First heard on the Nymphaea disc of Darsombra remixes that came out on Public Guilt last year, Blood Fountains is the new musical venture from artist Stephen Kasner, whose creepy, disturbing portraits and oceans of deep blacks and greys have graced album covers for bands as diverse as Integrity and Khlyst, Lotus Eaters and Himsa, and anyone who's been paying attention to underground metal and hardcore for the past fifteen years will be familiar with at least one of his images. I've been a huge fan of Kasner's work since the latter half of the 90's and have followed his output ever since, finally getting to the point this year of actually commissioning artwork from him for the new Subarachnoid Space album, Eight Bells. So I was intrigued when I heard that he had this new project in the works. I liked the Blood Fountains remix for Darsombra, which pointed towards a deep, murky dark ambience, but that was only a vague stirring of what his solo material would fully evolve into, a kind of gorgeous black-kosmiche psychedelia that takes form on his first full length, Floods. Released by Utech, who has also been partnering with Kasner lately for the majority of their cd package designs, Floods is a collaborative effort that sees Kasner creating sprawling, shadow-covered ambient soundscapes of Lustmordian darkness and spectral drones with help from a number of musicians, including Matt Woods (Beyond The Sixth Seal) on guitar, experimental jazz flutist Cheryl Pyle, guitarist David Beaver, and vocalist Yoshiko Ohara from Bloody Panda. According to Kasner, the music of Blood Fountains is meant to be a sonic extension of the strange otherworldly imagery found in his artwork, but this is nowhere as grim and horrific as I thought it was going to be. Floods is actually quite beautiful, as each of the six long tracks drift through fields of dark drift and jazzy ambience that sometimes feels like the extended tones of a dusty, moldy Rhodes piano being stretched across time, while thick black smears of buzzing psych guitar and crumbling distorted amp-drones snake their way through these mysterious soundscapes. Bloody Panda fans will especially love this album, as Yoshiko Ohara's vocals are all over it, though her performance here is restrained compared to the violent shrieks and ecstatic howls she uses in BP...instead, Yoshiko's voice floats disembodied across Kasner's midnight-drenched poppy fields, cooing whispers and uttering deep gutteral Tuvan-esque throat singing on thick clouds of druggy reverb that always seems to be on the verge of being swept away on a tide of nocturnal blackness. Imagine Bloody Panda at their softest, and filtered through the dark freeform psychedelia of Keiji Haino and ghoulish graveyard dream-bliss of Aghast, or a more ominous and weighty Onna-Kodomo mixed with Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze and drenched in shimmering jazzy dark ambience. I knew this was going to be good, but Floods still ended up taking me by surprise with how beautiful it is, especially the blissed out ten minute "White Wax Blood". That's my favorite song on here, with cascading crystalline guitar melodies and delicate wisps of digital glitchery drifting into a gleaming cosmic fug of flutes and wispy female voices and deep bass pulses and peals of black acid guitar, forming into something akin to a Cocteau Twins song stripped down to an ethereal cloud of dark pop bliss and pitched into the abyss. Dark and beautifully creepy, this one is definitely recommended. Comes in that signature style of Utech sleeve, with Kasner handling the artwork, of course.