Band's List Dark Ambient Dronny Darko Outer Tehom

« Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. » Genesis 1.2

I suspect some of you had to read twice the catch phrase to be certain to not have connection issues with their occipital lobe, and some others thought that Spirit of Metal was making a product placement to redress their conscience. Stay here a bit, we will come back to it.

Oleg Puzan, or the well-named Dronny Darko (secret admirer of Donnie Darko ? ) for the rest of the world, is a young ukrainian artist performing in a drone and dark ambient stage swarming with people since the explosion of the netlabels. Darko sticks to the mould as he shares since 2012 the free publication of his digital works between the russian label DNA Production and the norwegians from Petroglyph Music, alone or in collaboration with other young shoots growing on the dark volcanic and fertile fields of the genre. The problem in this plan is that most of the creations stay confidential, hidden from the eyes of people that don't (want to) have the time to explore the dark streets of the interwebzian megalopolis. And we can not really blame them given the plethora of choice.

But Dronny Darko knows it, and he wishes to make himself known a bit more ; so he sailed with success towards the coasts of the american label Cryo Chamber, held by the swedish Simon Heath better known under his aliases Atrium Carceri and Sabled Sun, taking -almost- always care of the mastering, with its specifications combining audio quality and a cinematogenic (so much syllables, beautiful) ability. But let's stop digressing.

Here we are today (if you still didn't give up the reading after the biblic verse and a never-ending introduction), talking about Outer Tehom, the freshest piece from the cold room. And to better understand the general concept, it's necessary for me to give you a short armchair catechism lesson (read « Google4Life » ).

The second verse of the Genesis read above is obviously not a desperate effort of redemption from the columnists (it is too late for a long time), it's got a far more concrete relevance. The hebrew word « Tehom » is translated in english by « Deep » or « Abyss », and is first found in the excerpt from the Genesis quoted in the preamble. This abyss is the place where the primordial waters have always sat and still sit, above which our Creator may have hovered just after creating a virgin and shapeless earth. A place of darkness so, where the void and the silence reigned in absolute masters.

Outer Tehom would mean that Darko puts us beyond these waters, far from the Divine, in a universe not built yet, and that our only distraction is to gaze at this sea, gaze at ourselves, and turn our thoughts upside down until bursting an aneurism. The human brain being well made, it can't help filling the silence… And then would be born this 52-minutes opus, a schnaps of the darkest fruits passed through the esoterico-dronesque still of the kievian.

Far from the Creator, we are free to be influenced and mistreated by malevolent spirits, and that's what seems to come to light from the four 13-minutes tracks. Evidently built on infinite spans of low humming frequencies penetrating our souls and doubled up by an unnatural freezing breathe, each track is livened up by toxic and mystic textures reverberating endlessly on the walls of the abyss, and we can notice the appearance of vocal samples with a diabolical grain, like a terrifying extract from the Anneliese Michel conjuring in Mortal Skin or a dangerously mesmerizing poem from the occultist Aleister Crownley on Arcane Shrine.

An anxious ritual atmosphere where words like « witchcraft », « black magic » or « esotericism » don't need to be prompted to take insidiously root in our shaken minds. But why using the conditional on what could this album be, it seems clear that all these sound artifices have the sole aim to evoke questionable habits, isn't it ? Isn't it ?

For alone, perched opposite of the Abyss, the only thing that can scare us, it's what is looking ourselves right in the eye ; ourselves. The Tehom doesn't restrict itself to this primordial well without bottom stimulating all our most fundamental fears like the solitude, the darkness and the unknown : we all carry a bit of Tehom on Earth nowadays.

An inner and personal abyss where we can hide the most sinister thoughts and feelings to the Other, at a time where selfishness is trendy, where dehumanization is omnipotent, where ignoring the worst horrors in the world comes down to push a button the ass laying on a leatherette Ikea chair. But if we feel like we have a safe conscience because everyone acts the same, our subconscious screams like Anneliese for it knows itself trapped, our heart feeds relentlessly from the ink of the society flowing in our arteries at the pace of the magnetic drone layers going with the listening of Outer Tehom, prisoner of an insensitive body of charcoal coming from the same depths as the growling of the creatures in Arcane Shrine.

Even if the listening of Snake Hole in third position will seem lighter, after the two previous sonic trails that were the fiendish Black Arts with its guttural low vocals and Mortal Skin with its fearsome vocal recordings and its slow breathing in the sonic background, the last track closes these 52 minutes on an enigmatic and gloomy ritual note that will leave us alone with our questions.

So Outer Tehom is a work on several strata, where trying to look at the end of the Deep is far from necessary to grasp its blackness and to imagine its bottom ; the shape of this album, made from a material that doesn't let the light escape from it, is enough polished to rave about it during a listening session on headphones more than advised.

Dronny Darko signs on Cryo Chamber one of the most interesting releases of the label this year, and his most accomplished work in his nascent career.