Genre: Dark Ambient / Spoken Word

01 Blue Sky
02 My Brain Trap
03 Brain Of A Dog
04 The Null Revelation
05 Artificial Sun

Recordings made over an 11-year period between 1995 and 2006, Artificial Sun is a collaborative effort between Wyrm's Allan Zane and cyberpunk bad-boy Kenji Siratori. 11 years has spawned a shortish set of six ambient/experimental pieces allied with Japanese spoken word passages.

Zane comments on his Myspace page that his work is a construct or conglomeration of the “dark ambient” and “electronic” genres. Furthermore, he claims the results are “as equally repulsive as they are intriguing. Expressed through music, Wyrm’s fascination lies with the shadow aspects of human existence—yet constitutes virtue, consciousness-expansion, and illumination.”

Whatever the case, Artificial Sun opens with Blue Sky, a hissing, burbling throng of synthetic gadgetry and high-end clanging metals, and Siratori's ominous, distorted prose chants throughout. Well, the sound is ominous. I don't speak Japanese, and whilst its delivery is weighty and hypnotic, I would have liked the oppurtunity to read along. My Brain Trap has a cut-up, looped feel. Metallic, processed gonging eventually filters into the seething opening, and Kenji's wordsmithing forms a greater synthesis with Zane's treatments, in contrast to Blue Sky, where it has the mood of a sermon delivered over-or through-whatever other sounds are present. Brain of a Dog is shorter, that springs into motion like some archaic wind-up toy, or perhaps a hurdy gurdy, playful and strange. The speech is an utterance, containing whimsical whisperings and mutterings.

The reverse-looped and disturbingly pitched-down poetics of The Null Revelation have become music itself: they are sounds, barely human, or logical, and certainly not able to be rendered. I doubt a Japanese speaker would make much sense of them, either. Lengthy, drawn-out echoes shudder with a pensive, the-hills-have-eyes sort of atmosphere. Knowing something's out there. Something dark. And you're just waiting, because you can do nothing else.

The title track closes the disc. Dense and continuous, less percussive, but brimming with a flowing intensity, this is the most successful track of the six. Brooding and simultaneously forthright, it finally feels that the opus has found its direction, its real pulse.

Interesting production and sound design. Leaving aside the true blackened ambience of Artificial Sun for a moment, I am not quite sure how “successful” this release is. Well, for me anyway. Maybe its the feeling that after 11 years of work, I expected to have come away with a sense of something more cogent, strident even.