Copyright © 1994 Side Effects
1. Section 1: Sol Om On 3:49
2. Section 2: Aldebaran of the Hyades 24:56
3. Section 3: Dark Companion 14:41
4. Section 4: Metastatic Resonance 25:35
5. Section 5: Dog Star Descends 6:47
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Based around the repetition of dynamically fluctuating layers of spatial sounds this work envelops the listener in a surreal and nihilistic auditory void. Contemplative and ponderous in its unveiling of information, the listener is absorbed into a cosmic inertia shifting slowly between states of balance and imbalance before steadily realizing its own entropic demise. Sometimes, as noticeable on the track "Sol Om On", this album will make use of resonant soundscaping techniques combining them with sounds of heavy electrons and metallic convolutions to give a sensation of earth shattering definiteness. Beneath the immediately perceivable lie further subtly expansive harmonic delights floating on a sea of forgotten immaterial entities there to be either explored or ignored. The track "dark companion" serves like an archaic mystical narration of the mysteries of the surrounding black infinity, incessantly repeating dark, spectral choir voicing echoing like a hopeless roaming ghost, reaching far across the ages.
While this foreboding work lies very much beyond all that one might call humanistic, it does nevertheless confer something of 'life' but strictly in a meta-organic sense, far beyond the understanding of our physical senses and anthropocentric perceptions. This work conveys spiritual idealism, in that from its nihilistic and black space emerges something living, albeit seemingly in deep somnolent slumber and subsumed into a grand cosmic order binding all matter, space and vibration together. It operates like a cluster of stars, emerging from vast space to assert itself as something that has no comprehensible or definable purpose to humankind but simply 'is'.
While this album finds similar ground to many other ambient artists and, like most ambient music, is concocted as direct replacement of the current mindset for something less bent on the immediate, this album goes even further, to the point where it often seems beyond the very definition of music. Instead of projecting constant melodic interaction between an outer lead-melody and other parts of hierarchical significance it throws densely saturated, droning parts along with almost violent and non-tonal parts that in totality acts like the sound of a waterfall or a wind, therefore as truly ambient sound. 'The place where the black stars hang' is expression nihilism itself: an opening to a reality of infinite breadth, stripped of petty meaning and beyond human intervention.
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