through with hints of the darkly bizarre underbelly of existence, the plane where very few of us venture to explore. Also for those who, like me, ‘see’ music through images rather than as just sounds. A good place to find yourself, I think. 

Psymon Marshall 2019

øjeRum - Without Blood the Sun Darkens.

Album: Without Blood the Sun Darkens

Artist: øjeRum

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: 135^th Cycle

Tracklist:

1.      Without Blood the Sun Darkens

øjeRum is Danish musician and collage artist Paw Grabowski, and on this release we’re presented with an hour-long track of sweeping cinematic ambient that’s highly melancholic, brooding, and inward-looking. It’s a soundtrack to loss and longing, a hymn to trying to capture something, a feeling or an emotion, that was experienced but fleetingly and has now faded into memory. It almost feels like the deep regrets held by someone dying, an immense sadness about a life wasted or a momentary decision that had life-long consequences: tears run down a face, eyes lifted to the shimmering stars, and a silent plea to perhaps turn back time.

There is no other phrase for this but hauntingly beautiful: a tad trite and unsatisfactory perhaps, but there are times when words are inadequate and fall short of a mark. Despite the deep wells of sadness evident on here, it is simultaneously uplifting and soaring. Think of a stunning landscape, seen under the blue, purple, and red sky of dusk, where day hasn’t yet succumbed to the blanket of night but stars are beginning to shyly peek out of the veil of blue, streetlights and lighted windows pinprick the last remaining silhouettes of earthbound geography, and everything takes on an air of mystery. Upon a hill somewhere, a lone and unknown musician plays a lament to how time takes all away from us in the end, how it is that only the living possess memory, and also that we shape and distort our remembrances of people and events.

In the end, no matter who we are, whether we were important or otherwise, we leave all behind, and the shape of our lives dissolves – and the further away in time the finer the particles of what we were become until they too disappear. øjeRum’s musical tapestry weaves all the emotions and feelings associated with things we wish we’d done or not done, and the resulting narrative drifts into the wide open spaces of the celestial aether. Perhaps it is only there that our memories exist, forever travelling between the stars, and becoming a part of the panoply of Creation.

Simply stunning.

Psymon Marshall, 2019. 

Monocube - Substratum

Album: Substratum

Artist: Monocube

Label: Malignant Records/Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: TumorCD120/137^th Cycle

Tracklist:

     1.      Sehnsucht

     2.      Prima Materia

     3.      Luft

     4.      Visiones V

     5.      The Opposite of Nadir (feat. Antti Litmanen)

     6.      Opaque

     7.      Actio in Distans

     8.      Limen (feat. Visions)

Yes, you read that correctly – this album is a co-release between Malignant Records and Cyclic Law, two very fine purveyors of dark and industrial ambient. Monocube broadcast their brand of darkness from the Ukraine and on this outing are assisted by contributions from Antti Litmanen of Arktau Eos and Frederic Arbour’s Visions (he also manages Cyclic Law).

Shake the bones, inhale the sulphurous vapours, blow the bone trumpets, stare into the sacred black flame dancing on the altar. The eight darkly ambient/occult tracks here have emerged from deep underground, from the shadowed spaces where celebrants enact ancient forbidden rites in the deepest and most secret of primordial caverns: places where the gods were worshipped before mankind had even come into existence. The sounds and textures here are truly subterrestrial, the exhalations of entities far beyond our abilities to comprehend. Washes of whispering winds and voices surface from even deeper regions, emanating from times and dimensions separated from us by vast temporal distances. As lazy as it may be for a reviewer to borrow a[n overused] label but the term Lovecraftian is perhaps the nearest I can get to encapsulating the aura this music stifles us with.

Even if it can be labelled thusly, perhaps it’s not the nightmare visions of the creatures themselves that are being conjured up – it’s the terror inherent in the idea that there are those humans who are willing to manifest them into material existence in the first place. These are the agitated harbingers announcing their imminent arrival. The poisonous, suffocating vapours seeping from the fissures beneath our feet are highly disturbed, their effects distorting and twisting. The weight of the imminent catastrophe to be visited on our reality crushes sanity, and heavy black atmospheres build up into gargantuan waves ready to break and submerge all. The world will drown, and the light will be extinguished.

Monocube are either issuing a warning or an invitation. Either way, it speaks of a bleak, dismal future, where the only light available is from a dim, cold, and dying sun. Even the stars will flee from the sight of a devastated earth, and a starless night will be our only companion. Warmth will abandon us, and in its place will be an imperative for survival. The prognosis, however, remains grim.

Essential listening for those times when you suffer the nihilist blues – this will set you straight back along the path of blissful doom and gloom. 

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Visions - Temples.

Album: Temples

Artist: Visions

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: 119^th Cycle

Tracklist:

     1.      Traces

     2.      Murmur

     3.      Lamentation

     4.      Ultima

     5.      Temples

     6.      Aura

     7.      Continuum

After an extremely deceptively quiet start, this album opens out into a glorious essay on sustained dark atmospherics and esoteric visions, taking the listener on a mind-expanding journey through the inner recesses of our own thoughts and dreams. Of all the music I’ve heard and reviewed recently Temples is my standout album – deeply meditative, inviting us to look inwards rather than outwards, speculating perhaps on the idea that the spaces inside our minds are as infinite and beautiful as the vastness of the universe around us. After all, didn’t Carl Sagan say “We are made of star stuff, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself”? The reflection of the macro contained within the micro – in effect, ‘as above, so below’.

Deeply resonant chords ebb and flow in continuous cycles, the very breath of the cosmos itself. Perhaps, too, these are the thoughts of the macrocosm made material and intelligible, so that we can be a part of the myriad cycles and evolutions it undergoes. And, contained within each piece, are hints of boundless and illimitable spaces, hints enough for our finite brains to comprehend without breaking apart. The vistas alluded to here are both staggeringly exquisite and devastatingly terrifying. They are simultaneously savage and edifying. We are witness to both the dance of colour and light, and the stately encroachment of darkness and gravity.

Beyond that, however, is that this set has shades of what I term the Deepsoul – a resonant frequency that jibes with everything contained within the definition of divine kinship with the universe at large. It is spine-tinglingly simple in construction yet deeply affecting in effect. There is complexity here but it is simply delineated and expounded. It goes beyond incense and paraphernalia, fire, chant, and ritual, and on into true communion. Try the title track for starters, ‘Temples’ – a ringing, siren-like invitation to divest oneself of material notions, to leave the fleshly body behind, and to become united with the very star stuff that is both inside and outside us and to make those essential – no, urgent - connections.

I can honestly say that I actually had shivers running up and down my spine whilst listening to this album. Every one of these seven tracks is consciousness elevating and soul-enriching, cutting through the dross of the everyday to reveal the dangerous beauty that lies within our grasp if only we’re brave enough to reach out despite the perils.

Ratings are meaningless, but if I were to assign it one it would be 10/10. 

Psymon Marshall 2019.