It's been years since I've heard new stuff from Clint Listig; his Dragonflight label put out some interesting dark ambient and neo-folk albums in the early half of the last decade, and this output included some interesting records from his own projects which included the neo-folk outfit As All Die, the symphonic doom metal band Long Winters Stare, and the dark ambience of When Joy Becomes Sadness. It appears that Listig is back with a new outfit called Black Depths Grey Waves, a duo with a character named Saint Ov Gravediggers, who I've heard before from the obscure, underappreciated black industrial doom band Ordo Tyrannis; their Vasa Iniquitatis album (Flood The Earth, 2006) received a lot of play around here back when it came out. Here, the two musicians have teamed up for this black industrial outfit whose debut for Aesthetic Death combines a harsh noise aesthetic with the blackest sort of ambient drone and a heavy dose of occult subject matter. This is really cool stuff. The three tracks on Nightmare... submerge heavily processed incantations, warped minor key synthesizer melodies and backwards black metal riffs, and pitch-black bass-heavy drones in clouds of swarming black static; on the opener "The Hunt For Greater Truth", the sound suggests a meeting between the satanic industrial rituals of MZ412 and the crackling static walls of Werewolf Jerusalem. It's an unexpected mix of sounds, but it works well here. The middle track "3rd Candle For The Fallen" is more hallucinatory and layered, a swirling fog of metallic drones and roaring subterranean wind and crackling shortwave static; through this murky wall of sound you can detect all kinds of strange whirrs and whispers and melted backwards-running melodies, eventually joined once again by that withered gasping voice reciting strange Crowleyian verses. The last track is the highlight here, though; "Final Key To Pure Thought" is a Robitussin-soaked dirge with a gluey doom metal riff that is played backwards and looped over and over while corrosive static washes over it, and a processed goblin-voice snarls over top alongside pitch shifted bestial howling. With this, the duo conjures something akin to hearing Blue Sabbath Black Cheer performing the background music for a black mass. Grim stuff that makes for a supremely brain-blackening listening experience.

Comes in digipack packaging.