Sky Burial is the brainchild of one Michael Page of Fire in the Head. Having appeared on over forty releases in the last six years, 'Kiehtan' marks Page's eighth appearance under the guise of Sky Burial, a dark ambient project designed to enable him to explore avenues not wholly fitting to his main musical outlet.
According to the press release, 'initially inspired by early "industrial" music projects, electronic/ambient acts of the 70's and 80's, and Krautrock, the music of Sky Burial continues to evolve and blur genre boundaries creating its own version of "ambient" music, often citing esoteric and mythological subject matter as a muse.' Listening to 'Kiehtan', this is all quite apparent (Sky Burial is an ancient Tibetan funerary practice, in which the corpse is dissected and its parts placed in specific mountain locations where birds of prey consume the remains). The album was mastered by James Plotkin of Khanate and OLD, who has also performed mastering duties for brain-crushing heavyweights such including Sunn O))), Earth and Isis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s done a most sympathetic job.
'Kiehtan' contains just two tracks, the first being the title track, which has a truly monumental running time of forty-one and a half minutes. Miraculously, the time simply drifts past in swathes of shifting sonic waves that ebb and flow. There are times when those waves aren't simply metaphorical, as oceans surge against sands and crash against cliffs. Yet these sounds are rendered strange and alien, filtered and manipulated as they are, and juxtaposed against drones and groans. The sounds envelop the listener, and one feels as though one is listening to the album while drifting outside the physical body, or watching the apocalypse from the moon. The darkness creeps in and overtakes the ambience as the track progresses, and by the half-hour mark it's reached squirm-inducing levels of disquiet. Background music it isn't. Impressive, it is, although not nearly as agonisingly abrasive as Fire in the Head's brand of industrial power electronics.
|
Track two, 'Himmelblau-starren (Mark Spybey reconstruction)' is but a fragment in comparison, at six and a half minutes in length. What it lacks in duration it more than compensates in intensity. Backwards jangles and drones tangle messily and worm their way into the listener's cranium before retreating to a strange silence, nothing but the sound of your own breathing.
Sky Burial on MySpace
|
