Fear Falls Burning he spoke in dead tongues

Drone music, a new style of ambient music that is gaining some popularity amongst aficionados of ambient styles especially for those who love dark ambient. As many know, the difference is easily recognized. The standard style of ambient is that of a nice, lilting blend of music and atmosphere that is pleasing to the ear and soul. However, there are other styles more disconcerting and disturbing that appeal to an audience that appreciates an immersion into worlds that are, at once hostile, yet challenging, and which go to places that doesn’t rain, hear laughter, or provide any amount of comfort. There are masters in this arena of fear-inducing sounds and atmosphere-creating music that are dominated by the talents of Steve Roach, Vidna Obmana, and Robert Rich, with apologies to many unmentioned purveyors of this style. But now there is a newer splinter to add, that of the before mentioned drone music.

Vidna Obmana, whose brilliant streams of dark ambient over many albums, recently released an album on Projekt Records, that involve a step away from his normal style and plunges participants into darkness so vast, you need to scrape your nails on unknown surfaces just to see light of any kind. His side project, Fear Falls Burning, is an experimental branch that involves the use of guitar, extracting a steady and discomfiting swell of noise that can only qualitatively be referred to as drone. Add variations of guitar manipulations and other strange guitar noise and you get an interesting work that is an exploration, not only into that of sound exploitation but also that of setting. In Obmana’s Fear Falls Burning project, the 2CD he spoke in dead tongues, a title that sets up the ambient approach, a world in chaos is readily available.

Some tracks employ a soft, dreamlike peek into an alien soundscape of forbidding locations while other tracks are a blast furnace of guitar that immediately set the tone for the scorched earth you’re about to traverse. Fear Falls Burning’s he spoke in dead tongues is not for everyone. It is a journey that requires an appreciation of sound reconstruction, a brave walk through jungles of sometimes abrasive sound. If you’re a connoisseur of dark ambient music and can find worth in ground breaking experimental applications of guitar, there is almost no one better than Vidna Obmana’s expressions of shunned worlds to take you to waterless places. The question is whether or not you can survive the trip.

Drone has other approaches, some less harsh and others more melodic. Silber Media recently released two such albums. The first is from Kobi, a band that uses synths, sounds, guitar, and drums to achieve a more traditional ambient feature, less drone and more melodic, while the other is from if thousands, a more minimalist style that centers on desolation using an exotic mix of music.

If Thousands I Have Nothing

The work from if thousands, a band that consists of two individuals from Duluth, Minnesota, is called I have nothing and is indicative of the stark, barren world that is created from this recording. The music is bleak, at times swirling into a chaotic blend of steady guitar drone and harsh atmosphere. There is a streak of strange life found in the unlit worlds of i have nothing, most notable in “marianas,” where you’ll hear the noises of such creatures. As you walk through, your senses will be rewired. At times, you’ll feel threatened by a distant malevolence, and at others, you be soothed by a siren-like flow of melody that is no less dangerous.

If thousands’ style of ambient is not as cultured and intense as you’d find from Obmana but then Obmana has been doing this for years and is refined in his development styles. However, their minimalist style is endearing, particularly the wailing guitar over synth found on “caterwaul.” The mournful horn found blended with the short instance of drone in “shaitan,” a grammatical variation of the word Satan, perhaps lifted from Brian Lumley’s excellent vampire world series (the trilogy found after the first 5 books in the original Deadspeak series), is effective although far too short. I would have liked a more threaded ambient work that ties all of the tracks together in a more thematic style. Regardless, if thousands is on track to create deeper intensities of sound for future recordings.

Kobi Dronesyndrome

Dronesyndrome, the work by Kobi, is a work not far removed by the more structured aural designs of Steve Roach, whose tribal drum signatures stamp his ambient masterpieces with a war-like feel. Kobi supplies smaller lengths of tracks than Roach, but still allowing for rich development of their soundscapes and intents. And like Vidna Obmana’s works of oppressive darkness, Kobi synthesizes insectile life within the canvas of their music making the location more frightening, more alarmingly populated, and more eerily productive; it’s a world that breathes and rhythmically pulses but its inhabitants hate.

Dronesyndrome is, by and large, a foreboding work employing voice (may have been more effective as an alien language to English, or, at the least, an unintelligible language) in several tracks. It is also individualistic in nature, as if we’re observing singular entities rather than many. But it is the ambient textures that define the recording and reveals shades of dread throughout.

In any of the three mentioned, you will be rewarded if you appreciate sound and its many bizarre couplings that form a cohesive world quite unlike the one that we live in. However, in our own realities, if you strip away the veneer, you’ll find layers upon layers of the same raging fear and discontent that reside on these recordings. In that, they are artists that use sound as their paint. They’re not for everyone but then neither is the inherent and underlying cores of hate found just underneath the skin of our societies.