Back in stock. Dim Arcana's Ars Populi is one of my favorite of all of the great albums that I've picked up from the Black Drone label. Equal parts mysterious liturgical ambience, Goblin-esque horror soundtrack, and nightmarish blackened industrial rumblings, the music contained on this album is some of the creepiest that has surfaced thus far from the Australian imprint.

   Ars Populi is the first proper album from this excellent Italian outfit, who perform a sort of medieval-themed, ritualistic dark ambience that combines Latin liturgical incantations, abstract rhythms, swirling drones that rise like crypt-fumes wafting out of some ancient oubliette, and bursts of demonic horror that give this ten-track collection a much more sinister vibe than most of the stuff that I've picked up from Black Drone. The purported aim of all of this is to create an atmosphere evoking scenes of medieval plague and pestilence and decay, drawing from the combined influences of Raison D'etre, Abruptum and Equimanthorn. Dim Arcana creates these weird electronic noisescapes comprised of fluttering effects and rumbling synths and whirling metallic tones, and blends them with a mix of those male voices that seem to be reciting blasphemous distortions of the Latin Mass, while bestial growling emanates from somewhere deeper beneath the surface of Dim Arcana's cinematic soundscapes. Those hideous, almost black metal-esque vocalizations emerge again on tracks like "Dissertazione D'un Ladro", which drift into a Yen Pox-esque field of black ambience filled with looping bells, fragments of eerie melodic drift and huge, booming blasts of distorted tympani-like percussion. "Lux Obscura" offers up some killer malevolent synthscape that sounds like Tangerine Dream scoring an early 80's slasher film, and as the album progresses, these menacing elements continue to appear, pounding drums appear and disappear at random as bursts of harsh noise suddenly appear and begin to loop endlessly, sinister spoken-word passages drift into the sound of nightmarish violins squealing and scraping, and ominous orchestral strings swell and tumble through the darkness, the dark shadowy drift laced with bits of xylophone, gothic organ, acoustic guitar and more of those haunting funereal violins.

   And then "La Vestale Con Una Luce" drops in, a grinding distorted black synth riff circling around a processional rhythm, clanking ritualistic percussion and strange howling noises, a sinister death ambient dirge streaked in corrosive feedback and rumbling heaviness, later transforming into some wonderfully eerie Goblin-esque soundtracky creepiness. More of that weird blackened industrial sound shows up later on on the track "Promessa Din Un'Anima Bruciata", a delirious blast of diseased power electronics and wailing demonic vocals, bizarre blown-out synth chaos and rumbling sheet metal. Looking back through my notes on Ars Populi, it might seem that there's a lot of disparate elements at work, but Dim Arcana bring it all together nicely, creating a strange phantasmal fog that at times takes on the appearance of an industrial-music tinged score to some lost Argento film.

   Beautifully packaged in a six-panel digipack with a twelve page booklet beautifully illustrated with details of Breugel paintings, lyrics and a photo of the duo adorned in beaked Plague Doctor masks.