Greetings and welcome to all the new subscribers who are finding Endarkenment through search engines and word-of-mouth. I do no promo work for this newsletter, so I’m glad you managed to find it through your own methods!
A quick work-in-progress update: two deep-dive interviews are in process — Boris Tyurin of Out Of Hell, and the long-awaited update of my 2018 interview with Ulf Söderberg, as I announced last year. No release dates yet, but of course you’ll hear the latest news here first.
Awhile back, I announced a new feature: capsule album recommendations lifted from my Bandcamp page. Today I bring you the second installment.
Perhaps you’ve heard last week’s news that Epic Games acquired Bandcamp? Unsurprisingly, responses are mixed. So the catalyst for today’s new issue was uncertainty about Bandcamp’s future.
While it’s possible that Bandcamp will continue its artist-friendly policies, I’m not taking any chances. I’ve already been burned when the Playmoss platform disappeared without warning, taking lots of my Chthonic Cathedral Project playlists and followers along with it. The playlists were all backed up, and some of them are preserved here on Substack, but I’ll never get back the time and labor involved in building those playlists and reaching those listeners.
To be on the safe side, I decided to download FLAC-format copies of all the digital albums I’ve bought on Bandcamp and transfer over all the review blurbs I posted on the artists’ Bandcamp pages, just in case they’re lost.
Three of those blurbs appear in this issue, and I’ll include three more in each future installment of In Brief.
Can’t wait until web3 music communities mature, giving artists the ability to port their work and followers to other protocols at any time.
In the meantime, enjoy this great music on Bandcamp.
~ Danica Swanson, your friendly neighborhood dark ambient music nerd
In Brief: HEXA - Material Interstices
Do you yearn - as I do - for deep-earth seismic rumbles, rough-hewn howling echoes, and densely packed scraping slabs of darker-than-vantablack drone ambient? If so, Material Interstices is pure bliss. Uneasy listening writ large! Prepare for a harrowing slow-mo odyssey unearthing ever-deeper layers of the shadow self. Each track blends seamlessly into the next. Calibrate your subwoofer properly, kill the lights, and let this delicious release sink into your bone marrow. Favorite track: The Exquisite Crushing of Atlas.
In Brief: Phragments - All Towers Must Fall
The aura of foreboding and apprehension is near-palpable in these richly layered orchestral dark ambient soundscapes...yet somehow, underneath the surface tumult and the ominous drones, an expansive quality makes itself known. It makes sense: there is comfort and hope in the fact that towers fall and empires crumble, after all. Polished to perfection, with great care and attention to detail, this is Phragments at their finest. Favorite track: Into Nothing.
ICYMI: All Art is Political: An Interview with Phragments (2019)
In Brief: Hyios - Consuetudines
Shrouded in mystery — no information is available about the musicians behind this project, aside from the mention of its home in Leipzig, Germany — this album is intense and otherworldly, yet every bit as earthy and terrestrial as if it had been forged in a series of field recordings in labyrinthine underground passageways. Chthonic and primordial dark ritual ambient, with bonus points for originality: I’ve heard nothing else in the genre that I’d say is truly comparable to this. Favorite track: Aquila.
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