Michael Frenkel's latest album of black kosmische drift under the Aspectee name is actually the first release from the German artist that I've heard, even though he's been recording and releasing dark ambient records for years with earlier projects like Evoke Scurvee. The stamp of the Black Drone imprint on Aspectee's second album Jour Cinq was reason enough for me to pick this disc up, and fans of the label will find this to be another satisfying dose of subterranean ambience, comprised largely of icy, muted synthesizer figures circling around vast cavernous spaces filled with lush reverb and endless abyssal darkness. There's a myriad of mysterious sounds flitting through the void of Jour Cinq, ranging from ominous voices trailing off into the depths, strange creaking sounds and scraping noises and various field recordings, swells of terrifying orchestral strings and distant war-horns sounding off in the deep, smears of washed-out piano, ghostly EVP-like transmissions flickering in the gloom, fragments of backwards sound and clanking metal, gusts of arctic wind, hazy choral voices, the sound constantly seeming to pulse with menace as Frenkel flows through the dim gloom of vast underworld passageways. On some parts of the album ("Poudure", "Roter Wald") Frenkel ventures into an eerie cinematic territory that's really similar to Tangerine Dream at their most sinister, sometimes bringing minimal electronic rhythms into the mix, but more often he simply constructs layer upon layer of chthonic drift that slowly blooms out of the depths, with later tracks venturing into blacker regions of sonic terror nearer to the likes of Lustmord and Atrium Carceri. Aspectee doesn't veer too far from the classic stygian ambient sound, but fans of the more dread-filled, less hospitable depths of dark drone/kosmische music a la Northaunt, Vinterriket, Phaenon, early Encomiast, and False Mirror will probably find this as satisfying as I did.