���Canticle is a new collaboration between two Crucial Blast alumni, Caulbearer and Sky Burial, teaming up to produce a killer album of doom-laden kosmische electronics, and man is it dark. Dark and impressively grim, this disc unleashes three sprawling, stygian epics of crushing drone-noise and apocalyptic atmosphere, and fans of Mike Page's more sinister work with Sky Burial are going to love the desolate driftscapes that these guys have crafted here. The album moves through swirling miasmal fogbanks of chittering electronics and roaring orchestral drone that stretch across vast yawning chasms of pure blackness, sprawls of nightmarish kosmische dread that rise and fall in waves over fields of grinding, distorted rumble; if indie horror directors had any fucking sense, this is where they would be turning for film-scores.

��� The first track "Vortices" unfolds into a kind of jet-black cosmic electronics, the sound utterly vast and oppressive like heavy black clouds of negative energy hanging over a blasted landscape, shot through with bits of eerie choral drift and rhythmic crackle and ominous symphonic swells. Huge grinding tremors reverberate through the track, like cyclopean temple doors opening in the bowels of the earth, while ghostly howls streak high over a distant blood-rimmed horizon. As the album continues to unfurl, elliptic keyboards glimmer in an endless heat haze, only to slowly build and transform into a surprisingly heavy wall of cosmic doom-drift that rises over the latter half of the track; throughout Canticle, this swirling, massive, amorphous driftscape shifts and billows in formless waves of sound, sweeping slowly through fields of endless darkness, the sound traced with jittering mechanical noises and immense orchestral drones, bursts of choral dread that wash through the abyss.

��� All of this flows together, a roiling black ambience strafed with high keening feedback that screams out of the distant depths, a vast oceanic roar of metallic shimmer and drift, cold and unwelcoming and inhospitable, formed from layers upon layers of dissonant sound and searing sustained drones and symphonic roar that the two musicians sculpt into a nightmarish wall of sound, culminating with the bleak bathysphere ambience and nocturnal droneology of the closing track "Miserere Nobis". In those last moments, strains of murky gothic organ glimmer beneath the roiling black fog of static and hiss, while EVP-like exhalations swoop through the depths amid the groan of tortured metal and faint, black pulses of low-voltage energy, the album slowly breaking apart and dissolving into the void. Fantastic stuff that's highly recommended if you're into the Malignant / Annihilvs brand of grim industrial ambience and kosmische blackness. Comes in a four-panel digipack, limited to just one hundred copies.