���Here's a great 1997 collection of early, hard-to-find recordings from Die Sonne Satan, an obscure occult ambient project from Italian industrialist Paolo Beltrame who released a pair of cassettes on the legendary Slaughter Productions label back in the mid-90s, Fac-Totum and Omega, along with a split with satanic industrialists Runes Order on Old Europa Cafe and an appearance on the classic Death Odors compilation, all sought after by fans of vintage death-ambient. Archive collects a bunch of these recordings released between 1992 and 1995, including tracks taken from the Prayer Of Mankind and Slaughter Age 1995 compilations, the split tape with Runes Order, and the Fac-Totum and Omega cassettes.

��� This stuff has lost little of its stunning creepiness in the two decades since, a kind of nightmarish post-industrial music that ranges from processed orchestral drones and murky ambient loops to vast oceans of nocturnal whirr and drift that spread out into the distance. The sprawling sound is flecked with glimmers of metallic drone and peals of wailing feedback that disappear back into the abyss almost as quickly as they arrive, that abyss sometimes birthing simple, sinister synthesizer patterns that glimmer in the blackness like some menacing Tangerine Dream piece, or veins of deep electrical thrum that charge the air. Bits of backwards glitch and ghostly theremin-like wailing floats slowly by, like moving shadows across fields of distant, murky rumble and crumbling mechanical loops on the eerily mesmeric "Body Snatcher". Elsewhere on "Dismal Chant", Beltrame weaves a chilling fog of graveyard ambience composed from decaying liturgical chants, washes of electronically processed harp-like sounds, everything enshrouded in thick layers of sepulchral reverb.

��� There's a ritualistic feel to much of this material, the understated sounds often forming into endlessly looping patterns, whorls of pungent sonic smoke that circle in the blackness before trailing off and dissipating; it often feels like a precursor to the chthonic ritual ambient of artists like Halo Manash, Aeoga, Zo�t�Aon, Arktau Eos and the rest of the Helixes collective, but is also capable of moving into almost techno-tinged territory on tracks like "Hic Cum Apostuli Sui". The later material from the Fac-Totum tape moves into a slightly more rhythmic and abrasive direction without diminishing the deeply creepy atmosphere, venturing into machinelike throbs and rhythmic pulses that spin beneath slowly unfolding waves of vast black drift, or expand into immense kosmische-colored expanses of seething synthnoise, lit up by slow pulses of irradiated energy echoing into space. Hints of Maurizio Bianchi and Mauthausen Orchestra's early Italian death industrial works surface throughout these recordings, creeping into the monotonous death-throb that emanates from some of this later material, but the most rapturous piece of satanic space music included here is the song "Conspiracy" from the Omega cassette, a beautifully crafted piece of kosmische sonic shadow that is as desolate as the best stuff from Neptune Towers. All in all, one of my favorite Dark Vinyl releases.