Nihil Impvlse — Anabasis
Anabasis is the 4th full-length album from Italian’s Nihil Impvlse. It’s a six-track affair- where the sound sits in a decidedly brooding industrial-bound drone place, with the release working as the perfect soundtrack to surveying shadowy & bleak pictures of war's aftermath.
The release comes presented in a monochrome four-panel digipak- with on its front cover a picture of a stern-looking bronze figure with a burnet in his hands. The release has an edition of just three hundred copies and can be purchased here.
The six-track featured have runtimes between five and eleven minutes- with each settling down into a selection of drones & textures, which are looped out to create grim & lightly seared sonic scapes.
We open with “The Fog Of War” here we find a starkly piping ‘n’ greyly hovering drone meeting steady and spaced metallic hits, and the sound of rattling metal tank tracks. All making for a greatly evocative opener- which summons up images of a ragtag regiment trekking through swampy reaches of cold mud, shattered/ detached human limbs, and rapidly congealing blood of the battlefield.
Later on, we have “Blood On Hand” where a foreboding drone loop meets stark pulsing beats, and building tone billows which at points get quite sears- with eerier field radio banter appearing towards the end of the track.
The album plays out with the track “Shattered Light” which finds taut & slightly pitch-shifted drone spins afloat with brooding hovers, light metallic clashes ‘n’ clangs, and unease tonal forking.
As an album, Anabasis creates a feeling of shadowy yet lightly seared unease- with the mix of the elements in each track being well realized and conceived. If you enjoy where ambient and subtle industrial elements meet- this is most certainly one for you.