The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The York Doom Stone) is the tenth full-length album from British dark ambient/ ritual doom project TenHornedBeast aka Christopher Walton. The five-track CD album sees Walton craving his grim sound right down to the bone, nearly into pitch-black marrow itself. It’s an album that needs both time and headphones to fully get it's arcane teeth into you…sending you back through the ages, to the deep, dark and shadowy medieval past.

The CD appears on UK’s premium dark ambient/noise/ experimental sound label Cold Spring- it’s the firth album to appear from the project on the label. The CD is presented in a six-panel digipak- and this takes in moody pictures of the doomstone- a 12th-century limestone craving that depicts hell, it’s centred around a cauldron to which the souls of the damned are being pushed and tortured by demons- it presently sits in the crypt at York Minster. 

The release opens with the nearing ten and quarter minutes of “This is the first death”. Here we find a grimly waving and weaving organ tone- which is edged by shadowy sustain, fleeting darts of eerier and minimal percussion hits, and bleakly gliding feedback simmers. The track feels heavy in ancient foreboding yet hazed with circling and swirling malevolence. Next, we have “Into The Mouth Of Hell” this just over twelve-minute track brings together raw-but-stark percussive rolls ‘n’ hits, darkly swarming and drifting guitar tones, and brooding feedback bays.

For the final two tracks we just over nine minutes of “Black Furnace” here we have ushered in a seemingly huge and vast sonic place where sustained, yet hazed bass organ hover, sudden waves of percussive glide,  and tarry drone hoover. Finishing off the album we have the nearing thirteen and a half minutes of “This Is The Second Death” where we find foreboding billows slowing drifting with wavering bass drum hits, eerier cymbal sprinkles, and light forking feedback.

I guess you’d classify what we have here as minimalist doom, or maybe stripped and barren dark ambience. It’s an album that’s both stark, yet vast- earthy yet barren- rumbling with deep dread, and heady with ancient black unease. To buy The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The York Doom Stone) direct drop by here.