Genre: Dark Ambient / Minimal Electronics / Noise / Noise Rock

01 Creeping Arrival
02 Start
03 Onus
04 Flame Bears Soul
05 The Apocalypse Came With The Rain
06 Black Yesterday Pt. 1
07 Erebus
08 A Bad Thing
09 A Question Of Psychology
10 Self-Flagellation
11 A Description Of A State Of Being
12 Decay?
13 This Is War
14 Obsessed
15 Fractura
16 Medicamentum
17 Black Yesterday Pt. 2
18 Finale....... .......Fides

The crescendo blast of a cyclonic furore crawls into every aperture animate and inanimate, a swelling boil of air that indeed creeps on arrival. It’s not an aftermath that this bloating waste leaves with its intro, but sets up a scene of devastation and a vista of shattering ruins to explore, after all this is how Ralf Rabendorn, solo artist of Testphasen Negativ, “Won the War”.

Eighteen tracks of the blistering soundscape parade the vicissitudinous template that Testphasen Negativ masters extremely well in this album, a convergence of styles works across the plains and urban decay seamlessly. Electronic rhythms rattle and scrape lulling and frustrating beats, horns of white noise roar and surge, rasping ambience scuttles about in debris, but it’s not some exposition of post-industrial miming that is going on here. The tracks segue and morph continuously, cinematographically. Soft dulcet piano haunts blasted monuments and growling sludge of rock explodes them and here Testphasen Negativ truly shows its mettle in welding together the continuous dichotomy. The use of powerful electronics juxtaposing sonar like drones is strangely calming at times. Vocals and vocal samples scamper and slice between the clamour and somnolent drones, twisting backwards and down in pitch, another tool Ralf instils here.

The sound quality is top notch and here Ralf has produced and mastered it adroitly, the depth of surrounding sound is pristine, every nuance captured and spaced out in horrifying detail. The album is a dark mass of visions, a dream surreal in its fractured automatism, one that takes you to into trenches overwhelmed by the gulfs of blackness overhead.

In sixty minutes you’ll be convinced to cue/repeat.

The album comes pacakaged in a A5 sleeve of 3 gatefold panels.