Genre: Black Ambient
Split between Atum and Roto Visage
01 Atum - Syndrom Cotarda I
02 Roto Visage - Syndrom Cotarda II
03 Atum - Syndrom Cotarda III
04 Roto Visage - Syndrom Cotarda IV
05 Atum - Syndrom Cotarda V
06 Roto Visage Syndrom Cotarda VI
Cotard’s syndrome - People with Cotard's Syndrome believe that they do not exist. Cotard's sufferers complains of having lost everything: possessions, part of or entire body, often believing that he or she has died and is a walking corpse. Paradoxically, being "dead" often gives the patient the nation of being immortal. This form of depressive disorder was described by psychiatrist, Jules Cotard, in 1880.
With the aforementioned as the promotional introduction and a woodcut image of what appears to be the River Styx, where Dante watches the submerged bodies of the sullen writhe under its waters, it’s not a complete surprise that Syndrom Cotarda (a split release from black ambient artists Atum and Roto Visage) is a murky voyage through aural despair.
Each artist alternates throughout the 6-track CD and Atum sets the scene with a blend of low, analogue drones, howling winds and clanking chains that drift into Roto Visage’s dark caverns populated by twittering bats. Very much the spiritual twin of Kerovnian’s “From the Depths of Haron”, this is a record of cavernous vaults and echoing, half-heard voices.
There’s a cloying sense of paranoia lurking throughout this record; a Kafka-esque sense of disease and dis-ease that’s hard to pinpoint (the Kafka link is followed through by much of Roto Visage’s work echoing the grating, industrial sound design that Lustmord did for the “Zoetrope” short film, itself based on one of Kafka’s short stories) and the cold, bubbline waters of Styx never seem too far away.
Yet, for all of this, there’s something missing. The eerie ambience feels fleeting, not looming and aggressive. On the standout tracks (the aforementioned caves of Roto Visage’s “II” and Atum’s slithering, abyssal “V”) there is a real sense of retreat from the world of light but this doesn’t hold across the entire release. Some sense of progression (or, perhaps more aptly, regression) would have helped this because, as it stands, the unchanging protestation from Dante’s denizens of the Styx rings all too aptly:
“Sullen were we in the sweet air that by the Sun is gladdened, bearing within ourselves the sluggish fume; now we are sullen in the black mire.”
