Genre: Dark Ambient/Funeral Doom

Track Listing:

01 Ondo - 1920
02 The AG - The End of the Golden Age

This is neat stuff; I definitely like splits where dudes that play different genres (not to say that the songs on here are polar opposites) come together and release something that's coherent. Two twists on something heavy, dark and mysterious. It's quality stuff.

Ondo are a band that I've really liked for sometime; a real tasty blend of low, massive guitars crunching away, fragile, haunting processed guitars that bring to mind Hecker and Fennesz, and some synths ripped out of the deep space genre. "1920" is one of the best songs on "Mahavishnu", which i'd say is one of finest ambient releases of the last decade. It's not quite as accessible as the aforementioned artists, but it's still really good. Massive reverberating low end, brilliantly done synths bubbling away up to the foreground in places, a generally spacey and otherworldly vibe.

Compared to the quality of the space-loving swede, the man behind Austrasian Goat doesn't quite live up to it. I kind of think he's went for a very similar vibe here, that big, infinite chamber sort of spacey feel. The first two thirds of the song is decent and sort of good, but it's just competently executed funeral doom; big chords crushing away, a guitar playing a long, constant lead, nothing you haven't heard before. Having said that, things are really kicked up a notch when the doom fades, an acoustic drones away, while some toms, really cool synths and a one note guitar line repeat in a doomed jam that definitely befits the title of the song. This would sound amazing in a cathedral... it's actually really damn cool. Would be good if it went for longer, perhaps, but I think it's power is definitely because of how it fits into the overall structure of the song.

So all in all, this is a pretty nice little split, most of Austrasian's side isn't too fantastic, but overall a good percentage of the music here is of a solid quality and has an atmosphere that I really enjoy. If you enjoy the idea of soaring through the atmosphere of long forgotten worlds, of strange monoliths rising high above storm clouds, of Kirk and Skywalker gay fanfic, then you'll probably really like this.