��� Here's the latest album of exotic black ambience from Colombian artist Edgar Kerval and his Emme Ya project, descending further into the lightless depths of dread-filled droneology and ritualistic creep that he's explored with previous albums on Cold Spring and Brave Mysteries. As with that earlier material, Ophidian Fetish Mandala evokes a mysterious magic-obsessed soundworld filled with spare ritualistic percussive elements, vast fields of chthonic drift, quaking with reverberations from monstrous tectonic movements occurring deep beneath the surface of the earth, and awash in mesmeric murky drones that move wraithlike through the dank subterranean gloom of Emme Ya's music. Despite a fairly prolific release schedule, Kerval's work has continued to maintain a high quality of craftsmanship, and is some of my favorite black ambient currently being made, managing to be both deeply unsettling and strikingly evocative.

��� On this disc, you get tracks like "Yantra Of The Spider Goddess", whose title evokes images of some classic Clark Ashton Smith vision of subterranean horror, with sprawling stygian ambience laced with the sounds of nightmarish inhuman chanting and monstrous growls that lurk deep in the mix, surrounded by metallic clanks and shuffling rhythms that form into heavy, hypnotic patterns. There's also the blackened rumble and reptilian ritual vibe of "Arcana Of The Waters Of The Bloodred Moon", which is suggestive of Funerary Call at its most nightmarish, but Emme Ya drapes this stuff with its own strange quasi-Lovecraftian vibe; moments such as when ghastly, bestial growls materialize over the hypnotic drone of an organ, while waves of blackened kosmische electronics sweep across massive machinelike rumblings. Other tracks mingle wilderness sounds with distant orchestral murmurs set above rhythmic clanking, and bits of folky melody glimmer softly behind a veil of blackness. Swirling black ambience transforms into more surrealistic electronic glitchery, while tribal drums pound away dazedly in the depths. By the time the album gets to "Sigillum Sabbati", Emme Ya's abyssal ritual ambience has morphed into something substantially stranger, a nightmare haze of fractured electronics and warped horn-like drones strained beneath increasingly heavy swells of distorted drone and bizarre, alien vocalizations, bursts of cosmic electronics whirring out in the blackness. It all leads into the utterly narcotized fog that billows across closer "Spider Goddess", a dreamlike blur of flute and gamelan-like sounds tumbling into the abyss, lost amid foul froglike croak-chants and dub-flecked drums that are stretched into eternity.

��� Comes in a six panel gatefold sleeve with a set of five full-color postcards, limited to four hundred ninety-three copies.