Most of the music that the Russian label Abgurd sends us falls towards the darker, dronier end of the industrial music spectrum, and usually focuses on ritualistic pagan dronescapes, death industrial nightmares and harrowing exercises in evil necro-drift. So when we got the latest batch of releases from Abgurd a few weeks ago and popped this disc from the Russian group Eonic into our stereo, we were all surprised to hear the extremely dance-floor friendly beats and lush Gothy ambience of Shadows wafting out of the Crucial Blast speaker system. This 2003 album is an older release from Abgurd, and obviously this is very different from the more industrial-style sounds that I'm used to hearing from them, but after listening to the album it kind of makes sense how the dark-ambient loving guys at the label would be into this. There's a definite dark ambient quality to the music, with dark orchestral swells and ominous strings and dreamy, Middle Eastern-style melodies swirling over the ethnic percussion loops and Euro dance beats, and the beat-driven tracks like "Seven Flows" and "Corridor Of Mirrors" alternate with purely ambient pieces like the drifting, Lustmordian horror-movie score of "Rebma", or the lush dystopian New Age of "Cryonide" and "Temple Of The Astral Light" - the latter of which is a stunning piece of luminous synthesizer ambience with lush harmonized female voices. A weird mix of soft, dark electronic dance music, Middle Eastern melodies, and futuristic ambience that sounds like Dead Can Dance and Enigma crossed with Vangelis's score for Blade Runner.