Lately, Epidemie has been moving deeper into realms of total psychedelic ambience with the new disc from Jaaportit and this excellent full length from Closing The Eternity. It's a big shift away from the manic avant-metal that made up most of the previous releases, but the label obviously has a keen ear for high quality ambience too, and Noughtwards is as good an album of dark, murky ambience as you could ask for. The solo project of Russian artist Andrei B. (also of Velehentor), Closing The Eternity exists in the same cold, black isolationist space as Lull and Lustmord, well worn territory for sure, but CTE's recordings reveal a deft hand at crafting truly majestic chordal shifts and massively heavy undercurrents of low-end synth and monstrous time-stretched chanting. Noughtwards fills the entire seventy-four minute capacity of this disc, a single unbroken wave of pitch-black ambience swirled with swells of crushing low-end crunch that almost sounds like distorted doom guitars flattened and muted and softened into rolling black clouds of cavernous rumble, deep gutteral harmonic drones drifting through space that have a very vocal quality to them, while at the same time are pulled apart into infinite tones far beyond the capacity of any human throat, and smeared with gaseous metallic shimmer, deep throbbing mechanical whir, and the occasional flutter of melodic synths that's rendered into a wash of sound so glacial that it could be a melted Tangerine Dream cassette time-stretched into an endless oceanic blur of vaporous cosmic drone. Wow...fans of Aural Hypnox and Lustmord, Tho-So-Aa and Exit In Grey and Rapoon will LOVE this, a dense and deep and immensely heavy subterranean drone/ambient epic. Recommended. Comes in a six panel digipack, and is limited to 600 copies.