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FUNERARY CALL   Nightside Emanations   CD   (Malignant)    10.98



Released almost simultaneously with our own new Funerary Call offering, Nightside Emanations is filled with the same lush netherworld ambience as Fragments From The Aethyr while using a distinctly different approach. The whole feel is different, from the fantastic surrealistic album art courtesy of Russian occult/symbolist painter Denis Kostromitin (whose work has also graced the covers of recent albums from Horseback, Ride For Revenge and Dead Reptile Shrine) to the sparse soundscapes littered with random noises and bits of mysterious-sounding field recordings, this has a much more 'mystical' feel to it than the classically-tinged graveyard visions of Fragments.... The instrumentation used on this recording feels more organic and atavistic, the sounds created using wood and bones and antlers, excavated stone and pieces of scrap-metal wielded by hand to craft these richly detailed fields of ritualistic movement and sepulchral ambience.

The disc moves through ever more shadowy chambers, beginning with the fearsome guttural invocations and black drift of "Wands Of Fire", where the sound of crackling flame becomes a locus of death-meditation around which swirl strains of ominous minor key melody, ringing gongs and vast desolate drones. Its followed by the chaotic clatter that opens the title track, which becomes a haze of dire droning textures and harrowing musical fragments that inject an intense dosage of dread into the almost ceremonial feel of lone drum and prayer bowls resonating through this great lightless space, the tension occasionally fractured by eruptions of bestial noise or massive industrial rumblings. This moves in a more cinematic direction on "Thee I Invoke" as dark magisterial synths rise and fall in waves of twilight drone over slow pounding tympani, the panic-stricken wail of synthetic strings and the hypnotic chanting of eyeless priests, these sounds transforming into a nightmare delirium of backward orchestras and howling choirs and inhuman tongues. An awakening presence is evoked on the hallucinatory ritual "Seven Candles Burning", wailing electronic voices sounding out their frustrations while the clanking of metal and chimes count out the seconds until oblivion. "The Calling" has what sound like ancient horns blasting in slow motion across a rain- drenched waste, and the disc ends with the dramatic climax of "Upon The Heath", where the orchestral voices and sounds rise again and are joined by a wall of drummers swaying in trance, ghastly vocalizations and distant mystic choirs trailing through the darkness like tendrils of smoke.

One of Funerary Call's more dark ambient -leaning albums, this is one that fans of Ruhr Hunter, Archon Satani, Zero Kama, Herbst9, Tenhornedbeast and the shamanic black drone-rituals of the Aural Hypnox label are also highly advised to check out. Comes in a gorgeous, super-striking dvd-sized digipack.


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