Genre: Lo-Fi / Dark Ambient

Track Listing:

01 And the Future is Fire
02 Siberia as a Hexagram
03 The Story About The Rabbit Who Dug A Hole In The Ground And Saw The Future
04 No Way Out, No Escape
05 Testimony

The occult and mysterious is a rather common theme among dark ambient musicians and its not seldom that the music reflects that theme rather well. In the case of Testimony the peculiar core is the urban legend describing the Siberian deep hole drilling project that accidentally penetrated the roof of Hell itself. The story was even more interesting since the drilling engineers had lowered a microphone into the hole and picked up strange sounds at the bottom of the hole. The sound that found its way up through the 2000 feet cable was supposedly the anguished screams of thousands of tormented souls in the bowel of Inferno.

I love a good story and this music sure tells it even if your not even familiar with the story to begin with. The first track takes us right to the edge of sanity with a lo-fi noisy background sampled with the background story of the drilling, the fact that its told by a disturbed news reporter makes it all the better. Siberia as a Hexagram is more of a slow journey downward and starts up with mixed drones pulsating through emptiness. The song evolves after a while and turns into a more complex ambient composition that vibrates with mechanical grinding sounds, the song ends in a more and more weird overdrive of hard, subterranean emulating noises.

I don’t know about this one, only the title make me a bit confused. Perhaps the length of the piece is enough to render me slightly insane and revolted by the thought that it just has to be a deeper meaning to it then just a title. The song is based around a deep drone that keeps pulsating in different scales throughout the whole song.

Added to this creeping pulse of cryptic promises are various deep disturbing hollowed out sounds, almost like swimming in a huge metal barrel filled to the half with water and submerge it deep into the earths molten core. I really love the feeling around the song, its part shadowy brooding and part enlightened terror, more or less impossible to comprehend yet so alive and vicious that it’s impossible to ignore.

The last two tracks are a combination of tense building stories of hell, fire and brimstone and the pure raw terror that the unknown can bring to our corrupted hearts. The sampling used is taken both from the supposed drilling to hell as well as a various statements made on radio and television. The pitched down voices are really creepy and mixes perfectly with the pulsating drones that turns the whole track into a long brooding sensation of hell.

The last song, Testimony, is just a calm and quite disturbing piano mixed with what I think is a brass instrument of some sort in a weird combination. Now and then a few strings enter only to fade away into the background. Added to this are two persons commenting on the drilling and asking themselves if this really is a gateway to hell or not. All in all it is a great and creepy track to end this testimony of hell in Siberia. Testimony is a great album and a great evidence of MortalManifests further greatness, its limited to 100 copies so I suggest anyone into hellish dark lo-fi ambience to check it out..