��1978 is the fourth album from Italian death industrial/black ambient project Djinn and sole member Alex Vintras; since 1999, Vintras has been exploring the extremes of emotional isolation and despair under the Djinn name, and with this latest album offers an intensely nihilistic look at the year and the date which marked both Vintras's birth and the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, which Vintras transforms into an investigation into the act of self-extermination. After starting off with the haunted ambience of opener "Listen", 1978 settles into a deeply creepy series of morbid soundscapes, moving through fields of clanking metal and distant percussive noises, layered with recordings of female voices recalling scenes of murder and abuse, the eerie ambience suddenly punctuated with blasts of deep horn-like synth, distant choral moans or thunderous eruptions of tectonic rumble. It's no wonder that this project started off producing releases for Marco Corbelli (Atrax Morgue) and his Slaughter Productions imprint, as that label's pitch-black vibe thoroughly permeates every inch of Djinn's nightmarish death industrial soundscapes. On tracks like "Away From It All", Djinn unleashes waves of crushing nebular synthesizer and clanking mechanical rhythms, creating a kind of monstrous kosmische death-dirge, the sound filled with creaking black electronics and massive distorted drones, washes of analogue synth roaring over distant creepy voice recordings and the more delicate streaks of electronic noise that Vintras carefully threads throughout the track .

��Further in, mutated dissonant melodies begin to take shape beneath the clattering abandoned asylum ambience, and operatic female singing suddenly swoops across the black ambient expanse. It's all very dreamlike and surreal filled with a gnawing, knowing dread, half-formed murky melodies warbling in the depths, awash in dank dungeon atmospherics, the sound of priests in liturgical chant or the muezzin's call to prayer rising out the depths, brief moments of religious delirium that are quickly consumed by swirling horror-movie synths and monstrous pneumatic pulsations, more unsettling snippets of recorded interviews between psychologists and murderers, and wafts of hypnotic tabla rhythms. The whole thing has this dank , diseased feel to it, a mixture of religious ecstasies and psychotic deliriums littered with chunks of massive distorted rhythmic throb and enshrouded in a ghastly, graveyard ambience. If there is a comparison to be found, it would be that of hearing parts of the soundtrack to Buttgereit's Nekromantik being filtered through that classic Slaughter Prod death industrial aesthetic. Comes in a six panel digipack.