To begin with, this isn't the same Collapsar that has brought us two albums of stunning space-prog-metal, no, this Collapsar is an entirely different beast, a fearsome sculptor of black hole drones appearing here for the first time. Not since the black space-devouring majesty of Yen Pox have I heard an ambient album this bleak and epic and CRUSHING. This French dark ambient project debuts with Beyond The Event Horizon, a sonic narrative totally obsessed with black holes and collapsing stars, and which explores this obsession through six epic tracks of ultra-deep black driftscape that gets pretty terrifying at various points. The artwork (lush galaxy clusters rendered in deep shades of aqua and black, and the alien black hole maw featured on the cover) and track titles (such as "Into The Wormhole" and "Passing The Gate") all work to transport the listener through vast cosmic starfields and straight into the wormhole abyss, but this ain't no Hearts Of Space bliss-out... Collapsar's sound is wholly menacing and ominous, a combination of stygian black drones and majestic kosmiche roar; like most of my favorite dark ambient albums on Malignant, there's a noticeable Teutonic influence at work here, and the soaring jets of black synthesizer and clouds of buzzing whirring minor key buzz often make this sound like the thickest, heaviest, most oppressive and apocalyptic Klaus Schulze recording imagineable. But these passages of pitch-black kosmiche drift intermingle with even blacker depths of monstrous drone, vast regions of cavernous drift and bestial time-stretched roars drifting out of the ink-black of space, the ambient soundtrack to Lovecraftian horrors drifting along the edges of space, joined by distant blasts of grinding mechanical engines, incomprehensible chants echoing in the darkness, chunks of crushing distorted, almost Sunn-like powerdrone, strains of far-off orchestral strings, and massive blots of dubby reverb. The album gets more terrifying with each track, eventually arriving at the immense blackened dronescape "The Way To Infinity" that melds swirling trippy space effects with evil Lustmordian darkness. Looking to fill your sleep with endless nightmares filled with all manner of cosmic horror? Just fall asleep with this on your headphones. A must for dark ambient fans, lovers of Inade, Lustmord, the ritualistic blackness of Zoat-Aon and the rest of the Aural Hypnox collective, and the imaginary horror film scores that Klaus Schulze never recorded...

Packaged in a beautiful six-panel digipack.