Genre Martial Industrial / Dark Ambient / Noise

01 Exordium: A Journey Into Frozen Memories
02 Tenebrae: Sie Mundus Creatus Est
03 Thee Aleph
04 Hommage A Tristan Izara
05 Embolium
06 Farewell To Nothing
07 La Revolution
08 Jedinyi Sovestrij Sojuz
09 1929
10 The Burning

Zr19.84 is Riccardo Z., a prolific releaser of tenebrous sound, “Reperte Omnes Tristita Invasti” the fifth album from this Italian artist in two years. It is an album of taut and dark electronics seeping up through fissured cracks from vast spaces underearth.

Fibrous feedback ravels and oscillates a threadbare mane to shuffling minimalist percussion, haunting and serpentining before glazed and gargled vocals coil and snarl – an unusual start but its Spartan ghostly accompaniment foments dreamlike disembodiment. Zr19.84 fires its salvos in breadth rather than in concentration, unleashing grave carnage like the phosphorescence of modernized mustard gas, the dark ambience settles slowly like a shroud. Vocal samples feature freely from the Iraq war to Dada/Surrealism, in the form of a homage to Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dadaism. Nebulous French song is made nearly inscrutable with escalades of lurching and fragmenting noise, like swarming bombs from above.

Little in the way of melody is essayed in “Reperte Omnes Tristita Invasti”, what small cinders are used are in looped drones or as cinematic valance over the recesses of ireful antechambers. The last track, ‘The Burning’, a fourteen minute epic in the hour-long release escorts the senses into annex of smelted and warped steel – yet strangely after a pause of sound the album disbars the dark ambience with a dancing percussive beat and droning lines of organ, which nearly becomes an ultimate letdown until Riccardo’s gravely vocals marl the electronics with dark noose.

George Bush is perhaps the let-down of this album. Featuring across several tracks is that same old diatribe of Mr. Weapons of Mass Destruction, which would be poignant but with something so heavily sampled from the lips of a puppet pre-schooler it drags the redoubtably brooding music into the ho-hum.

The CD is limited to eight-four copies and comes in deluxe packaging, but since only a CDr was sent no comment can be made on the design. As a few digital pops occur it is difficult to say whether or not they are on the actual release than the proffered CDr.