Lindskold - The Aura of Collapse [Altar of Waste - 2012]"The Aura of Collapse" is the first release from this rather mysterious US project who blur together: ambient black metal, bass burnt noise ambient, blacked drone drifts and HNW into a majestic through damaged form. The release comes in the form of a CDR and it offers up a single fifty eight minute track. The CDR comes in a clear DVD case, and it features on it’s outside a ancient looking painting of a small figure standing in front of a vast sea & under a huge sky. This image is rather apt as one really does feel like said figure when playing the track with-in, simply put overwhelmed & engulfed. The single track on offer here moves from dense ‘n’ punishing wall of sound to brooding drone drifts, and it mergers together & shifts though: mid paced melancholic ‘n’ repetitive blacked metal guitar riff craft, shifting layers of roaming bass singed ambient noise, pummelling ‘n’ locked metal drum work, shards of HNW, and bleak bass drones. The track stays fairly firm, dense & pummelling through-most of it’s first half, with all the elements merged into a thick ‘n’ unrelenting map of sound; through there are subtle shifts & risers with-in the tracks mass. One of the big dips/ shifts happens around the mid-way point when the track gets thinned down to rumbling & brooding drifts of distorted dark synth ambience & thumbed black metal guitar tone. Around the thirty five minute mark the track moves again into a mixture of stretched out sort of grim ‘n’ murky tone drifts; I guess these are being created by either guitar or bass guitar….this part is ok, though at times it did feel a little too haphazard & uncontrolled for it’s own good. This track finishers off on the murky tone drifts, but I felt it was a pity that it didn’t return to the denser start of the track For it’s first half the track certainly offers up an extremely dense & overwhelming take on the blacked metal form, and it’s interesting to hear HNW elements with-in this context. But I felt on the whole there was not enough variation & contrast with-in such a long track, and when changes did occur they often felt a little ham fisted & amateurish. Never the less I must say it’s always interesting to hear something different done with-in the whole ambient black metal/ blacked drone field, and there are some rewarding elements on display here. So to sum an interesting opening shot that lacks some sonic fieriness & structurally composition skills, but there is enough promise here to make me want to check out future releases by this project. Roger Batty
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