The Italian duo Corpoparassita resurfaces with this album of unsettling black ambience and musique-concrete experiments. Don't let the cover fool you - it's whimsical antique illustration of cats playing flutes and trumpets beneath a crescent moon suggests something cloying, saccharine, but the sounds that are captured on L�affannoso Respiro del Gatto are more menacing and phantasmagoric in nature. Limited to one hundred copies, the disc comes in Abgurd's signature Dvd-style snapcase packaging, and feels right at home among the label's other offerings of dark post-industrial ambience.

The disc begins with a short piece of creepy, pitch-black drones and clanking percussive sounds that evoke the emptiness of ancient crypts and other crepuscular visions; from there it moves into more murky soundscapes formed from mysterious industrial recordings shaped into eerie orchestral drones that drift back and forth, panning from left to right, the sound becoming increasingly disorienting, while objects are struck and rattled far off in the background.

The gorgeous slow-moving organ drones of "In Diversi Uccidono Nell'utero I Concepiti" recall the bleak minimal keyboard drift of some of Bianchi's post-Y2K work, treading across the fringes of the most minimal realms of kosimiche music. Voices surface out of the minimal nocturnal drift, but they remain shapeless, unrecognizable; they linger at the periphery of this spectral soundscape as a haze of chatter, like the buzzing of insects at twilight. Murky backwards melodies rise and fall, their warped notes bubbling like the sounds of a heat warped audio tape.

"Una Cura Prodigiosa" in particular seems to be pulled out of the ectoplasmic residue of bad dreams, a cavernous space filled with muffled clanging, galloping sounds weaving across the speakers, reverb clinging to everything like ghost visions, making it's way towards the grim shadow-jazz of "Spatulimanzia", where solemn, mournful reeds appear to drift above a fog-covered, wind-swept nighttime realm, delicate guitar notes and ethereal synth moving in wispy figures before being blown away by howling winds. The final track "Il Magico Simbolismo Dei Denti" features a doleful piano playing across some vast abyss, the sound of the keys washed out and rendered into a murky blur as they drift across a massive black chasm, the notes stretched out and played so slowly, the feeling both sorrowful, and cinematic.

It's a fantastic disc of dark post-industrial and macabre nightjazz soundscapery; the tenebrous nighttime drift of Corpoparassita is like music from a dream, seeping from a state of opiated gloom, bits of reality streaming through the black fog trails left behind some creeping nightmare.