“Quietly Phobos builds himself an enviable place in the very restricted market of black and gloomy ambient EM”
1 Séance 29:25
2 Descend 17:23
3 Hells Gate 12:17
4 Decomposing Lust 12:51
(DDL 72:06) (V.F.)
(Dark ambient, Drone, Experimental EM)
A distant breeze, hollow like the breaths of winds singing in a tree trunk trimmed by holes, opens the rangy and single-phased Séance. The movement is quiet and dark. Without rhythm it inhales of these long dark strata which surround silence, plunging the listener into the gaps of DARKER. Without surprises, this 3rd tome about the solitude of the black angels from David Thompson is a profound immersion into the slow waves and black lines of a synth which frees as much musical lines as morphic singings which waltz lazily with the shadows of oblivion. From the height of its 29 minutes, Séance sweeps of its apocalyptic breaths the vestiges of an arid land and embraces of its atonal wings the last souvenirs of a world formerly of light and hope, leading so the dreamers that we are in the most abyssal cracks of a world to be redone. Dark? More than! Neurasthenic? Not just a bit! DARKER is forged in the melancholic shadows of our lost illusions. Taking back the black ambiences of his This Desolate Place made in 2011, Phobos digs even more in the fantasies of our night terrors with 4 long tracks which kiss at full tones the hooting of souls lost in slow lethal whirlwinds. Alone with his earphones, the auditor is plunged into a duel against darkness in a rich morphic canvas where the music, so intense than black, flows like gloomy torrents into our speakers. Our dark thoughts embrace the forms of night spectres, fomenting the dark obsessions which feed even more the vision that we can have of the lands that are on the other side of mirrors. And it's to these doors that Phobos leads us after the quiet Descend. Hells Gate is the hallucinatory rendezvous with the other hillside of the tranquillity. The angels are shouting here, and the incubus are exulting all the way of this slow ingression in the mephistophelic abysses there where we can hear strange rustles and feel the ochred breaths dancing with weariness around our fears. There are no doubts; Hells Gate is one of the heavy monuments of black ambient music that I heard. After this odyssey in the opacity, Decomposing Lust re-appears out of darkness with a movement wraps by a scent of iridescent metal of which the grazes are praying for a paradoxical freedom in the ultimate moment of serenity of an album that makes no compromise regarding its first intentions; plunging the listener into the most somber secrets of DARKER.
Quietly Phobos builds himself an enviable place in the very restricted market of the black and gloomy ambient EM. The music of DARKER is intense and fed the driest of the imaginations with waves of synth which float as spectres of which the ochred breaths are moulding some insidious ectoplasms in search of a life. Possibly ours! But all this are only fantasies loosened by more than 70 minutes of a dark and captivating EM of which the listening in solitary, and in the dark, can only forge these delights that only the imagination can sanction.
Sylvain Lupari (December 15th 2012) ***½**
Available at Phobos Bandcamp