FUNERARY CALL "Fragments from the Aethyr" Digipak CD

The grand master of black ambience returns with this new missive from beyond the chthonic depths. Featuring three extended descents into jet-black drift, funereal chamber music, monstrous metallic noise, booming ritualistic percussion, slit-throat recitations of formless horror, and further abyssal abominations. Fragments From The Aethyr presents a triptych of long, sprawling pieces that descend through dark layers of cinematic sonic horror. The music shifts between violin-led passages of pitch-black, dissonant chamber music backed by booming kettledrums and traces of modern music composition and the rotting exhalations of the dead, to blasts of crushing shapeless doom where huge metallic chords thunder in the deep, sending tremors of doom-laden dronemetal rumbling through the strata of Funerary Call's demonic industrial nightmares. The sound of Fragments sometimes resembles a Bela Bartok piece drifting through a fog of black-mass ambience and the murmerings of the long dead, the sound imbued with a deep ominous feel but also glowing with a mysterious dark beauty as it builds to a crescendo of black majestic power, as on the nearly twenty minute centrepiece of the album "Fragments". There are noisy elements that appear here that threaten to push the music into ear-destroying industrial cacophony at times, but even when the sound is at it's most chaotic, it's held together by the searing melodies of the stringed instruments, tethering the plumes of black industrial noise to the graveyard ambience that soaks deep into the surface of the album. Absolute lightlessness from this seminal artist, highly recommended to fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, Megaptera, Nordvargr, TenHornedBeast, MZ.412 and Aghast.