The new Black Drone imprint has been turning out a great series of dark ambient albums with more variety than you might expect; this disc from Asbaar is one of the label's latest, a slab of excellent minimal black ambient from Spanish artist Marc Merinee, who is also known for his involvement in the Cold Meat martial industrial group Eldar as well as the dark ritual prog band Equimanthorn (which also features members of Absu and Hexentanz, and is a huge favorite of mine...). Those fans of Eldar who check out Asbaar will hear a few similarities between the two projects in Merinee's solo work, but with Asbaar he pursues a more stripped-down and abstract form of dark industrial, this one made up of longer, more expansive tracks broken up with shorter interlude-like pieces. Once you start listening to Corona Veil Aurei, you're quickly embraced by vast metallic reverberations echoing within endless, lightless underground chambers, where mysterious unidentifiable sounds occur at the edges of hearing and abstract machinelike clank and echoing noises dissolve into the blackness without end. At its core, Asbaar crafts a massive abstract blackness that's pretty similar to Lustmord, the vast cavernous drift filled with the same sort of Lovecraftian dread and mystery. But there's an added mystic element to this that also suggests a kinship with the blackened Finnish drone rites of bands like Halo Manash, Zo�t-Aon, Aeoga and Arktau Eos. These elements appear as inhuman mutterings and chanting that drifts up from deep beneath the earth, those monstrous voices cloaked in swarms of creepy insectile buzz and flutter, disappearing behind the omnipresent drone of distant engines. Massive distorted cosmic synths start to show up with the third track "Agnosia" amid percussive noises and abstract glitchy sounds, but it's on "Lumur" where the sound really changes into a more fearsome soundscape, with eerie distant sirens sliding up and down in pitch, strange synthetic wailing and the far-off buzz of swarming locusts all filling the depths. From there, the faint sounds of bells and chimes emerge followed by sinister reptilian throat singing and nightmarish chanting, swells of formless black drift and metallic whirr bellowing out of the depths, joined by dissonant synthetic strings and pitch-black kosimiche synth-drone. The whole album moves equally between the more minimal Lustmordian crypt-drift and the heavier, caustic Cold Meat style sound, while maintaining a nightmarish feel throughout all ten tracks. Chilling stuff, highly recommended to any fans of serious ambient dread.

The disc comes in a six-panel digipack with a full color twelve page booklet with photos by Manel O. Company and writing from Merinee, and is limited to 480 copies.