Sombre Présage - Infernale Procession

Year: 2006

Genre: Dark Ambient

As the sound of rain and thunder hit your ears, you're immediately warped to another time and place. The church bell tolls, signifying the coming of a new age. An age of sorrow and desperation. Voxum carefully works his moods and takes the time to weave the dark veil that envelopes us throughout the listening. While the instruments and sounds used differ, everything is done to us into a single trip: the abyssal depths of the human soul in all its most bleak, desperate and morbid. Percussion, bass, keyboards, distant guitars, feedback, murmurs and whispers. You are then completely helpless facing this flood of frightening sensations, a darkness unprecedented. The atmosphere is wet, cold, opaque, the music is particularly disturbing, ritualistic, but to which one can not help being attracted. The attraction uncontrollable in fire, water, vacuum, and even death.

Bosque - Dead Nature

Year: 2005
Genre: Funeral Doom Metal

The demo consist of three songs, clocked at 30 minutes of atmospheric and crawling doom metal, with a strange experimental sound, sometimes reaching almost noisy atmospheres due the ultra slow riffs, which sometimes sound like a dense and saturated buzz, but adorning this chaotic background we find some interesting, quite delicate, guitar lines creating a remarkable contrast. The drumming is really slow, but very fitting to the whole of the music. But to this point, you will probably ask: what the main differences between Bosque and 1,000 other “crawling” moom metal bands are? Well, the music of Bosque is very climatic, with few melodies, some monotone, trance like atmospheres and a clean voice, which seems to be singing from the depths of some catacomb or something. The whole production is pretty poor; almost rehearsal sounding in some passages, but the music is undoubtedly good.

Beatrìk - Requiem of December

Year: 2005
Genre: Black/Doom Metal

Hypnotic chiming and discordant guitar work is woven over the most basic drum lines, and topped with grimy jarring Varg-like barks. The songs are mainly mid-paced, and on average are roughly eight minutes long, although they do have the occasional blast-ridden section when the bile is fully raised, and the vocal department begins to sound as if desolation and despondency have been captured in corporeal form, transferred to aural format and been laid alongside a musical accompaniment. Let this not fool you into thinking that "Requiem of December" is not without its hugely placid moments too, as it has some really doom-laden passages with church bells tolling as an accompaniment, intertwined with melancholic acoustic guitar and church organ styled keyboards exuding the overall dark vibe of morbid sorrow. Just listen to track four 'Eternal Rest', with its imaginatively radiant use of trickling stream and birdsong samples alongside sad, downcast guitar – striking in its magnificence.

Black Seas of Infinity - Within Daathian Chasms

Year: 2005

Genre: Ritual Dark Ambient

Within Daathian Chasms is a journey to hell and back. From the industrial tinged beginnings of "Vortex of Awakening" to the crashing waves of "Path of the Void", the listener is pulled through soundscapes of beauty only to be pushed to the brink of terror and back again. This is the soundtrack to the horror movie in your mind. Total ambient beauty like "Blessed Sacrament of Levanah" puts you in an alpha like state, while others like "Retromingent Periodicity" had me jumping out of my fucking skin. These are complete contrasts of dark and light, the aural Tao. In reality, "Daath" is the Hebrew word for "Knowledge". 11 tracks to that end.

Boris & Merzbow - Sun Baked Snow Cave

Year: 2005
Genre: Ambient/Drone/Noise

A single hour-long composition shuffled back and forth between the two groups to yield maximum aural overload, Sun Baked Snow Cave is something of a wolf in sheep's clothing, playing possum for the better part of twenty minutes. Then, out of nowhere, it sandblasts your synapses with the sound of a million locusts devouring a steel mill, boring relentlessly forward until your cerebral cortex is nothing but a pile of dust. Fifteen minutes in, you'll be slightly confused, lulled by the song's murky piano lines and murmuring electron pulse. A half-hour in, you'll swear that your speakers are melting, or that an avalanche of poisonous Vietnamese beetles is about to crash through them and kill you where you sit. At the forty-five minute mark, you'll start seeing things: your toaster is walking away with your laptop and the television is broadcasting nothing but pornographic low-def H.R. Pufinstuf episodes. After the full hour, you'll be slack-jawed, drooling like a mental patient and twitching like a ballerina on crack, rendered immobile and unrecognizable to even your closest friends.