Collaboration between Caul and Kirchenkampf

Genre: Dark Ambient

01 And the First as A Shadow
02 Pit of Stars
03 We Enter Fire Imbibed
04 I Am the One Whom You Have Hidden form
05 The Abyss Will Appear Among Your People
06 Darkness and Water
07 The Consumption of the Voice of Blood

When I first encountered Caul it was a moment that would linger on for a long time thereafter. The first song that rang through my mind was The Vettar from the album Swan, a moody and very atmospheric piece dedicated to the creatures of the underworld and my all time favourite mythical being. Caul has come a long way from his first staggering cassettes in the early 90ies and have so far impressed me both with his genuine and well created music as well as the awesome atmosphere his albums always bring forth. In this album Caul join forces with another dark ambient project called Kirchenkampf, a band this beast never heard of before. Sleep-Night-Death is a stunningly beautiful album whose pure simplicity brings joy to my eyes. The cover is so clean and minimal in its composition and yet so elegant and alluring that it becomes a part of the album’s total experience. This is another one of those limited releases set to 888 copies, because regular and even numbers are quite rare in the realm of dark industrial releases. The music is composed by the two artists during the winter of 2006-2007 and for me it’s quite hard to tell where Caul begins and Kirchenkampf ends, but that is not a bad thing at all. The music in itself is quite haunting and ranges from heavy and brooding drones encrusted with stellar and dreamlike sounds purified in dark matter and blessed with bleeding sensations of angelic serenity.

What I am trying to say in my own monstrous way is that this really contains the core of dark ambient structures and yet feels quite refreshing. However, the main problem with electronic music nowadays is that it feels almost overly polished and clean. Sound is affected by lots of things and now I am sitting here listening to music in my headphone and find myself thinking: “Why is it always so clean?”. It is almost as if the digitalisation of music somehow has removed a huge chunk of the soul that the music used to have, I am speaking generally in this matter of course. This album don’t suffer namely from this mastering hysteria where each sound should be overly pure, which is a good thing. The general feeling of the album is that of a dim archaic structure where in old evils dwell, and I really like what they’ve done to the music. The tracks are quite varied where some almost disappears in a whisper and others lash out in long strange brooding swirls that go above and beyond. The Abyss Will Appear Among Your People is one of those tracks that I simply can’t praise enough in its simple yet enchanting structure and atmosphere. Despite all the good things that this album presents, I can’t really say that it is that mind breaking. Plainly it is good dark ambient, nothing more and nothing less and in the end you get what you expect so to speak.

If you like drones and dark ambient plus have the cash to spare I warmly recommend this album, however if you’re searching for something evolutionary in dark music it is not here to be found. I like this album, it is beautiful, it is haunting and it delivers what you expect. This is not really relaxation music, its more music for the mind of the author who staggers alone in his weird attic composing strange esoteric novels of strange cults and colours from outer space. And really, you can’t complain about that!