Aural Holograms — Vol 1

As its title suggests this is the first of a series of disks from those fine purveyors of ritual ambience the finish based Aural Hypnox label. This finds the collective stepping away from the more ambient and often acoustic based ceremonies of their previously  released works and utilizing droning, dense looped synth and percussion layers. But still in the very cryptic, dark and down right chilling manner, which long time listeners of the label releasers will be familiar with.

As expected with Aural Hypnox the packaging is something a little different. The disk coming inside a six-panel hand finished cardboard booklet/ envelope, that’s illustrated inside with old photographs of what could well be a turn of last century dig at an Egyptian tomb. The track titles  seems to follow on this tomb/ uncovering of mystery feel too; The first track is entitled Before the great stone and mixes together aged analogy like synth throbs and purrs with weird often off-centre percussive matter. It circles round and round ones head, with all manner of strange sound angles & weird harmonic quilty's and what could well be whispered voices appearing every now and then out of the droning fog. It feels like a beat-less Boards of Canada crossed over to the dark side, or a John carpenter soundtrack  theme that he rejected for been too damn disturbing, made out of focus and distorted with added percussion oddities. A really quite wonderfully, dread filled yet inviting slice of atmosphere.

Next is the Day of opening the tomb which ushers us into a more slower moving and ritual collection of synth, gong and ritual percussion matter. That  wonders through  a landscape, that will suddenly build-up and almost lurching out of the darkness at you, or slowly ebb and crawl like dark misty around your very being. Again theres all manner of strange, eerier and ‘what the hell was that sound?’ matter at play; really build up the feeling of dreadful anticipation to almost fever pitch in places. There’s also present here and there  this music box theme, but it’s never right in the centre of your audio field- it’s almost like it’s off in another room or passage way, or possible another reality.
 
Lastly we have Beyond the Black deep, which is the longest track on offer here at 41 minutes. It returns to the more defined analog throb and purring dread of the first track, with the percussion been at it’s most constant here too, but the track  like the rest of the album quite deceptive as there’s all manner of tones and drones that appear from strange and unexpected angles.Though I did find it a little over long at 40 minutes running time, it was never the less very effective and hypnotic in it’s feeling of fearful and inviting dark revelling.

Another darkly satisfying  and involving piece of ritual influence dread from this constant quality label, I really  cant wait to hear the next part. To find out more about this and here samples and of course buy direct go here