We didn't discover Accurst's 2004 album Fragments of a Nightmare on the Coldflesh imprint until recently while looking through the Red Stream catalog, which was the main distributor for this disc. We had seen the name mentioned in some blog entries, and one online posting in particular that listed Fragments as one of the "scariest" dark ambient albums ever helped guide us in the direction of this album. It turned out to not be the Lustmord style dark cavernous drift that we were more or less expecting, but instead a very weird, and indeed very creepy slab of lysergic black soundscapery, sounding like a mix of minimal horror movie score and black demonic drift blended with the isolationist ambient sounds.
The ten tracks on Fragments are set up as individual chapters of an interconnected whole, making up a single album-long piece, each chapter wandering through strange aural realms of gargling, inhuman moans and shrieks, deep and ominous swells of rumbling bass, the looped crackle of vinyl forming into a mesmeric hiss, distant gong-like reverberations that echo throughout vast underground passageways, strange verbal incantations rising out of fissures and cracks in the walls, and the appearance of some very dissonant violin sounds combined with booming tympani-like percussion and metallic scraping noises. Slow heartbeat-like pulses emerge from the shadows and are met with muted, looped percussive rhythm; and all sorts of weird, nerve-wracking effects and samples flit through Accurst's ghoulish deathdrift, which often makes this album sound like someone mixing up old experimental horror movie scores from the 70's with Cold Meat style death industrial. Some interesting melodic elements creep through this stuff, too; bits of evil xylophone and eerie minimal piano figures that are repeated over and over, and ghostly voices wail in the distant gloom, occasionally forming into deep chanting that sounds like the utterances of undead monks, or erupting into bizarre gargling growls. We keep thinking of recordings of the dead, EVP phenomenon, the sounds of tortured beings trapped between worlds, those crepuscular recordings accompanied by super minimal instrumentation, with a recording quality that makes this sound remarkably old and decayed. Some vague reference points that might give you an idea if this is your sort of nocturnal crypt-ambience or not include artists like Aghast, MZ412, Atrium Carceri and some of Abruptum's later, less black metal influenced work, but Accurst go for a much more surreal and cinematic sound that achieves a different form of psychological horror. Regardless, it's highly recommended for fans of all dark, abstract horror-ambience.