Sky Burial — Aegri Somnia

There seems to be a lot of this sort of stuff at the moment: a combination of the more expansive, wayward kosmische synth excursions, like, say, Tangerine Dream’s Zeit, with a sense of entropy best demonstrated by William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, allied with eerie, buoyant looped samples a la Nurse With Wound’s Salt Marie Celeste and the distressed audio of James Leyland Kirby’s depressing releases. Too complex to be merely referred to as either ‘drone’ or ‘ambient’ music, a constant low to midrange grey rumble travels at a constant, smooth speed to cut a straight line through open space as the journeying listener receives varying impressions of ominous activities beyond the fog. You could call it ‘chasmic music’ as it almost always bears a sinking sensation like being lowered into the underworld while typically hinting at more ethereal, sinister or ritualistic mysteries obscured by the overwhelming darkness.

And this is what the first forty minutes of Aegri Somnia sounds like, the latest release from Massachusetts’s Michael Page who also produces noisier environments as Fire in the Head. It’s a nightmarish world, as suggested by the title, formed of a blackened rift full of reverberating suspended synth strings, billowing passages and rustling, creepy movements. Episodically, the free skronk and squeal lent by Nik Turner’s saxophone bizarrely suggests a subterranean busker is out there stalking the listener as he briefly diverts attention away from the stony descent. Elsewhere the finer details of the movement – from shimmering shadows through splashing cymbals to galactic synth streaks - are also blurred by Page’s collage style, the edges of each fragment so well-integrated or cross-faded their centres can glide by unnoticed. Consequently, the track’s layers confuse into one long miasmic cloud.

Less blended, so initially more interesting, is the shorter second movement that feels less like a descent than a climb up a haunted Tibetan mountain, replete with goats and their shepherd’s bell, the buzz of flies, disembodied voice fragments and high-pitched whistling. After setting this fearful scene, fragments of musical ideas, from industrial percussion and Death Star synth chords to dramatic piano fills and metallic pulses, rise and fall, once again with smooth transitions.

While Aegri Somnia overflows with foreboding atmospherics it also feels like a parade of sketches or anecdotes neatly and expertly blended together to form a cinematic soup where the strong, individual flavours can lose their contrasting appeal in an over-generous serving.