Rasalhague — Rage inside the Window
It's evident from the first slow, ebbing waves of 'Danielle's Dilemma (Her Birth)' which begin to layer upon one another in hypnotic washes that Rasalhague is constructing the image of a prison of sorts: walled in by rising drone patterns that creep with fluctuating frequencies and a tangible sense of dread. A cold heart beats at the core of this track as 'Rage...' seeks to guide the listener within the fractured brutality of the captive's mother - the one prison where there is no escape; one of flesh and bone. The gathering dark is maintained and further fed through 'Squalor Prison' and 'Mother is the Disaster' both of which flex and coil with searing frequencies, lo-fi waves and restrained noise-bursts that culminate to form a sense of suffocation among which disembodied voices flit. Looping after effects course through the dulled, jagged, edges of workshop horrors.
Rasalhague succeeds in nurturing a growing veil of hopelessness and inevitability by employing vacuous tonal undertows through which alternating frequencies are peppered. 'Communication Depravity' and 'Taming the Feral Child' seem to draw the listener to towards some form of polluted light bleeding into the darkness. Yet despairing pulses move against penetrating drones ensuring that any escape is temporal and fleeting.
'Rage..' is a surprisingly confident debut from Rasalhague. Confident in that it is genuinely unsettling in an already crowded theatre of black- and dark-ambient artists. Recalling some of the darkess pits of Lustmord, or the dank tones of Sutcliffe Jugend's more subterranean forays, 'Rage...' convinces as the sum of its parts. A chilling debut made all the more disturbing when one envisions the sounds as trapped forever within the mind of the tormentor and not the crumbling brick of the captive's prison.