Stunning psychedelic blackness from this Italian band that sprang as a side project from the sides of Italo avant-black metallers Urna and Locus Mortis.
It's actually another one-man BM outfit, but you'd be hard pressed to guess that from the expansive, doomy atmospheres and symphonic heaviness crafted on
this album, and synth music freaks will particularly dig the amazing space music textures that cover Ubi Secreta Colunt. The guy behind Arcana
Coelestia is MZ, who is responsible for most of the instrumentation for the aforementioned bands, and here he weaves a pitch-black tapestry of cosmic funeral
doom and sleek analogue ambience with blasts of black metal tremelo picking, blastbeats and doomy arpeggios savagely bursting out of these four creeping
symphonies. Each of these lengthy tracks spin melodic, swirling synthesizers around dark doom metal marches, double-bass drumming blasting out every once in
a while to bring the music to a boil, gutteral death growls alternating with spacey clean chanting, groans, and hushed whispers, and those sweet keyboards
taking center stage with an old-school analogue sound that turns this into a blend of powerful melodic doom metal, atmospheric dirge, and heavenly, swirling
kosmiche electronics in the mode of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Vangelis. As if the music wasn't heady enough, this is a concept album based on the
work of Swedish author and alchemist August Strindberg, who is quoted in the booklet, and the whole package is filled with images of eerie religious
iconography and church statues. Man, this album is amazing, and it's become yet another new favorite over here. Imagine Skepticism, Shape Of
Despair, Esoteric or Panthiest combined with Virgin-era Tangering Dream, black metal, and lush shoegazey metal like Cult Of Luna, with songs like "Arcane
Knowledge Revealed (Part I)" reaching suffocating levels of celestial beauty. Seriously recommended!