Funerary Call — Nightside Emanations
For all the dream-like or trance-inducing qualities often attributed to the dark-ambient sub-genre, Harlow MacFarlane, the man behind this Vancouver one-man project, has spent the last twenty years pursuing his own pestilential course and trying to capture the aural essence of man’s most terrible nightmares. And the least we can say is that the man seems on a creative roll as this is already his second offering this summer – the other being the ‘Fragments from the Aethyr’ album recently released on Crucial Blast.
To a layer of minimalistic soundscapes which would work a treat with the attendants of some Lovecraftian black mass held in a subterranean chasm under the patronage of Cthulhu himself, the artist weaves a subtle tapestry of distorted guitars, mantra-like invocations, Oriental bells chiming in the distance and tribal percussions to sometimes very evocative effect, the last track ‘Upon The Heath’ being a point in case and allowing the album to linger on in the inner recesses of the listener’s brains long after it has stopped playing.
And while they might not enjoy the same reputation or even display the same immediate brilliance as erstwhile label-mates Wolfskin or Yen Pox, Funerary Call still propose music that is convincing enough to warrant an altogether pleasant (sic) listening experience. The album, which comes in a 4-panel DVD digipack and features artwork by renowned Russian artist Denis Forkas, manages at times to sound like a field-recording lifted straight from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Dulle Griet’. Which I suppose is a good thing.