This album introduced me to Black Seas Of Inifinity, although the band has been around since the early 1990's. Apparently

the Salt Lake City project began as a more straightforward black metal outfit, but over the past decade has slowly evolved into a whole 'nother

beast, creating hallucinatory voids of pitch black electronic murk. Still influenced by the bleakness and coldness of the most feral black

metal, but now stripped of blastbeats, guitars, and traditional vocals, a kind of grim floating drone ritual. Amrita - The

Quintessence is Black Sea's first full length CD after releasing splits with Aymrev Erkroz Prevre, Kaniba, and Ugegi Aoiveae A Aer, and

this disc serves an hour-long plunge into mesmerizing black weirdness, each track sprawling out with a constantly-morphing field of minimalist

minor-key riffs, primitive spartan drumbeats, howling wind, blasts of manipulated noise bent into bizarre melodic figures, sputtering

breakbeats and heavy industrial dancefloor rhythms buried under a thick blanket of malfunctioning machine whirr, newscast warnings of zombie

apocalypse and weird glitchy rhythmic loops, the sound of metal being scraped across concrete factory floors, and heavy, subterranean ambient

drone. The last piece, "Anti Vital Interior Of The Womb Exploded Moon" features a spoken word peice from Japanese cyberpunk Kenji Siratori that

is overlaid with a veil of tribal beats, abstract electronica and sinister shimmering feedback drones. Bizarre sexual/occultic imagery is

burned into the shadows of Black Seas Of Infinity's desolate drug visions; this fits in nicely with the Autumn Wind style of stygian ambience,

informed by black metal but going way beyond, sharing the mysterious and charred vibes of artists like Hlidolf, Lustmord, Nordvargr, Ruhr

Hunter, and Neuntoter Der Plage, as well as the industrial gristle of Wolf Eyes. There are even a couple of spots on Amrita where I'm

reminded of Skinny Puppy, but this is altogether weirder and bleaker than that reference might lead you to believe. The disc comes in a

beautifully designed white digipack.