It was a pleasant surprise to have this new Lull album pop up at the end of last year - like the label states, this is the first brand new album from Mick Harris's dark ambient project in fourteen years, long enough that I really didn't expect him to revisit the ice-cold stygian dronefields that he helped to trailblaze in the early 90s alongside Lustmord and Yen Pox. Lull has always been one of my all-time favorite dark ambient outfits, Harris just seems to have this spectacular touch for weaving impossibly deep webs of subterranean murmur and barren volcanic drift that stands out from anyone else in the field. Definitely muich more than just "that electronic side-project from the former Napalm Death drummer" to me.

Covid-era sessions

Impressionistic driftscapes that evoke oceanic vastness, an immense and empty terrain cast with an ominous, crepescular glow, somewhere on the razor's edge between twilight and nightfall. Fields of immensely ancient ice sprawling all the way to the horizon, the dim, fading solar glow rising over that distant flatline horizon, vaporous clouds of freezing air and condensation swirling upwards into the troposphere. A single, blinding beam of light shoots straight down into the ice-fields, stretching skyward from the surface like a lunar ray that ascends to the point of invisibility. Borealis-like smears of lightform shifting imperceptibly beyond the vanishing point. The pieces, titled "Range", "Expanse", "Unplumbed", "Way" feel like a fractured phrase, each one stretching from eleven to seventeen minutes and flowing together like a black haze of sound. Pieces of something approaching sonority slip beneath the surface of these glacial sheets of sound, bleeding into each other, blurring and melting together.

Make sure you've got a good system for low-frequency playback. For an hour, Harris draws the listener through a boundless sonic environment, the drones and rumblings and reverberations and echoes moving constantly in all directions, washing over you again and anagin with huge swells of deep bass tones and lush chordal forms, spires of majestic tonality piercing through the gloom and shadow and casting a luminous glow across the billowing, gamboling cloudscapes, awe-inspiring choral textures rising out of unseeable depths. This is unmistakeably Lull, scultping vast and ominous sound into dramatic movements that completely surround you, quite different from the other early "dark ambient" and "isolationist" artists; Harris utilizes his layering of low-frequency / low-end soundscapes to create something almost symphonic, opener "Range" being a perfect specimen of this approach as the track unfurls into something akin to a cosmic event, with peaks and valleys of intensely cinematic magnitude arrayed into deeply moving formations. Aside from having an extremely subtle rhythmic substratum in his dronescapes, Harris and Lull usually brings a meditative element to this music that distinguishes it in the field, with series of forms and patterned movements that reveal themselves to the attentive listener, especially on the first two tracks of That Space Somewhere, "Range" and "Expanse". As the album moves into its second half, though, it feels more meteorological, those giant tectonic tones and reverberations giving way to a slightly more etheric sprawl of endless shimmer and metallic whirlpools. "Unplumbed" and "Way" develop into slightly more harrowing topographies, less physically visercal tjhan the begining of the album but no less immersive and evocative. Like waves of tone emitting from planetary-sized prayer bowls, rippling through the cosmos.