Reviews

Plaguehaus

A very interesting split by two equally interesting projects. (…) Next up are two offerings from the mad Frenchman, Meldhkwis under the Aymrev Erkroz Prevre moniker. You may also know him from one of his other projects, Dapnom of Etmenns Derokwis. All are amazing and worth seeking out. Seriously, I can't say enough good things about his releases. "Kamaruba" ends Side A with a 15 minute plus journey into the abyss. Side B kicks off with "Bardo", warm, static rumblings are punctuated by waves of treble noise and monastery chimes. Not a comfortable few minutes, but I doubt it's meant to be. 

If you're a fan of ritual ambient madness, this one is definitely worth seeking out. (J.)

Metal Archives

The CD edition under review is a 2006 release by Sonic Tyranny productions and contains just three tracks - one by each act and a third on which the members of both acts collaborate under their individual names Set-Heru and Meldhkwis. 

The entry by A.E.P., "Kamarupa", is an all-instrumental dark ambient drone piece with perhaps some industrial influences. Some of the ambient and droney effects may have been done on piano. Those familiar with experimental and improvised music may have seen or know of musicians who put various gadgets including large clips or electric fans on strings of guitars or pianos to change the quality of sound that comes out these instruments, and possibly Meldhkwis may have done something similar here. The track has a very open, spacey feel which can be threatening and is very like what industrial / dark ambient musician Lustmord (this guy was a former member of the Australian late 1970s / 80s industrial band SPK and also collaborated with the Melvins on "Pigs of the Roman Empire") has done in his solo career. There are strange things that go bump underfoot here and metallic drones seem to reverberate through your head forever and ever. As the track continues, Meldhkwis starts stabbing out a deranged piano melody that often goes off-key and lifts the music into a completely different world. Drones and seething clouds of tone and grit build up into a sort of vague monster entity that almost but never quite engulfs him.

The collaborative piece "Betwixt the Words of the Dark Grammar ... lies the Gate of the Secret Horizon" is a secretive space-ambient tone work in two sections: the first part has a constant scratching rhythm in the background as though someone is combing through grass and soild looking for something while overhead dark clouds of drone pass. About the sixth minute all this changes into the next section: a piercing sonic laser leads into a different universe where ghostly sound images float in space plasma. Fragments of sonic flotsam and jetsam, all appearing to be part of something bigger and meaningful but lacking the means to connect them, pass by, not doing very much.

The A.E.P. track is enjoyable, more so when the piano melody really gets going so that the piece becomes a soundtrack to some Gothic Grand Guignol play where the puppets murder each other in a frenzy and throw fake blood at each other and at the audience. (Ah, those must have been the days before people decided puppet shows were really for children and so had to be cleaned up ...) As for the collaboration, it's very subdued and too well-behaved compared to the rest of the CD and I get the impression the musicians erred on the side of being polite to each other and respecting one another's work too much to do very much apart from gilding it. It's possible the musicians simply exchanged pieces of music and worked on the other guy's stuff without doing something very different on it, then put the results together and released the combined work as is: a lot of musical collaborations these days are of this nature, without the people involved having to meet at all. This probably explains why the collaboration piece seems to divide into two phases quite neatly and isn't more what it could have been.

If you are keen on dark ambient music with strong leanings to experimentation and improvisation, and you don't mind forays into noise and industrial, this split release would be of interest, though it's not the kind of album you'd necessarily keep in your collection permanently. I see this split mainly as a way of introducing people to the work by BSoI and A.E.P. and once you start listening and collecting their other releases, you'd probably pass this split on to other people who might be similarly inclined towards this kind of music. The bulk of the rating I have given for the split is for the separate A.E.P and BSoI contributions.  (NausikaDalazBlindaz)