��Here's another mysterious Swedish industrial outfit trafficking in the sort of bleak, desiccated industrial music that I absolutely cannot get enough of. At first, I thought that Victor Eremita was the name of whoever was behind this obscure project, but a little digging revealed that this band actually takes its name from the pseudonym of Danish philosopher S�ren Kierkegaard, taken from the Latin for "victorious hermit". This half-hour long cassette came out earlier this year on the Black Horizons label, and is the first ever release from the project, featuring two side-long fifteen minute tracks of their entrancing, super-minimalist shadow-world emanations that sort of resemble an even more stripped-down and skeletonized version of the sort of clinical electronic deathscapes that Italian death industrialist Atrax Morgue perfected back in the 90s.

�� The first side starts off all spare and minimal with a vast spacious field of tape-hiss that slowly gives birth to bursts of sparse rhythmic crackle and fuzz, while strange ghostly murmurs and deep, monstrous rumblings move slowly through lower levels in the mix. As things progress, those fields of minimal fuzz give out, leaving behind the distant sounds of creepy howling and shrieking that are rendered almost totally indistinct by what feels like vast distance and depth. The second track follows similar suit, with more murky low-fi drift peppered with streaks of minimal high-end sinewave drone, muffled monstrous breathing, and more of those distant hazy creaks and scrapes, these bits of mechanical murk slowly developing into a seriously sinister and unsettling atmosphere, with a feel similar to that of hearing contact mics being scraped across (and through) a rotting carcass, the resulting recordings then played back in slow motion.

�� As the second side slowly winds up, Eremita's sound becomes even more phantasmagoric, tracing blurs of eerie melody through the minimal gloom, bits of heartbeat-like throb slowly pulsating way down in the mix, surrounded by glimmers of far-off metallic drone and more of their creepy minor-key drift as it moves into the fourth and final track. This closing piece is the darkest of them all, an ominous field of far off bells and malevolent drone, the sounds looping slowly through the darkness, faint specters of sound cast against an endless field of soft speaker hiss. All of this stuff has that minimal, almost clinical feel, the sounds contrasted against stretches of near silence, everything heard through what could be a thick layer of dust and mold. Listening to this tape gives me the feeling that I'm hearing some old Italian death-industrial tape being played underwater.

�� As with most Black Horizons releases, the tape comes in one of their signature hand-assembled packaging jobs, the cover of the cassette beautifully printed on metallic vellum paper with multiple printed inserts, one for each track, the sheets combined to create a striking layered effect, with the release issued in a limited edition of one hundred copies.