Document number two in the ongoing collaboration and joint low-frequency brain massage between the uber-prolific ambient sludge duo Nadja and minimalist UK doom architects Atavist, released by the consistently amazing underground metal label Profound Lore. This disc features two twenty-two minute pieces, titled "Projective Plane" and "Closed Curve" respectively, and if you didn't get a chance to hear the first collaborative album that these cats put together last year, well, this isn't exactly the bonecrushing slugfuck you might expect. Both of the tracks are sprawling and spacious, and the first opens with a plaintive guitar melody hovering above a field of whistling drones and deep tectonic rumblings, the muffled guitar and downcast minor key melody resonating across the softly roiling dronescape and eventually joined by a chorus of male vocals chanting in harmony. Once these vocals emerge, the sound becomes a bit darker and more ominous and the guitar melodies begin to unravel and break apart and float across the darkening plane of subsonic rumblings and swelling low end drone, beautiful and mysterious sounding but becoming more and more abstracted until it fades into an elongated feedback drone that disappears into nothingness. And the the second track suddenly appears amidst a swell of metallic shimmer and feedback, exploding into the big riff, a huge crumbling minor key dirge that definitely sounds like what we were expecting from these two bands combining their sounds together, a massive grinding riff, simple but pulverizing, and encrusted with overdriven feedback and distortion, repeating over and over atop huge pounding drums, and joined by a constant panic siren of feedback. The metallic crush only lasts for about seven minutes though, a brief avalanche of bottom heavy sludge that slides to a halt and becomes a sprawl of nebulous atmospheric feedback and humming amplifiers. Clean guitars come back in, along with waves of feedback and freeform, almost jazzy drumming, swells of cymbal shimmer and cello-like strains as the song becomes an eerie dronescape that stretches out for more than twelve minutes. This last half of the song is super abstract and mysterious sounding, filled with deformed sludge riffs and surges of Sunn O)))-esque amp drone, that quasi-jazzy percussion that reminds me of those recent discs from Pentemple and Burial Chamber Trio, reverberating notes suspended in blackness, and horrific blackened shrieks that scuttle over the blasted landscape of drone and guitar noise.

The album is more abstract and intangible than what I'm used to hearing from either band, but together they make some amazing far-out ambience that on this album manages to channel some serious heaviness. Cool packaging, a six panel digipack with strange mystical artwork that adds to the esoteric dimesion-tripping vibe. Recommended.