“doombient. three (kalte sterne) is a true ambient album that will fill your ears and transports you as far as your imagination would allow”
1 Before Big Bang 15:00 2 Pillars of Creation 14:05 3 Quantum Surge 15:55 4 Triumph of Entropy 12:05 5 Questions Unanswered 15:00 Doombient.music
(CD-R/DDL 72:14) (V.F.)
(Dark Ambient Music)
Sounds! Heavy sounds that twist into an imaginary immensity. Oscillations, sound modulations and heavy reverberations that waver in a poetic heaviness. All elements anti-harmonies, near the anti music too, which unite to create a huge spatial soundscape that few artists manage to recreate. In this area, there is Michael Strearns' magnificent Chronos. There are also works by Stephen Parsick, SETI and Steve Roach, to which must be added now this last opus of ['ramp']; Doombient. three (kale tern). Recorded live at the Bochum Planetarium on February 24, 2007, this third opus of the Doombient series is by far the heaviest and quietest album from the German duo. Digging deep into their imagination, Makowski & Parsick draws a musical canvas recreating the formation of the universe.
Before Big Bang is a morphic ode from which heavy sound sediments escape, recreating the perfect musical illusion of a slow and tedious design. The music is intense and starts with heavy resonant reverberations and synth streaks whose intertwined lines are surrounding the genesis. It's a slow fertilization that mates with the powerful Pillars of Creation and its superb momentums of enveloping strata whose dying waltzes stand out to the abyssal pains of the sublime Chronos from Michael Stearns, which is for me the reference in ambient, dark and cosmic EM. Fine arpeggios glitter, reminiscent of the cosmic universe of Vangelis, on unctuous huge strata from which emanate intense buzzes of wild sweetness. A little as if the creation became controllable. This is one of the beautiful pieces from the ['ramp'] repertoire and dark and ambient music in general. Quantum Surge is as heavy as the opening piece but with more nuances. It's a slow lifeless movement with a long evolution where brief, translucent incursions, nourished by barely perceptible choruses, pierce the static opacity and transport us to the gates of the morphic Triumph of Entropy and its sound waves à la Blade Runner. Questions Unanswered rises from the void to embrace a dark force equal to Before Big Bang with hoarse and thundering breaths, while flirting with the sweet agony of Pillars of Creation.
Doombient. three (kalte tern) is a real dark ambient album! A heavy album full of subtle sounds that gives it a musical dimension as black as poetic. An album that fills the ears and transports us as far as the imagination can allow. A must for fans of heavy and black ambient music, which I'm not that much, with a slight emotional suspicion.
Sylvain Lupari (November 16th, 2009) ***½**
Available at [´ramp] Bandcamp