Like the other discs that I've picked up from the British occult/black ambient imprint Section XIII: Coma, Gate To Void's Black Empty Void is morbid dark ambience, minimal and subdued, surrounded by grave-fumes. The look of this release, the spiky nearly unreadable logo, the skulls, the title of the album - all of that stuff could fool you into expecting some sort of black noise outfit, but Gate To Void enters in with pure synthesizer drift swirling with ghastly whispers and simple, repetitive forms that give this the feel of a kosimische funeral dirge on the first track, a stripped-down Tangerine Dream score written for a mass burial. It's similar to Vinterriket, as a matter of fact; for fifteen minutes or more, Gate To Void just drift along on soft, muffled waves of grim electronic ambience, the eerie melodies unfolding slowly in the depths, the sound resembling that of pipe organs playing at the bottom of the ocean, desolate and lightless.

No synths on the second track, though. That one is a vast half-hour swirl of graveyard psychedelics and electronic voice phenomena, fragments of wordless moaning and ghoulish gasps echoing through a great black void. Chilling minimal black ambience, those stray bits of vocal dread that flit among other percussive sounds, vague electronic noises and death rattles to form a bad-dream delirium, a constant subliminal buzz hovering underneath all of the macabre, delay-soaked weirdness...this side of Gate To Void is more in the vein of such amorphous crypt-dreamers as Silcharde and Stigma Diabolicum, a blend of crude, old-fashioned industrial sound-scrapery and DXM-fueled necro-drift.

And then all of a sudden the disc ends with this totally bizarre 90 second track that has moaning specter voices appearing over weird backwards melodies and a synthetic sounding raga-esque buzz and fast paced computerized tribal rhythms. A really weird fuckin' way to end this...

Comes in a black slimline dvd-style case with a black and white insert photo of an ossuary wall...