The pieces Seetyca calls Bleakscapes are not grey and barren, they are near impenetrably inky black and evoke scary amounts of space far away from where we are. The only ripples in the fabric are radio signals heading even further off and some static circling the drain of a black hole.
German dark ambient artist Seetyca has apparently released some eighty solo albums and collaborations, but the present reviewer only ever encountered him before on the impressive Nekton Fallsproject (2006), a fascinating, triple-disc leviathan on life and death in the ocean depths. Initiated by Swiss geologist and paleontologist Achim G. Reisdorf, Seetyca was in charge of overall sound design, linking the twenty-odd contributions by various artists both familiar and unknown with freshly-composed interludes. Canadian colleague Etheocles Stevens, who contributed one of the best selections to that album and has partnered with him on six albums in a series dubbed “Sulphur,” provides Seetyca with string samples recorded with the Oregon Origo String Quartet.
The pieces he calls Bleakscapes are not grey and barren, they are near impenetrably inky black and evoke scary amounts of space far away from where we are. The only ripples in the fabric are radio signals heading even further off and some static circling the drain of a black hole. Each track is a numbered “Bleakscape,” except for a nine-minute “Bleak House,” where Dickensian spirit voices are trapped among the rafters and ghost candles sputter. As we draw toward the close, however, Seetyca’s space becomes a little more operatic, with gravitational forces acting on matter to create a forgiving space in “Bleakscape #3,” an organ-like melody in the vacuum. The four minute coda, however, is out of character and out of place.
Not light years from Lustmord’s genre-defining The Place Where the Black Stars Hang of fifteen years ago.
Bleakscapes is available on Essentia Mundi. Buy at Amazon.
