Black Seas Of Infinity - Amrita The Quintsessence [Autumn Wind Productions - 2007]Amrita The Quintsessence offers up on it's audio alter a mix of dark ritual ambience and black electroncia. It’s goes from building sacrificial air, to looped sinister, to darkly psychodelic beatscapes. The thing that most came to mind on first hearing this was Coil around the time of Black light district, this has that similar mix of beats and darkness through much of it’s running time. And when it’s not been straight out beat bound its building ritual percussion layers with dark synths and sinister stretches of sound- or dipping straight into dark ambience with looped eerie elements abound, giving it a feeling of a locked nightmare.The first 20 minute track Ajasram Abhichara is a highlight givining a good focused and quality bound cross section of the albums moods and textures. It starts with slow swirling clouds of spectral like dark atmosphere, giving the feeling of swimming in pure darkness. It’s built around grim synth drones and layers of electro scuttling come slow beat revolutions, the atmosphere is really built and deepened by the clever audio texturing & utilizing backwards tones, etc. At about the five minute a murky bass line is introduced to great effect as the track goes from dark strength to dark strength, building and changing finishing off in heady and cold beat patterns with dark engulfing waves of synth sound over the top. Sadly though the rest of the album has some high points it never seems to reached the fevered darkness of the first track. I think part of the problem is the use of samples which frankly are a little obvious and at times plan lazy, one track loops over and over again what sounds like a zombie picture sample about people been devoured, It just really takes away from much of the musics atmosphere and power- really cheapen it. Never the less theres enough here to send the odd sliver down the spine or feeling of real dread, they just need to dump or improve samples and they’ll really be cooking up a potent dark vibe. Roger Batty
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