The latest from the finest US dark ambient label is Maculatum's The Nameless City, the first release from the collaborative duo of Malignant artists Rasalhague and Collapsar. Working together, the artists have crafted a superb slab of black ambience for this disc that is directly influenced by the seminal horror fiction of HP Lovecraft; the title of this album is itself taken directly from one of the earliest stories in his Cthulhu Mythos. The music on The Nameless City is richly textured but thoroughly black experimental soundscapery that moves between lightless electronic drone and more rhythmic industrial sounds.

The disc's opening track immediately sets the tone for the album with its billowing gusts of black subterranean air and vast growling synth-drones, an abyssal backdrop for the strange electronic flourishes and effects that the duo smears across the blackness. All throughout these slowly drifting ink-clouds, they apply a constantly shifting tableaux of backwards voices, endless clanking chains, sharp metallic tones and unsettling noises, distant cries echoing across the horizon, ghastly feminine sighs creeping through the murk, guttural throats chanting in some presumably pre-human tongue; but then with the second track, they begin to introduce the sound of looped drums, simple tribal-like rhythms that begin rattling in the blackness, quickly joined by bursts of violent metallic percussion that send the music into a paroxysm of ritualistic movement. Even when the music is at it's most minimal, with little more than the sound of massive geological formations grinding together, Maculatum imbue the sounds with a deep sense of dread and desolation, perfectly keeping with the images of hidden underground necropolises and ancient eldritch sciences that are invoked here.

Obviously, Lustmord's cavernous catacomb drones are a major influence on The Nameless City's sound, but these guys take it in a glitchier, more electronically mutated direction, with loops of rhythmic noise that comes to the forefront with the fifth track, mixing what sounds like tabla hand drums with blasts of stentorian percussion, ghostly wailing voices and an ominous horn section that sounds like they were channeling one of Brad Fiedel's ominous film scores. It's this somewhat unique combination of sounds that finds a meeting place between the themes of blasphemous Lovecraftian horror and the presence of malign technology - man, this is exactly what the soundtrack to Stuart Gordon's Dagon should have sounded like.

Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies in gatefold packaging.