Here's some mood music from the blood-stained heathens over at Sygil. I've been lovin' their other recent releases, with that new disc from Charnel House front and center in my mind, one of the most skull-fracturing albums of fucked black noise metal I've heard all decade. Hot on the heels of that album comes Sygil's newest offering, a full-length cassette from a band called Agakus which is actually another loner outfit, one guy out there somewhere in the Midwest crafting some terrific black ambience that manages to inject the bleakest abyssal driftscapes possible with shards of haunting musicality.

There's a massive wave of almost kosmiche immenseness that begins the tape, the sound of The Keep-era Tangerine Dream by way of Charlamagne Palestine, the keys melting into rivulets of black quivering drone, slowly growing from unease to dread, real dread. And from there to vast fields of near nothing, minimal organ-like notes rumbling and disappearing into the shadows, shifting almost glacially into tense drones suspended over the massive reverberations of some massive inhuman technology activated somewhere miles below the earth's surface, an almost subliminal ambient massiveness. It goes on to stretches of ghostly guitar chords that hang and twist above more minimalist hum-scapes, the guitar passages resembling a deconstructed black metal chord progression, eerie dissonant notes cascading slowly over the infinite thrum.

This side really reminds me of Emit, without sounding like knockoff. The feel is similar: spare, weird, ethereal, like listening to a black metal guitarist playing somewhere off in the depths of catacombs beneath a massive cathedral, or hearing the hyper-amplified collapse of the dying earth.

The other side is considerably more extreme though. Blasts of monstrous roaring sound and distorted power are spaced out between long stretches of silence, causing the eruptions of black noise to jar the listener, and then a seriously foul army of tuneless guitars come howling into the depths, warped and melted tremolo riffs swarming around a vast hall, joined by strange deep drums being pounded slowly over waves of metallic noise. And when the slow motion rumble and sheets of diffused noise finally transform into the hellish black noise and ghastly screams that take over at the end, it's crushing; like some slow motion deathdoom march further dragged out and dragged apart into a pulverizing glacial dirge, almost like Human Quena Orchestra or Reclusa but even more washed out and stretched apart and crushing...

Can't recommend this one enough to blackened drone junkies and death ambient addicts. Massively heavy but almost entirely 'ambient', this falls somewhere in between the extreme slow-mo earthcrush of Human Quena Orchestra and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, the deep-earth drones of Lustmord and the demonic nocturnal weirdness of Emit and Vomit Orchestra. Comes in an odd Chinatown-style paper sleeve with printed stickers on it, and includes a Agakus sticker and a small insert. Released in a limited edition of one hundred copies.