Articles
Spotlight 17
Anneli Drecker

Albums
Aegri Somnia
Susan Alcorn
Damián Anache
A Sides and Makoto
Heather Woods Broderick
Atrium Carceri
Robert Crouch
Anneli Drecker
David Evans
Finland
Anne Garner
Tania Giannouli
Peter Gregson
Grönnert and Mondfish
Emily Hall
Hidden Orchestra
Hior Chronik
Hilde Marie Holsen
Inner8
Joyfultalk
Deborah Martin
Scott Miller
Monkey Plot
Kate Moore
Mr. Jones
Nicolay
NOW Ensemble
Numina + Zero Ohms
Oiseaux-Tempête
Kristoffer Oustad
Pete Oxley & Nicolas Meier
Peptalk
Qluster
Bruno Sanfilippo
Maria Schneider
Dirk Serries
Stratosphere
Robert Scott Thompson
Skydive Trio
Time Being
toy.bizarre / EMERGE
T_st & Dronelock
Kamasi Washington
Andrew Weathers
XaDu
Yen Pox
Young & Martin
ZOFO

EPs / Cassettes / DVDs / Mini-Albums / Singles
Alex Agore
Bird People / Waterflower
Kaison
Lullatone
Donna McKevitt
M. Mucci
Nattavaara Rocks
Zenwan

Aegri Somnia: Monde Obscure
Cryo Chamber

Monde Obscure features sixty-three unsettling minutes of pitch-black soundscaping from Aegri Somnia (real name Jurica Santek). Though the dark ambient project was active between 2007 and 2008, the Croatia-based Santek stepped away from it for six years before resurrecting it in 2014. If there's one thing that separates his recording from others in the genre, it's Santek's extensive incorporation of field recordings into his experimental set-pieces. Sounds of crows, industrial and city noises, and human activity surface throughout the album's twelve settings and lend each piece a strong sense of place. Attending to the details of a given track, one begins to feel transported into its nightmarish world, and it's easy to make that transition when the details Santek works into a piece are so plentiful.

Monde Obscure isn't field recordings only, however. Musical materials are as prominent, resulting in tracks that achieve a satisfying balance between instrument-generated and real-world sounds. Over the course of its seven eerie minutes, “Obscurite Totale” presents a shape-shifting collage of tinklings, phantom exhalations, clicks, scrapes, and bodily writhings. With tribal percussive patterns added to “Culture Aveugle,” the setting shifts to a more remote and mysterious locale, one perhaps derailed by violent rituals and madness. With the focus so heavily on the atmospheric, the brief appearance of a regulated beat pattern within “Faux Prophete” proves momentarily disarming. Tinkling bells, ominous creaks, and rustlings of indeterminate origin appear alongside synthetic rumblings and ghostly choirs in Aegri Somnia's reverb-heavy soundscapes, and dread and disease fill the air at every turn. As a result, describing Monde Obscure as evocative hardly does the material justice.

July-August 2015