CRUCIAL BLAST on GEOMANCY

"The latest offering from Wilt is this new collaboration with the solo digital drone/noise artist Michael Palace, who records under the name Horchata. I haven't heard anything from Palace's project in years; the last thing of his I remember picking up was a tape on Truculent, which would have been earlier this past decade. I definitely don't remember his work sounding anywhere near as ominous and unsettling as this, though. Working together on Geomancy, the two artists produce a series of virtually lightless soundscapes that combine bleak, blasted expanses of aural desolation, distant rumbling tremors, and slow-moving clouds of metallic whir and hum that swirl around the simple drifting synth-shapes that hover within the blackness like glowing black sigils. And it's all blackness. Wilt always produces nightmarish sounding stuff, but this is the closest that I think I've ever heard the duo venture into this kind of cosmic black ambience that sits somewhere in between the darkest Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze works and the deep-earth horror of Lustmord and Yen Pox. Of course, they add in the sort of monstrous black electronics and hellish textures that their work is known for; throughout long tracks of abyssal ambience like "Procession Of The Equinoxes" and "Patterns In The Soil", Wilt infests the slowly drifting black fog with an array of far-off croaks and howls, snatches of garbled chanting, swells of deep metallic Sunn O)))-like drone, distant horns melting across a jet-black horizon, and on "Etheric Winds", the artists create a black kosmische ambience where faint pulsating signals and whirring machinelike sounds combine with waves of pitch-black space drift and amorphous metallic buzz, sounds that later return in a more hushed manner on some of the album's later forays into fuzz-draped nocturnal driftscapes that resemble a more malevolent version of Tim Hecker's granular electronic ambience. The further you get into Geomancy's arcane formations, the stranger they get, even as the music becomes more cinematic in scope; on ""Stone Alignment", the cavernous drones transform into this strange electronic dirge where distorted synth chords plod over massive reverberant tympani-like drums, processed samples of orchestral strings and softly wavering electronic textures, becoming one of the album's most arresting tracks, and the closer "Amplifying The Geometry" is a mesmerizing piece of widescreen midnight ambience stained with looped horns and lysergic darkness that resurrects some of the obsidian metallic heaviness that appears earlier on the disc. Fans of Wilt are obviously going to love this, but anyone not familiar with this project who dig abstract, blackened ambient electronics and formless doom-laden dread should check this out as well...
Comes in a digipack package."

Available at Crucial Blast