Arktau Eos' Scorpion Milk is a companion piece to the Mirrorion CD which we will have listed in next week's new additions list, and was originally presented in a super-limited deluxe boxset that contained both discs. That box set disappeared pretty quickly, but both the Mirrorion CD and this Scorpion Milk CD-R are offered individually, a good thing for fans of Aural Hypnox's brand of heavy, ritualistic drone music.
Scorpion Milk is a single, 48-minute track of glacial, meditative drone created from a live performance of obscure 70's electronic music being manipulated and reshaped from reel-to-reel tapes. It's difficult to imagine what the original recordings must have sounded like, because the result is like standing over an immense void and bearing witness to some Stygian ritual taking place far below you in the depths. Over the course of Scorpion Milk's running time, Arktau Eos conjures a cavernous dronescape through which drifts strands of amplified guitar drone, ghostly vocal chants and intensely creepy, monstrous whispers soar through the darkness, alongside minimalist chimes, prayer bells, and distant, frozen synths. It's very beautiful but also quite unnerving, made even moreso by the jarring appearance of what sound like huge, reverberating cello chords scraped from some cyclopean stringed instrument that surge up from the deep, hanging in midair as the monstrous vibrations resonate and disappear back into the pitch-black void. Like many of the other excellent releases on Aural Hypnox, this is the darkest ritual drone imaginable, eerie and monstrous, mystical and heavy, a soundtrack to a deep-earth Lovecraftian nightmare, but also evocative and organic sounding, and strangely beautiful. Sort of reminds me of The Monstrous Soul-era Lustmord in it's obsidian massiveness.
And like everything else released on the Aural Hypnox label, this disc is beautifully presented, in a one-of-a-kind slim plastic case with a textured, hand-painted cover and an insert card, in a mubered edition of 222 copies. Highly recommended to heavy/deep drone disciples.