Like a dope, I had left this disc to languish in my in-box for months before I ever got around to listening to it when I first received a promo copy of it. There are so many demos and promos and albums that come in to my mailbox every day that it's become a serious struggle to try to keep up with it all. And something always slips through the cracks, some amazing album that I had been sitting on, that by the time I finally hear it, the damn thing has gone out of print, due to the increasingly limited collector-oriented pressings that everything is getting nowadays. Released in a tiny run of one hundred copies, this album from the Canadian ambient doom project Gates more or less suffered this fate; we're down to just a couple of copies, and once these sell out, this title will be out of print. When I finally did dig it out and give it a spin recently, I was pretty impressed with the massive rumbling doomscapes that Gates produces, a sprawling, wide-flung abyss of industrial doom drifting through utter blackness. The three songs on Moths Have Eaten The Core are expansive affairs, the first built up with dense layers of hiss and reverb and field recordings, huge glacial doom metal riffs slowly undulating in the depths, super heavy and distorted, while high end guitar notes, gleaming cold and shimmering with more reverb, slowly ascend overhead, and mysterious cracking, crashing, clanking noises sound in the background. It's like Sunn's Black One reshaped into a space rock jam. The second track "Inner Labyrinth" is just as heavy, just as blackened, but instead of a howling abyssal mass of amorphous dronemetal, the sound on this one is much more restrained. The slow, oozing riffs are buried under flattened low end frequencies and waves of amplifier hiss, streaked with droning feedback and speaker crackle. The latter half of the song grows more unstable, blasts of high end synthesizer and buzzing, almost black metallic melodies snaking through the murk. And then the final track "Dust of Absence", a monolithic twenty-plus minute symphony that moves through smoking wastelands of pitch-black amplifier drift into oceanic drones and what sounds like majestic strings and French horns and a whole orchestral percussion section playing in extreme slow motion, a washed-out, blurry symphonic drift buried beneath layers upon layers of hum and roar, lifeless moaning and Lustmordian blackness.

Beautifully assembled, the disc comes in a 6" by 6" gatefold six-panel sleeve that's illustrated with eerie photography from Gates mastermind Bryan Bray and Kevin Yuen's always-eye-popping abstract design work.