Arktau Eos - Mirrorion [Aural Hypnox - 2006]Arktau Eos debut album is a journey into ritual and dark occultic ambience with guitar elements on a few tracks. But for the most part it’s stick to purely organic and acoustic elements such as piercing blasts of windbones, accelerating steel-plate rolls, singing bowl and various kinds of stringed instruments along with the human voice in all it’s eerier wonder, to summon up dark and often deeply chilling atmospheres From the outset and the watery come percussive ritual tones of the first track to the albums last mummer you feel you are witness to some strange ritual worked out in dank caves or dark tangled forest deep away from civilisation. This feels very much of another place and other time, maybe not even part of our reality some third other place in-between worlds. For most of the albums running time there little melody or structure in a conventional manner, this is purely focus on making a certain atmosphere and vibe. You have to let it almost drift into your very being. Like most ambient works and certainly dark ambient this works best as one long 70 minute track, which never lets up it’s hynopnic and often very unnerving air. You can almost see gowned figures, smell and taste exotic burning herbs. The thing that I think that sets this apart from a lot of this type of thing and adds to it’s atmospheric depth, is the lack of recognisable synthesizer elements. Some of the more really dread inducing moments come via the strange 'what must be human' chanted voices. The organic intresmentasion gives it a real feel of been authentic, like some ancient ritual recording found locked in a black tomb. It’s all packaged in an A5 cover with black and red ink on light card stock- looking very much like a occultic document of some sort. Inside it has a ‘cant quite put your finger on why’ uneasy illustration of ritual robes. This unease stretches through the whole project it feels like there something deeper and darker going on here than what’s on the surface, something very shadowy and unpleasant. The listener left feeling like a character from a Lovecaft story, who slowly uncovers strange unearthly ceremonies and shadowy others. Strangely unlike of lot of this type of thing- this seems to have staying power, making one want to revisit it often. Maybe it has to do with the density of sound and depth of atmospherics on display here. To find out more & buy direct go to here or go direct to the bands website to really unease yourself. Roger Batty
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