A fantastic collection of ghastly ritualistic ambience, Celebratum features pretty much everything that this obscure 90s-era black ambient project released during its brief existence, compiling remixed and remastered recordings from the three ultra-limited cassette releases that Akhkharu released between 1995 and 1996 on the Dark Age Productions and Ishnigarrab Recordings imprints. The two members of Akhkharu were Fakir NXW and Blood Moon Ausar, musicians whose resumes also included stints with black metallers Crimson Moon and Absu, the Absu-related black ritual prog project Equimanthorn, and even experimental rock weirdoes Vas Deferens Organization; here, they were channeling vast apocalyptic visions and sonic blood rituals by way of a strangely militant black ambient sound that combined booming martial percussion, electronically-processed vocals that were generally delivered in an incantatory spoken style, looped orchestral sounds and blasts of stentorian brass, and gusts of hellish black drift. If you've been digging the recent Funerary Call releases that came out over the past year on Crucial Blast, Malignant and Fall Of Nature, you'll love this stuff. Aside from their super-rare tape releases, the band also appeared on the Y2K compilation CD The Fossil Dungeon alongside Equitant, Profane Grace, Absu's Proscriptor, The Soil Bleeds Black and Cernunnos Woods, which also gives you an idea of what sort of nightmarish post-industrial music these guys created.

Scattered among the shorter ambient pieces on this disc are tracks like "Nos Dominari Noctus: The Dominions Of The Night", where the band sprawls out into an eighteen minute black mass soundtrack filled with demonic chanting and looped horns, murky orchestral drones and pounding kettledrums, eerie wind chimes and burbling black cyborg electronics and washes of Lustmordian dread all fusing together into total delirium. Other tracks explore occult incantations played in reverse and enshrouded in trippy effects, monstrously deformed dronescapes, blasts of guttural war-horns and passages of murky Moevot-esque ambient creep, ominous keyboard symphonies drifting out of some dank sulfurous pit, and bizarre sound collages like "Ave Calix Sanguinis (Praise Be The Blood)", where the duo weave solemn ritual verse, female vocals and streaks of evil chamber strings around a hypnotic backdrop of pulsating black drift; the whole thing starts to sound like a satanic Dead Can Dance towards the end.

Akhkharu's black ritual drift can easily be situated next to the likes of early Funerary Call, Endura, Melek-Tha, the pure

ambient projects of the LLN and even In Slaughter Natives, bridging that lightless chasm between the most desolate corner of post-industrial music and the feral witchery of black metal's most abstract fringes. Really stoked to see this come out, and Silcharde did a nice job with the presentation for this disc, packaging it with a twelve-page booklet fitted with translucent vellum covers and metallic silver print that adds to the album's "grimoire"-like look. Recommended.