These Nights Are Ours

  Bersarin Quartett by Bersarin Quartett   Bersarian Quartett’s self-titled debut is a clinic in melancholy music.  It channels hopelessness, futility, and fatalism in a way that few albums have before its release and few have matched since.  The album refuses to give the listener a moment’s peace, a fleeting glimpse of happiness or any mortem of joy.   That’s not to say that the album is simply soul-crushing, the album has life and with it direction.  However, what the album does with that life is bring with it an acceptance that things will never be better than the miserable existence that is laid before the listener.   Through the first notes of the opening track Oktober the listener is greeted with slow and drawn out strings that accompany the dark ambient backing.  The music paints strong imagery - painting views of faceless workers trudging endlessly through the rain.  All color has been washed away from their countenance and the envi...

  Cloud Highway by Tonebox   Duality - the existence of two entities that are fated to be joined together for all eternity.  Light and dark, life and death, silence and sound - without one the other would not exist.  This paradox is ever present in nature and civilization, and it is truly a fascinating phenomenon to ponder.   Duality also exists within music.  Be it two contrasting styles or tendencies that compliment each other while still remaining completely different in their execution.  It is this very paradox that exists within Tonebox’s album Cloud Highway.   There are two sides to Cloud highwavy: the first offers a very satisfying, yet entirely typical rendition of synthwave.  The second however is where this album differentiates itself from many of its contemporaries.  Tonebox has added darksynth into the core of their sound with excellent results. The bass on this album is immense, powerful and used in exactly the right amoun...

  Rain No Longer Softens by Bruised Skies   Sitting alone in a high rise gazing eastwardly awaiting the rising sun.  Below there are indistinct shapes moving around serving little more than a pleasant distraction from our anticipation.  The city slowly defines its form and wakes from its slumber as the moment approaches.   Listening to Rain No Longer Softens brings to mind a scene as described above.  The audio paints a vision of dawn while in the midst of an urban setting.  Transforming itself from this dark formless void into a warm yet tainted vision.   The opening tracks have a strong ambient focus, featuring a central tone or soundscape.  However in the background there are little oddities. Sometimes I swear I hear different songs playing deep in the depths.  It's like a car passing by, playing a few sparse notes for a moment, then nothing. While listening to Rain No Longer Softens - especially with headphones - I will often hear ...

    #2 by HIROTA ENO   Another album I came upon by pure chance.  I know nothing of this artist, only that the cover stood out to me when I was searching randomly on Bandcamp. What Hirota Eno has created with #2 is four diverse takes on the drone ambient genre.  Four different looping samples that transport the listener into very different places. Each one is nearly the perfect length, and while repetitive they do not overstay their welcome.  They offer a type of hypnotic effect that allows me to lose myself in its tones.  This is one of the primary reasons I enjoy ambient music so much. Hibari offers the listener a guiding light in a sea of fog.  Komorebi overwhelms the senses with its saturated loops.  Kioku lulls the listener into a gentle trance with its repeating melodies and tones.  Rakujitsu closes out the short EP with a distant piano loop that has a dangerously hypnotic sway to it. The entirety of the EP is over before it even...

  NEOZEN by R∞   In the mid 70’s a band named Queen released an album named A Night at the Opera. I did not hear the album in its entirety until nearly 30 years after its release.  After I did though it quickly became the gold standard for me on how to approach diverse song writing within the context of an album.   What Queen did there was explore multiple genres throughout the runtime of the album, yet throughout you can still tell that it is the same band.  The songs ebb and flow, weave and bend and remain unpredictable.  Yet through it all the musicianship and quality of the songs remains consistently high.  NeoZen is R∞'s Night at the Opera. The first two tracks are very much the continuation and refinement of the sound that R∞ has been honing over the past few albums.  A cyberpunk interpretation of vaporwave/dreampunk that took on its own form and became instantly recognizable as his work.  It is after this however where the album trul...

  Heaven Will Be Mine OST by Alec Lambert   I read an article a few years ago about the death and rebirth of music.  It described how music as we know it must die in order for it to truly move forward.  While I no longer remember where I read that from, the concepts of it have stayed with me for several years.   Heaven Will be Mine has deconstructed and destroyed electronic music as we know it, giving birth to a new take on an old genre.  For music to truly grow and expand we need more music that follows this logic, and Alec Lambert certainly has embraced this concept with this soundtrack. Within the runtime of Heaven Will be Mine the concepts of intentional distortion are embraced, and driven to the absolute extreme.  Stripping the album to its core shows the remnants of  house techno.  However, restricting it to something so simple would be a great injustice. Heaven Will be Mine takes noise and weaves it into the very fabric of every note...

  OCCASUS by THE AMENTA   Much has been made of the inhumanity of war.  Death is now dispensed automatically by droids that know not fear nor remorse.  An unstoppable force that will not yield until its programming has finished: every last living being has been eradicated. If Occasus is a weapon then The Amenta are its inventor.  I have yet to hear another album that comes as close as Occasus does to being truly brutal… cold… murderous. The music has but one goal, to eliminate anything and anyone standing in its path. The compositions contained within this album are difficult to place into a singular genre of extreme metal.  There are touches of death metal, black metal, and industrial metal.  They are mixed together so well that they form a musical alloy, impossible to separate once combined, no longer able to take on their initial forms.   The riffing is exact and mechanical, nearly devoid of all life and melody.  The drums are processed ...