Misty Shroud of Regrets is predominantly neo-classical-informed ambience, whose mournful lyricism is aligned with a certain strain of transcendent Old European pessimism.
Day Before Us is a project curated by Philippe Blache—incidentally, an Igloo contributor, who claims inspiration from ‘odd literature, ghostly presence, angelology’ for his ‘antipop-cinematic-nocturnal-melancholic soundscapes.’ The French artist has worked through ‘solemn soundscaping ritualism, dada-esque hypnopedies and soundtracky ambiences’ over a handful of albums on Rage in Eden, Petroglyph, Cathedral Transmissions, and Kadaath, and collaborations with musicians Giuseppe Verticchio (Nimh), Markus Pape, Davide Riccio, Oksana Rodionova (Xiu), Jessica Peace and Rory McCormick (6&8) and scores for Jana Brike’s animations at international film festivals.
Latest opus, Misty Shroud of Regrets, idiosyncratically described as a set of ‘spleen-piano based ambiences and nightly soundscaping laments for electric organ and darkened chords,’ is based on Yulia Kazban‘s existentially-inclined photography, which provides the adorning artwork. Blache finds musical articulation for this largely via a series of microtonal melodies on a scale from doleful to sombre with texturalized noise and found sound infusions. It wears the monochrome colours of Blache’s passion for all things neo-gothic—visual, sonic, and textual; eschatological iconography, sombre swellings, dolorous dwellings. Most pieces find Blache’s plangent piano études drifting through a tenebrous space, occluded by veils of what may be tape saturation or captured room noise. There are occasional timbral divergences—“Burden of Silence” is harsher, a thick desolation-doused acousmatic mass through which runs a vestigial melody ravaged by ill treatments; “Autumnal Passing Tears” has its piano tones similarly distorted, while in contrast “Hyperuranie” leaves its church organ untouched in its meditations.
Though this exponent of the neo-gothic dark arts inevitably evokes a concatenation of ruins and arcane rituals, attended by forlorn spirits and shadowy presences, it gratifyingly denies the nihil of standard issue gloom and doom-deifying Dark Ambient. Rather than the grim genericism of much of the ‘dark ambient / neofolk / industrial / experimental / militaria’ of label Rage in Eden‘s War Office Propaganda past, Misty Shroud of Regrets is predominantly neo-classical-informed ambience, whose mournful lyricism is aligned with a certain strain of transcendent Old European pessimism. Through cinematic poetry and magic realism, it invokes ‘the everlasting power of ancient time which saves us from the amnesia of everyday life.’ Adepts of the more lyrical Cold Meat purveyors or more mystic Cyclic Law makers (cf. Desiderii Marginis) may find unholy communion here.
Misty Shroud of Regrets is available on Rage in Eden.
