��I've only recently started to make a serious effort to try to track down the various albums that have come out from the intensely prolific one-man black metal band Benighted In Sodom (whose Matron Thorn has also briefly done time with German black metallers Bethlehem), and it was the Dismal Ethereality CD that helped spur me on to get more of this guy's stuff. That album's combination of plodding, slow moving drum machine rhythms, blurred and caliginous keyboards, swirling distorted guitar billowing out in mournful, murky clouds of melodic blight, and hushed screams (which seem to emanate from somewhere deeper than the standard Satanic/self-loathing rage that usually permeates this sort of loner bedroom black metal) all really hooked me. As I mentioned in the write-up for that aforementioned CD, Benighted In Sodom's bleary blackness reminded me more than anything of a heavier, black metal tinged version of cult darkwave act Lycia, as heard through a haze of Xasthur-like delirium, filtered down through a bleary crepuscular zone stained in blood from acts of self-mutilation.

�� Released as an accompaniment to the full-length CD of the same name, the Dismal Ethereality: Stellar Celestial Void cassette features a single monolithic track recorded as part of the same session as the disc, but which was presumably left off due to space restrictions. It's the same blend of bleary blackened darkwave and minimal kosmiche dread, though, and fans of the album will definitely want to pick this up. That thirty-five minute track "Paradigm Inumbrate / Sanguine Stars" starts off as a murky, low-fi kosmische driftscape, bleak and beautiful electronic strings bathed in clouds of tape hiss, sounding like some super-murky darkwave demo. The sound eventually erupts into something fuller and heavier, that swirling droning guitar sound riding on waves of blighted shoegazer distortion and layered drum machines. The sound on this tape is a little more frenzied than the album, with that blackened dreampop often lurching into blazing fast speeds, the drum machines blasting beneath those looping minor key guitars. As with Benighted In Sodom's other recent stuff, this has that killer Lycia-in-hell vibe, a darkwave drenched black metal that unfurls into long instrumental passages of swirling, hypnotic gloom, the vaguely dissonant dreamblur occasionally punctuated with the singer's demonic frog-croak. There are brief bits of simple, plaintive piano, or plumes of soft, romantic string sections that sound like symphonic film soundtracks that have been left out in the sun for too long, their warbling hazy melodies melting into the harsh mechanical pounding of the drum machine. The more black metallish parts of this epic song often fall away, leaving us with just the sound of those grimly gorgeous melting synths, shimmering murky keyboards melting over the slow, pounding pace of the drums, and there are a couple of moments where this starts to resemble some strange gloom-pop mutation of Skepticism's legendary fuzz-drenched funeral doom sound. But for the last half of the tape, that gloomy, gorgeous washed-out metal transforms completely into a much more abstract and minimal noisescape, where swells of lush black static crash across fields of gleaming nocturnal synth-drone and clusters of atonal electronics. It's very kosmiche, like something Klaus Schulze might put together in the throes of suicidal depression, but with those waves of blackened distortion and undercurrents of sinister minor key keyboards lurking under the surface, giving this a deeply troubled, miserable atmosphere.