In between working on his more well known bands in the Ukrainian black metal scene (Hate Forest, Drudkh, Blood Of Kingu and the experimental blackened rock of Old Silver Key), Roman Saenko has also crafted some fantastic doom-laden neo-classical ambience and bleak kosmiche dread with his solo project Dark Ages. He's only released three albums under the Dark Ages name in the past decade, the first two on cult British black metal label Supernal, and both are top-notch slabs of soundtrack-style darkness, heavily influenced by medieval European history and drawing musical influence from a mix of classic dark ambience, classical music, liturgical song, and modern minimalism.

I finally got around to picking up the 2006 album Chronicle Of The Plague for C-Blast, an album that specifically takes it's themes from the time of the Black Death, evoking scenes of pestilential death, mountains of burning bodies, tyrannical Church-sponsored mayhem, and other horrors of the Plague through tracks like "Ships Full Of Blackened Corpses", "Rats", "The Doors With Scarlet Crosses", and "Dreams In Yellow". Sound wise, the album moves from vast Lustmord-style pits of churning black ambience to warped orchestrations drifting through an atmosphere of imminent doom that are reminiscent of Elend, to beautiful twilight synthscapes in the spirit of Tangerine Dream or Keith Emerson's work on Michele Soavi's The Church, even some hints of stark funeral doom style guitar-crawl can appear briefly at certain points in the album.

It's all very evocative and dramatic, and not all that removed from the stark, haunting electronic music that Hate Forest produced on their rare Temple Forest demo. Both this and the previous album on Supernal get a big recommendation to those of you who are fans of the dark kosmiche ambience of bands like Vinterriket and Paysage D'Hiver and the whole vintage "dungeon music" sound...