���Songs Over Ruins. Deadbeat. Strife. Seven Sorrows. Between 1997 and 2007, Swedish dark ambient project Desiderii Marginis released a quintet of albums on the esteemed Cold Meat Industries label that have gone on to become some of my all-time favorite works of dark post-industrial music. Formed in the early 90s as the solo endeavor of artist Johan Levin, Desiderii Marginis blended bleak orchestral sounds with cinematic synthesizer ambience and pounding metallic percussion into vast, solemn meditations on death, emptiness, and the abyss, each album an exquisitely crafted piece of elegant darkness made up of equal parts dark neo-classical and grave kosmische ambient. While Desiderii Marginis's brand of dark ambient was decidedly different from the more primordial black drift of bands like Lustmord and Yen Pox, Levin's project was frequently able to produce vast, unsettling music as powerful and as evocative as anyone.

��� Going all the way back to 1997, Thaw is an impressive new collection of rare material from Levin's influential dark ambient outfit, featuring the material from the Viscera V.Zero, Death Odors III, The Absolute Supper, Tribute To Zdzislaw Beksinski, Dark Ambient Vol. 4, Samhainwork I, Behind The Canvas Of Time and Abnormal Beauty compilations, as well as the three tracks from the Lost Signals From Unknown Horizons three-way split with Artefactum and Moan, and the track from the Total Reconstruction compilation of V:28 remixes.

��� The music spans the grim, nocturnal universe of Desiderii Marginis, moving from distorted, rhythmic industrial nightmares to expanses of majestic orchestral ambience, strains of cold neo-classical funeral music and evocative electronic driftscapes, skittering technoid rhythms crackling within fields of black bliss, swells of monochromatic liturgical beauty and the distant cries of falling Seraphim that could have accompanied Werner Herzog's darkest visions rising in the distance, all sourced from the raw matter of the subconscious mind, and then blown up to an almost operatic scale. Each of these tracks course with deep, rumbling drones, permeated with an atmosphere of desolation and emptiness, these vast drifting drones laced with fragments of subdued acoustic guitar and vaguely Goblinesque piano melodies that curl around Levin's dense electronic soundscapes. There are moments when the music emerges as a kind of mournful, dub-flecked trip-hop, delving into mist-scented, dub-flecked driftscapes gleaming with cold grey light and aching with some sad sense of nostalgia, while others tumble into the void, such as the nightmarish assemblage of prepared piano and ghastly backwards noises that flit through the closer "The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters". As with everything else from this project, the sounds of Thaw offer a kind of breathtaking midnight music usually only found in the darkest, most magisterial moon-lit corners of Tangerine Dream's oeuvre. Highly recommended.

��� Comes in digipack packaging, limited to one thousand copies.