Olhon have consistently delivered darkly immersive atmospheres, often evoking dread undercurrents flowing through their watery depths. The Lucifugus 10" is I believe their most recent outing and departs a distance from the depths, very raw scrap materials scratching fluttering shuffling in the confines of a tepid water tank, light atmospheric strokes adding an agreeable touch of class-cum-cheese. But much as I love, Luci has nothing on Sinkhole, perhaps their most critically acclaimed, with acoustic sources sunk deep, deep, down in a murky mire of unrelenting gloom. Those who have experienced, repeatedly, nightmares involving one's own gradual, inexorable, internment in a watery grave – and who hasn't – may be engaged by a disturbing sense of deja vu. Calls to mind Algernon Blackwood's classic piece of short fiction "The Willows", suggestive horror at its best, conveying a sense of some menacing, nameless horror lurking just below our conscious surface.
As I typed the above I was reminded of another rarely acknowledged wonder, the James Plotkin / Mick Harris collaborative Collapse. This one is rather less atmospheric, more active, muscular even, the repressed horrors surging if never quite boiling over, always verging on of the eponymous breakdown. Straight-ahead, inelaborate execution, at least compared to a lot of things Harris has offered, but better than much of what I've heard from either of these gents individually.
The "sound of engines & industrial mechanisms" thread prodded me into again propping up Vivenza's Aerobruitisme Dynamique – not as a piece of industrial-strength pounding godbeast machination, but rather dark ambiance verite! Vivenza's relentless hammering has always struck this skull as rather ambient in impact, if never particularly dark. Certainly not as dark as you might get from carefully filtered turbine-blackened drone-action. At the right distance, jet engines may sound more soothing than oppressive, but this disc I think strikes the right balance: full-flavored in its implied sound-pressures yet of a fluffy, billowing, cumulonimbus persuasion.
Another seldom acknowledged work, at least in the field of darkambient exploration, Pierre Henry's Le Livre des morts egyptien (The Egyptian Book of The Dead), 1988. I accept that few would put this in the darkambient canon, but thematically, it fits. Two decades after Henry gives us his magnum opus, Apocalypse de jean, and more than three decades after he gives us Le Voyage based on The Tibetan Book of The Dead, along comes what I regard as a vastly superior work. Conjuring ominous, spectral scenes of dust-swept corridors traversed by the dead as they hopefully navigate their way through Dislocation...Negation... Judgement... clanking percussives buried in deep cavernous howls. The sound is dense and occasionally very loud, percussive clutter cancelling out the more classically ambient permutations, nevertheless a stellar piece of work – darkambient or otherwise - worthy of repeat listen.
