A recommended malicious industrial, noisy and cinematic ambient album and a quite effective post-apocalyptical soundtrack for your dark reflective moments.
Kalpamantra is an active net-label since 2009 and specialized in blackened, noisy, tellurian and demonic ambient music. Founded by musical journalist Steven D Williams (second manager at Malignant Records) Kalpamantra is exclusively devoted to digital releases. Notable projects such as Alphaxone, Forgotten Backyard, Mystified have been published here. This editing structure also made a name with a serie of compilations where you can find rare and exclusive tracks from Malignant Records artists. The Echoing Black is the last album to date in this field of activity. It features now classic dark ambient projects such as Collapsar, Phragments, Phelios and many more interesting ones in related genres. The general sounding atmosphere is animated by an impressive collection of eerily reverbed drones, bleak noises and furiously sinister industrial textures.
Phelios opens the ceremony with an absolutely wonderful, majestic and ominous dronescaping ritual found of lugubruous electronic waves and resonant bass frequencies. With a bunch of industrial derelicts Abandoned Asylum carries on a relatively similar path with the same success. Phragments & Terra Relicta provide here one of the finest spooky and enthralling doom ambient tracks of the compilation with the fuzzed-out melancholic spell of Hall of Mirror in “Forest of fire” and the occult droning brilliance of Kristoffer Oustad’s “Second orbit part IV” (his first release published the past year on Malignant Records is actually an accomplished masterpiece in the dark ambient genre) . One more incantatory voice-ritualistic noisy track from the discreet but magnificent Of Earth and Sun (have a listen on the glorious ‘uncoil’ LP published on Malignant). Shibabla wrote here a nicely traumatic and religious fiction-like track entitled “Hymn to the climbing scarab”. Leyla Abdul-Rauf & Qepe offers a spectral, reversed, intense, intoxicating and mind-altered cinematic landscape with a puzzling ghostly and semi melodious vibe. Interesting to notice the more power electronic and dark death-industrialism facet of the album, notably in the second half with astonishingly harsh and ferocious tracks from Theologian, Black Earth, Abjection Ritual & Teeth Engraved. The album closes with the extreme power electronic hostility of Linekfraft , no spiritual escaping or reedeming transcendance are possible.
Sorry for the projects I forgot to include in the review but everything here is of a great quality in the radical, nihilist and uncompromising dark electronic music spectrum. The Echoing Black is a recommended malicious industrial, noisy and cinematic ambient album and a quite effective post-apocalyptical soundtrack for your dark reflective moments.
The Echoing Black is available on Kalpamantra.
