Категория: Heathen Harvest

For the third time in three years, the dark ambient label Cryo Chamber presents a collaboration paying tribute to an entity from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.  As before, this is a true collaboration, with the work of each artist seamlessly woven into a single, unbroken track that spans 190 minutes across three CDs.  Unless you’re extremely familiar with the sounds and techniques of each artist, it’s nigh impossible to distinguish one from another; perhaps the limiting scope of the dark ambient genre is also a factor.

I’ve always pondered what makes a particular genre album “better” than the others.  There’s a good deal of subjectivity in play here—what works for me might not for someone else—but I suspect there’s more to it than that.  I listen to and write about a lot of dark ambient music, and it’s still hard to try to describe why I like a certain album more than others, especially when they play by such similar rules. Reflections under the Sky is a fitting example of this.  The debut from SiJ (Vladislav Sikach) and Textere Oris (Ilya Fursov) sounds, on the surface, like countless other genre efforts:  somber keyboards waft to and fro over field recordings of rain and static, with the odd bit of treated guitar drone and other filtered and pitched effects gently snaking their way through the mix.  In some places, such as “Behind the Window,” the music’s a dead ringer for past classics: in the case of this track, Brian Lustmord and Robert Rich‘s seminal album, Stalker.  But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, first because Stalker is rife with brilliant yet desolate passages, and because the template Sikach and Fursov follow is a time-tested and time-proven one.

For instance, there’s the aforementioned blending of acoustic and electric sound—a mixture of the ancient and the modern. The sound reminds me a lot of the wave of ‘tribal’ or ‘ethno-industrial’ that happened in the early to mid-nineties with artists like OYuki Conjugate, Jorge Reyes, Hybryds, and Alio Die—music inspired by (usually non-specific) ancient cultures that knitted those influence into an electronic or experimental frame. Like much of the music of that time, SiJ’s interpretation of the ancient world (or lost world) is surprisingly gentle and pastoral. Its rhythms are relaxed, its melodies flow, and there are no jarring elements to interrupt the idyll. Maybe it’s my usual negativity seeping in, but I feel like this sort of dreaminess conveys very little of the life of the ancient world.