Impaled - Death After Life Review artwork

Rating: 8.0

Country: Poland

Release Date: 2007

Track list:
01. Waiting
02. Yesterday's Experience
03. Waiting II
04. My Thoughtful Heart
05. Waiting III – Exodus

Band Website: Absentia

Absentia - Waiting

J. ‘Irbis' Gorczyca - everything

Via Nöcturna is a new Polish pro-printed CD-r label specializing in that large nebulous region of music containing dark ambient, industrial, darkwave and the like and it's already providing a welcome look into the eastern European side of these genres. Absentia is the third act on their roster, being the brain-child of Jerzy Gorczyca and if this album's quality is an indication of what's in store for future releases, things are looking rather good.

Absentia consists of an intriguing mixture of dark ambient and industrial, with an added dose of understated power electronics to top it off. Picture the eerie ambient texturing of mid-period Lustmord, with the occasional industrial percussions of First Law (or any slow to mid-paced industrial act) and the rhythmic rumblings and noise experiments of early Brighter Death Now. It covers a pretty wide base of related soundscaping styles, while still maintaining a coherent sound and identity. The sense of isolation, of being alone in some abandoned but still active factory, conjures both a feeling of melancholy as well as trepidation and this feeling remains strong throughout the album. Interestingly enough, even though the album mainly focuses on rhythm and texture, largely eschewing melody or standard musical structuring, the type of emotions and pictures this brings forth are closer to those I get from music like metal than from soundscapes like Lustmord. Perhaps this is because of the rhythms and percussion supplementing four out of the five tracks or something else, but it's interesting all the same.

The way the album as a whole progresses is also reminiscent of more narrative styles of music, following the motif of epic storytelling. The first track "Waiting" is a rather sparse and slow echoing pulse and noise introduction, after which "Yesterday's Experience" picks up the proverbial pace with a very thick melange of industrial drums, spacey synths and noise-like ambience. The centre piece "Waiting II" provides a break in the action by being basically pure dark ambient, and here the album comes closest to the likes of Amon and Lustmord, with nary a rhythm or beat in sight. The “musique concrete”-like "My Thoughtful Heart" (think current Shinjuku Thief) then builds up the intensity again layer by layer, starting with sparse twitterings which are joined by a progressively heavier industrial cadence and varying layers of bell and chime-like synths and static, after which the almost purely industrial final track "Waiting III – Exodus" finishes the album off with an intense yet slowly down winding, complex beat and feedback distortion, before suddenly ending with a harsh crescendo of hyper-distorted percussion and white noise.

This album is an excellent showcase of that tenuous space between noisier ambience and more textured industrial, while also providing its own dose of originality by presenting it within a more narrative overall structure compared to the norm (as vague as the ‘norm' may be with this form of music). For anyone interested in this type of music, I'd urge them to head on over to the Via Nöcturna web-page or Absentia's myspace site and checking them out. Hurry up though, as of yet every album on V-N has been limited to 200 copies and this is definitely worth having in an ambient collection.

September 17th, 2007