This newest album from Montreal's Hérétique Du Nord and sole member Malgeist goes further beyond the project's dungeon synth origins, moving into heavier, more malevolent territory that creates a cold, esoteric sound-world all its own. And as with a lot of the stuff that's been coming out of Quebec’s Scarlet Kross collective over the past year, this writhes with Malgeist's spirit of collaboration, bringing in a host of other musicians to assist in the creation of these aural black holes. With rich production and thoughtfully-crafted monoliths of electronic / distortion-driven blackness, the music on Les Transmissions Noires is both bizarre and enveloping, enfolding you in great black wings of sub-zero menace. Definitely my favorite work from Hérétique Du Nord yet. The music merges isolationist ambient, morbid Cold Meat-esque industrial, crushing blackened doom-drone, evil noise, elements of Tangerine Dream-like grandeur, seriously raw black metal, and some of the gnarliest, most grotesque vocals in recent memory to produce a unique, almost liturgical plunge into primal ceremonial atmosphere and abrasive abjection.

Opener "Ombres célestes" is like wind singing along vast ice sheets, huge orchestral organ-like drone gliding and surging like echoes from a condemned cathedral, leading straight into the album's glacially slow, ominously massive driftscapes. The first of those is "La lame cruelle", aided by Neige et Noirceur's Spiritus, the two musicians weaving their respective dungeon synth and blackened ambient doom elements into a torturous heaviness, blending grinding disembodied doom-drone guitar crush with the album's infestation of ghastly, gaseous shrieks and electronic instrumentation into an air of dread-filled, utterly subterranean darkness. The vibe is black, and it continues non-stop through the almost hour-long descent into Les Transmissions Noires. Compared to Heretique Du Nord's previous work, this full-length is heavier (those roaring metallic guitar chords rumble like the goddamn Horn Of Gideon throughout the album), more layered, more complex in structure, but still as icy and inhospitable as anything Malgeist has ever done. And from that point, the album brings in a cadre of guest vocalists beyond just Spiritus: on "D'azur et de noires chimères", Onomocrite contributes oneiric French spoken word to a dreamlike haze of cavernous reverb, distant distorted synth chords and endless metallic whirr, evoking some of the more baroque expressions of 1990s-era dark ambient, but ultimately erupts into an anguished, shrieking finale; it's like hearing older Xasthur materializing within some classic Cold Meat Industries nightmare music. Black metal author Nafre appears on "Évocation de blizzard (Ilisininga piqsiup)", which sounds like Black One-era Sunn O))) performing background music for a black mass in a Parisian ossuary. But Malgeist himself is the most prominent vocalist, delivering his scowling shriek and ghoulish howls over the droning, hypnotic lo-fi black metal blast of "Le blizzard évoqué"; the brief but hellish arctic ambient interlude "Nocturne" that opens the B-side of the album; the title track's abyss of horrific scalding black noise (with Spiritus also lending his wretched snarls to the sulfuric filth); "La chute des hirondelles"'s sprawling and monumentous dungeon-crawling death-drone, which feels like some kind of cosmic black metal slowed down to pure molten majesty, overlaid with gorgeous billowing choral textures.

Towards the end, "Écarlate et cramoisi" sees Malgeist's death rattle joined by ambient noise artists Bête Lumineuse and ATD to produce another swelling mass of demonic droning distortion, and on closer "Les griffes d'hiver", Nightwalker (Illithocyte, Lune Incarnate, Marcheur de Nuit) takes over the music, summoning an amazing din of symphonic splendor, organ-like sounds, and searing distortion that is finally joined by a mix of killer black metal riff and clean guitar melody that falls in and out, making for a strange soundscape where Malgeist's voice is absorbed into a dreamy haze while birdsong emerges into light, ending the album with an eerie ambiguity. The presence of multiple vocalists beings so much to the album's expansive feel, but even the voiceless, cinematic dirge of tracks like "Litanie de l'ombre" chills to the bone, that massive, crushing riff rolling through a fog of dungeon synth-style keyboards, pure chthonic immensity. Each track definitely feels like a chapter in a larger narrative; Les Transmissions Noires is an album that needs to be listened to from start to end to really appreciate the full effect of Malgeist's vision.

The cassette edition is limited to one hundred copies, with expanded artwork, photography, and design from Malgeist.