Did you know the death metal scene has a vibrant dark ambient sub-scene? Well, sure, you probably did, o' purveyor of Viking thrash and demon-doom grindcore, but what of the rest of you? Dark ambient mostly found its footing within abstract industrialists and fans of the Alien movies at a time when having any sort of synth work in your metal music was considered stupid and gay (Van Halen exempt, apparently). Yet as the '90s took form and production in metal albums grew more ambitious, creepy ambient textures made good sense for an interlude or two. Some musicians grew inspired enough to make whole albums of the stuff, creating tidy side careers within the dark ambient scene at large. One of the more ambitious chaps in this field is Stijn van Cauter.
Not content to simply make an album or three, the Belgian metaller established his own label, Nulll, using it as a platform to release a multitude of LPs under a multitude of project aliases. Doom metal act Until Death Overtakes Me was the big one, but he also released dark ambient and experimental works as Fall Of The Grey-Winged One, Dreams Of Dying Stars, Tear Your Soul Apart, and Dance Nihil (among other cheery names), most of which were one-off works of CDr-length single track music. Oh, and In The Mist as well.
Lost got a bit more buzz than van Cauter’s other projects for its comparatively different approach to dark ambient – more grey atmosphere, less doom and gloom here. I’ll buy that, this seventy-minute long piece of drone remarkably immersive considering there’s very little going on. Over ninety percent of its runtime is dominated by an overbearing bass tone fed with overlapping reverb and echo effect. Additional sounds like heavily-echoed guitar plucks and fret rides occasionally pierce the murk, but its long stretches between those islands of musical respite.
Interestingly, Lost starts with these guitar effects, as though the fog of drone has yet to settle in; conversely, the overbearing tone dissipates by track’s end, allowing an actual bass melody to emerge for the remainder five or so minutes. Lost may be drone ambient at its near-droniest, but damn if van Cauter didn’t expertly capture the mood of being surrounded and trapped by bleak, suffocating mist here. Those few melodic bits that do emerge are like the glimpses of scenery one might spot when searching for landmarks to find their bearings, only for van Cauter to cruelly snatch them away as the haze reasserts its sonic dominance on you.
As a piece of drone ambient, Lost’s pretty cool, one of the better examples of the genre I’ve heard in a while. For a form of music that seems ridiculously easy to craft, it’s also remarkably difficult to retain a listener for, many producers forgetting that lengthy drone does need a sense of progression, of change throughout. Within the context of In The Mist, van Cauter finds just the right balance of deep atmosphere and suggestive narrative.
ACE TRACKS:
It’s only one track.
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