Envenomist is another alter ego for David Reed, whose ambient deathdrone work with Luasa Raelon has been lauded in the halls of C-Blast for awhile now. Abyssal Siege is the first 'real' CD from Envenomist after a rash of tapes and CD-R releases, and is divided into four tracks that average about nine minutes each. Much like Luasa Raelon, the sound here is heavy, deep, cold, black drone, the drifting of glacial minor key synthesizer fugues and majestic bass-heavy drones that seep across the bottom of deep sea canyons and through enormous cavern systems below the Earth's surface. The menacing squid tentacles that creep across the sleeve's cover and track titles like 'Ensnarled', 'Siege', and 'Titans' evoke Lovecraftian visions of ancient horrors sleeping and dreaming beneath the surface, but Envenomist's black drone is more minimalist than the heavy ritual drone of Aural Hypnox artists, who evoke those same types of images. But the final track 'Titans' is a real crusher, a grim dronescape of distorted synth riff heavy enough to sound like doom metal guitars floating over an icy waste of metallic whirr, monolithic prayer bowl tones, and dying machine pulses. Makes me think of a synthetic version of early Earth dronemetal mixed with Lustmord's classic dark isolationism. Awesome. COmes packaged in a trademark Troniks wallet sleeve.