Rating: 10.0

Country: USA

Release Date: 2006

Record Label: Soleilmoon

Track list:
1. Section 1: Sol Om On
2. Section 2: Aldebaran of the Hyades
3. Section 3: Dark Companion
4. Section 4: Metastatic Resonance
5. Section 5: Dog Star Descends


Band Website: Lustmord

Lustmord - The Place Where The Black Stars Hang

Brian “Lusmord” Williams - Everything
Adi Newton - Collaboration on ‘Metastatic Resonance'

Dark ambient; it's a genre in which extreme metal musicians often dabble, while usually completely missing the point. For a proper introduction to this difficult but extremely rewarding style of ‘music' (perhaps ‘sound-sculpting' would be a better descriptor) one can really do no better than Lustmord, which can correctly be credited with creating the ‘dark' variety of ambient as such, starting with the album Heresy. This monumental release was followed by The Monstrous Soul and The Place Where The Black Stars Hang and these three releases are basically the cornerstones of the Dark Ambient genre, with TPWTBSH usually mentioned as the most defining of the three. It's a fortuitous thing then that this seminal album has finally been reissued twelve years after its first pressing, to swallow up a new generation of listeners, completing the remastering project which updated Lustmord's entire back catalog.

To begin describing this album, or ambient in general, is to view it more as a constructed atmosphere than as a piece of music. Whereas the previous albums Heresy and The Monstrous Soul focused on sending you to the forbidden depths of this earthly creation and the black abyss of the human soul respectively, ‘The Place…' sends you on an inexorable journey towards the outer regions of space, where ancient, formless things lurk in the interstices of space and time (Those familiar with the old Mythos tales written by Lovecraft and his contemporaries will have already recognised the nod to Robert Chambers' story involving Aldebaran in the Hyades and the King in Yellow that this album gives in its title and one of its songs).

It's basically one long piece, which is divided into five movements, with the first track "Sol Om On" being a sort of taking-off point constructed of sparse droning sounds that build up over three minutes to effortlessly segue into the first monster track "Aldebran of the Hyades", which slowly develops from a backbone of stereophonic wooshing sounds, which are joined by progressively more intense and disturbing sweeping noises, distant explosions, cosmic winds, an ever more pronounced background drone coupled with oscillating horns and nearly choir-like sweeping sound-washes and other various echoing noises. While the atmosphere is definitely disturbing, the movement itself is very quiet and almost relaxed, with the constant stereophonic wooshes providing a sort of enclosed space (like a space-ship or a wormhole or the like) which separates the listener from the various extra-solar phenomena outside it.

Eventually the wooshing fades away and "Dark Companion" starts up with an almost (but not quite) human sounding monk-like chanting, which is joined over the course of its duration with an at first barely noticeable background throb and ever more defined bassy washes, metallic chittering and various soft, crashing echoes merging into each other; all the while the chanting like sound gains in echo and intensity and is at times joined by various other very distant chanting and wailing sounds. Later on another accompaniment enters the picture with sacral, feminine choir-like segments (all very quiet, yet intense) and somehow threatening-sounding bassy hums, bringing to mind that one has crossed a threshold into a superluminal realm that is on the one hand divine, but on the other progressively more inimical to the human condition. It's as if amidst all the tranquil, soothing divine energy, there are these occasional warning glimpses which show that one is trespassing in a realm not meant for mortal life.

As the angelic sounds fade away into obscurity amidst a cosmic backwash of brown noise the next segment "Metastatic Resonance" will make clear that this is indeed not a place where the human mind will find anything analogous to itself. The deceptively calm watery sound which at first forms this movements overall texture is soon pierced by wailing, synthetic tones after which some very strange, warped whispering and laughing sounds take over to herald an increasingly dense soundscape, filled with mutating layers of sound, strings of grey and white noise bisecting each other amidst the ominous backwash of sonorous, merging spheres of synthetic tonal waves. Eventually, as the backwash gets ever more dense, strange alien mutterings and almost-words will enter the picture; titanic, alien intellects surround the traveller, oblivious to the little human critter floating past, daring to pass another threshold into an area with even more disturbing soundwaves rushing past, as the entire soundscape bears down upon the tiny human mind, as if it finds itself within the heart of a black star where, amidst crushing gravity, the moanings and screams of unutterable, alien godforms have been captured and encased for all time. It's a realm of being that is both profoundly beautiful as well as horrifically monstrous.

After travelling through this dynamically shifting maelstrom, the various soundscapes will fade into silence, leaving behind the soft thud of a heartbeat, at which point the closing segment "Dog Star Descends" finishes the journey with an atmosphere which resumes the sparseness and quiet of the opener, with various mechanical throbs and humms giving that spacecraft feel, while occasional noise sweeps and gong-like echoes form the cosmic winds outside the ship before silence resumes.

This album, as with most of Lustmord's material, shows the strength of Dark Ambient in fully plunging the listener into another place and time or even a wholly other realm of being. This is not done through endlessly looping a handful of notes, but by expertly crafting an involving, evolving, deep, layered and above all dynamic canvas of unconventional sounds, replacing the melody of music with the texture of the soundscape. It's at times sparse, it's most often completely outside of ones depth, but it is always totally immersive. Even though ambient music is often thought of in terms of minimalism, the fact of the matter is that there are almost no repeating segments here. Even the various ‘backbone sounds' morph and change in intensity, while the surrounding ‘sound events' constantly alter and dynamically interact. While the core group of Dark Ambient artists are all quite capable of producing mesmerising ambient trips, it's Lustmord which has provided the defining template with this album and its two predecessors. For anyone with even the remotest interest in esoteric ambient and electronic music, The Place Where The Black Stars Hang is pretty much required listening as it is not only the perfect introduction to the style, but it's still as powerful and evocative as it was when first conjured forth. At the least it will be a nice background complement to reading, surfing the internet or when having other odd friends over but more probably it will start an addiction for more absorbing material of this calibre.

For being pretty much the be-all-end-all of Dark Ambient, I can do naught but give it a perfect score. This is the ‘Black Sabbath' of Dark Ambient.

January 17th, 2007