Aside from playing the drums in the Boston based avant-garde death metal/doom trio Ehnahre, Ricardo Donoso keeps himself busy with several other projects including running his Semata label and creating bleak, inhospitable dronescapes under his own name. The Zerovinteum 7" features two excellent pieces of stygian sound design and black drone from Donoso, and they are desolate, blighted things that shed little light on the listener.

The first of these, "Zerovinteum", is a lushly layered cloud of black metallic smoke and monolithic sheets of metal, sinister drones glinting with subterranean light and billowing across a vast abyssal realm, created with electric guitar, synths and contact mics. Deeper rumbling tones quake beneath distant murmurs and keening feedback drones and ominous minor key drift, growing more active with a myriad of strange sonic events that emerge out of the blackness, all sorts of mechanical whirr and far-off grinding sounds, ghostly hissing and deep distorted buzz. This piece reminds me of Troum and Yen Pox, and fans of either would dig this.

The second side has "Plate Fourteen", a massive tectonic dronescape of vast deep-earth bass tremors and indistinct smears of metallic thrum, bowed cymbals and howling solar winds, the sound massive and immersive (especially when played at high volume, or experienced with a god set of headphones), the lifeless rumbling disturbed at the end as the side drops into a locked groove of repetitive rhythmic fluttering and hypnotic tremors.

Limited to three hundred copies.