��Faint is the latest album of darkened driftscapes from B.S.E., the current project from Jonas Aneheim aka Drakh of cult Swedish black industrialists Mz.412. And it's great stuff, not quite as sinister as some of his previous works, but still dark and evocative. Working with fellow B.S.E. member K. Meizter, Aneheim has released a number of albums under the Beyond Sensory Experience banner on labels such as Cold Meat Industry and Old Europa Cafe, but the crepuscular, apocalyptic soundtracks found here are a rather far cry from the cold death industrial sounds those labels are primarily known for.
�� Fans of the more abstract and sinister fringes of ambient soundscapery should certainly check this out. There's a filmic quality to B.S.E.'s music, and it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine these tracks being used as the soundtrack to some particularly dark Herzog film. Many of these pieces on Faint radiate with a strange orphic glow, like audio transmissions from within a dream. When the album opens, it's with the murky, almost trip-hop like shuffle of "Bystanders", where guitar strings are gently plucked and looped into resonant drones and elliptical melodies over the broken rhythms. Grainy recordings of angelic choirs begin to surface, and become further obscured by billowing clouds of formless electronic drift. A modulated female voice appears over those broken beats, then shifts into whorls of eerie backwards melody and haunting piano that echoes through the darkness. The duo continue to lace that ghostly piano throughout later tracks like "Respect" and "Blank", often revealed as fragments of distant spectral jazziness. Elsewhere, dark liquid bass lines creep slowly beneath those layered broken melodies and washes of sonic gloom, as clusters of gong-like tones echo in the background. Swirling guitar tones emerge on "Sleepwaking" drenched in delay, shimmering beneath more spoken word passages and distant birdsong, evolving into an almost Troum-like wash of bleak droneological beauty.
�� But things can get fairly creepy on Faint as well. On the aforementioned "Blank", that doleful piano slowly transforms into something darker and more dissonant as rumbling atonal reverberations sweep through the depths, and the murky pulsating synthesizers and nebulous black kosmische electronics that roll across "Stumble" create an atmosphere of dark empyreal wonder. The dark chamber ambience of "Legacy" blends eerie flute-like melody with swells of nightmarish sepulchral drift, bursts of abrasive noise mixed with the ominous drone of cello-like strings and far-off wailing choral voices, while the processional feel of "Exhausted" rings out like some ectoplasmic pageant before transforming into an ocean of gorgeous orchestral currents. And on "Stale", those clouds of clustered piano turn even more sinister, resembling some of Wendy Carlos's most malevolent-sounding work. It is those moments that Faint is at it's most effective, combining that penchant for eerie, unsettling sound design with a kind of abstract, spectral post-rock.
�� The disc comes in a four-panel digisleeve with a twelve page booklet, and is limited to five hundred copies.