TenHornedBeast — Death Has No Companion

Death Has No Companion stands as one of the more terminally bleak releases from this British dark ambient/ ritual doom project. The CD offers up just three lengthy tracks built around an often pared back sound that sits somewhere between mournful soundtracking, acoustic doom, and dark ambience with subtle ritual & industrial elements.

For the last thirteen or so years TenHornedBeast has been the main sonic outlet for Christopher Walton-  a English experimental artists; who has been active with the UK's dark ritual/ ambient/ industrial  scene since the early 90’s- connected with projects such as Endvra & The Holy Order Of Faust.

The CD comes in a very fittingly bleak looking six-panel digipak that takes in pictures of just barren snow-covered roads leading off into nowhere.  The three tracks each last between eighteen & twenty-four minutes. With each been as barren & doomed as each other.

First up we have “The Wanderer”, and this fittingly feels like a slurred & somber journey into the murky beyond. It’s built around the melancholical march of slowly bowed– yet darkly majestic strings & brooding percussive rolls ‘n’ sudden louder shudders. It rather brought to mind the more brooding, sinister yet building moments on Popol Vuh’s soundtrack for Nosferatu the Vampyre. If you shut your eyes you can almost see a weary figure making its way across a wind & weather battered landscape, as the dusk rapidly creeps into the sky.

Next we have “The Lamentation Of Their Women”- this opens in wonderfully brooding & darkly pared back manner- with a series of spaced out doomy piano strikes. Slowly but surely within a few minutes  you can make a hovering dark ambient simmer, and then at around sixty minutes a bleakly cycling synth scrape is added to the mix. By around the 8th minute a grim & hazy simmer in brought into play, and in the last quarter of the track, we get sudden & menacing slides of grating ritual industrial tone. 

Finally, we have “In Each Of Us A Secret Sorrow”, and this is the longest track here at just shy of the twenty-four minute mark. It begins with a slowly stretched & bleakly simmering string haze- and over the surface of this we at first get metal hovering & scarps, and then the occasionally ritual chirming. At around the six minute a melancholy shimmering stringed element( possible a subdued electric guitar) is introduced , and this is both brooding & sadly harmonic in its barren glow. The track nicely & subtle builds in it’s bleak tension until around the mid-way point, when things slow & pare back once more- with a blend of longer dark string twangs & banks of muffled crashing reverberations. 

From its outset, Death Has No Companion ushers you into the darkest of sonic landscapes, and throughout the albums length it keeps you tightly held there- endless treading the dark paths with-in. As a whole, the album feels a bit more bleakly cinematic from the past work I’d heard from a project, and I can certainly see it appealing to those who enjoy any form of dark soundtracking- be it formal film scoring, dark ambience, or doomed neo-classical  music.