Search - Lustmord :: Heresy

An Dark Ambient Wonder

James Hissom | Charleston, WV | 04/02/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is my favorite of all Lustmord's output, partly because it gets to the root of both "dark" and "ambient" by processing naturally ambient sounds while avoiding the more dramatic and thematic structures of his other releases. The sustained, athematic ambience may remind some listeners of Brian Eno's "On Land" taken deep underground, but the wonderfully ambiguous effect is the same. The sounds that some reviewers of the earlier release have described as human or animal screams are so processed that they can be taken for any kind of primordial animate sound, muffled in a general inanimate darkness. The overall effect, for me, is neither scary and inhuman, but complicatedly non-human - nature without the cultivated flowers and Care Bears - and that's the wonder of it. As the editorial review hints, this can be good a background for reading Lovecraft, but then Lovecraftian horror has less to do with the ever-delayed specific threat of his monsters than a kind of dark wonder in the face of a radically non-human cosmos - not unlike the opening of Mahler's Nr. 7, the "Symphony of the Night," and contemporary experiments in "night music." It's not something you listen every morning over tea, but a kind of aural spelunking that everyone who's into truly ambient music should try."