Here is a phenomenal new album of dark, gorgeous ambience and portentous heaviness from the Japanese solo project Agnus Dei, the pseudonym of one Naomi Hoca who creates all of the vocals and sounds on this album. Described by the label as �funeral dark drone�, Paternoster is the first official album from Agnus Dei, and just came out on the excellent Japanese psych label Musik Atlach (run by Sachiko from Overhang Party/Kousokuya). Hoca's music is heavy on the blackened ambience and psychedelic drone, but more than anything this is obsessed with classical sacred music, using long stretches of liturgical organ, medieval religious music and cut-up sections of baroque religious vocal hymn that are interwoven with the more crushing and formless sounds of overdriven guitar distortion and furious industrial noise to create a seriously nightmarish dronescape. While listening to this disc, I'm reminded of everything from Arvo Part to Lustmord to Corrupted at their most ambient, and even the more atmospheric and abstract moments of Bloody Panda, although you can't really call Agnus Dei "doom", even if much of this album sounds doom-ridden as hell.

The first track "Paternoster" is a seventeen minute epic of atmospheric musique concrete and liturgical doom that begins with grinding low-end noise and waves of massive Sunn-like low-end drone heaviness, but as the track slowly evolves, the sound is joined by samples of propaganda speeches, industrial noise, pilfered loops of traditional Latin Mass, the haunting sound of female choral voices, random voices speaking in various languages, Gregorian chants, looped applause, blasts of brutally loud jet-engine noise, long stretches of mournful church organs, and gongs all puzzled together into a surreal landscape that resembled something from Nurse With Wound polluted by jets of blackened industrial doom guitar and orchestral strings.

The other track, "Holocaust Missa", gets even darker and creepier with samples of WWII-era speeches enshrouded within the buzzing drone of minimalist church organs and waves of pure black drone and CRUSHING ambient doom-guitar, at times sounding a lot like Corrupted or Black Boned Angel, but eventually the grinding guitar drone fades away as ghostly female choral voices appear, dark and delicate as they drift across a blackened field of drone and buzz and distant battlefield sounds, flecked with samples of gorgeous classical piano and choral voices and the fearsome insanity of large-scale wartime rallies.

Highly recommended, and packaged in a simple glossy cardstock wallet sleeve with creepy religious-themed imagery.