The latest album from Black Seas Of Infinity moves even further away from anything that might resemble the black metal protoplasm that the band originally sprang from, and further develops it's chilling, mindwarping language of demonic ambience and blackened improvisational murk. This is the second album that Black Seas has released through Autumn Wind, which I feel has become the North American answer to Finland's Aural Hypnox; both labels have developed a singular approach to documenting the sound of blackened ritual ambience, though Autumn Wind does have more variety in it's catalog than Aural Hypnox, branching off with releases that touch on black metal, industrial music and fantastical symphonies. On the blackest edges of the label's soundworld sits Hieros-Gamos, a four track album of creeped-out cosmic drift and psych-industrial that revolves around concepts of ritualistic sex and the marriage of pagan Gods, inscribed in expansive slabs of ambient dark matter. The first track is nearly thirty minutes, dense with drifting clouds of Lustmordian blackness and cavernous reverb, washes of gong and metallic percussion, the clang and chime of metal struck and scraped, atonal melodies, grinding low-end distortion and the tolling of bells ringing in the depths. Male and female voices appear at a couple of points throughout the track, intoning weird, erotically-charged invocations. These spoken word parts continue to show up over the course of Hieros-Gamos, reciting their tantric like lines over constant-shifting swathes of buzzing drone or glacial orchestral strings, and sometimes devolve into wordless chants or lose themselves, eyes rolled back, in a moaning trance as insectile chitter and black ambience washes over them. The first three tracks all flow together, like one single massive piece, an ecstatic slow motion vortex of time-stretched strings and cave drift, fluttering woodwinds and ritualistic percussion, voices drowned in lust and barbiturates. The sound changes when the fourth and final track shows up, starting immediately with a weird distorted raga drone that sounds like it is being played on some alien instrumental thats part didgeridoo, part sitar, emitting a thick intoxicating buzz that burrows through the tidal wash of dark cosmic drift, joined by an eerie melody scraped out a dessicated fiddle and the female vocalist, her voice deep and resonant, chanting over the heavy raga buzz . Very Swans-like, that last track.

Even if you don't put much stock into the occult/ritual themes that Black Seas explore in their music, this is still an impressive collection of weird black ambience that sounds like a fusion of the Aural Hypnox brand of percussion-heavy cave-drift, Lustmord-inspired dread, and Great Annihilator era Swans, which sounds pretty damn fantasic to me. Autumn Wind never lets me down with their packaging, and this disc is beautifully presented in a back digipack that comes with a thick 16 page booklet filled with evocative, mind-bending full color paintings from Stafford Stone, Asenath Mason, Markus Wolff and others.