Reviews: ambient

(ambient / soundscapes / ritual / drones)

Psychonaut – Stealing the fire from heaven

Recently I received a promo cassette from Psychonaut, a band from Houston, USA. They hope to release this album (their fourth) “Stealing the fire from heaven” in early 2001. The band was founded in 1998 as a side project of the dark-industrial band Valefor…

Polygon – Omnon

One of the members of the legendary electro band Mortal Constraint, Ingo Lindmeier, is also involved in another project called Polygon from which now a limited 2-cd set is released. It comes in a very special and beautiful package, which contains the 2 cd’s and interesting photographic artwork and accompanying texts…

Sephiroth – Cathedron

On the outstanding double compilation cd ‘The Absolute Supper’ there was an unknown project that woke my interest, the track by Sephiroth immediately was one of my favourites of the album. Now a convincing debut album has been released, called “Cathedron”, with a typical Cold Meat sound…

Sturmovik – Feldweihe

An LP on impressive heavy vinyl, released by Tesco, limited to 750 copies. The bandname sounds threatening, and so does the music. War is the theme here, and the musical style is not too heavy industrial, often more ambient/soundscape like. Feldweihe could be the soundtrack to a WWII movie. Many samples are used, from U-boots, aircrafts, military speeches and the like…

V/A – Solaris Collaboration

After the magnificent double cd “Omnon” (see older review) by Polygon comes another splendid release from Polymorph records. The recipe is comparable: the release comes in a very special, luxurious package, a large format paper gatefold sleeve with insert sheet, the music is ambient of the highest standard, that follows the line of ‘Omnon”…

Silent Watcher of Dark Matter – Deep Space & Deep Space II

As the bandname promises, this is dark ambient music. On these two cd’s, distributed through mp3.com as so-called d.a.m. cd’s, we find 3 tracks on each disk, with an average playing time of 20 minutes per track. That means that these two cd’s offer us 2 hours of minimal, very dark ambient. The songs evolve […]

Silent Watcher of Dark Matter – Installation

This is the debut release of this dark ambient project from Sweden, released in June 2000. Some info about this project, taken from the mp3.com page: “The experimental ambient entity Silent Watcher of Dark Matter was formed in 1999 by multi-instrumentalist/sound-sculptor myt; inspired by the atmospheric works of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Pauline Oliveros and Gyorgy Ligeti; […]

Mara`s Torment – Across for show/The barrier of skin

Rick MacLean is a solo-composer from Toronto, Canada. He creates beautiful electronic/ambient music and releases it under his own control. Via the Internet Mara’s Torment gained quite some attention. Since a while his CD’s became available through the Projekt mailorder. Mara’s Torment is all about atmosphere and emotion…