ninehertz

Prosthetic Records, the Los Angeles based powerhouse extreme metal label sponsoring the local football team, for some unfathomable reason. Cold Spring, the esoteric underground industrial label being based their briefly. And that's it for connections between my hometown of Glossop and the metal and weird underground music that I love. Until A-Sun Amissa, and their Gizeh Records label relocate there, recording, putting gigs on...

I can't help but mention this whenever I talk about A-Sun Amissa, which is self-centred of me - both band and label have a long history that I needn't go into the personal aspect of all that here, but fuck it, it's my review and it is strange times indeed when I'm returning home to see Thou in my old local with my mum soon because of what this collective are doing for the town.

From that excitable intro, there's a need to take things right down, into the low grasses and reeds, clear your head and simply listen. I'm a minute or two into the second of four songs, All the Sky Was Empty, and it becomes clear this is beautiful, a slow awakening, meditative, truly minimalist ambient drone, it feels so warm and natural you can imagine it as enhanced field recordings from their neighbouring Peak District. The following Sings Death or Petals is somehow ever sparser, first time listening, distracted, I took nothing in, and knew I needed to create a space for it, and so did - headphones, no phone, no checking emails, lights turned down and just let it wash over.

Only someone silly would pick out individual tracks as favourites - this is a forty minute escape to be taken as one - but if I were such a silly person, I'd highlight Our Hearts Bent As Crooked Lightning; the faint whispered vocals adds another layer into the thin air, yet if anything makes it even more opaque and ghostly, the effect is soothing. The band describe the album as "unsettling drones and claustrophobic atmospheres" but, other than the crackling trapped energy and breathy murmurs of the opening Electric Tremble, my experience is anything but - I guess art such as this is subjectively absorbed. Perhaps we'd meet halfway and agree on 'haunting'.

This is their eighth album and represents a subtle but noticeable and stated shift from the previous release Ruins Era, the band now stabilised in terms of membership but using that base to constantly morph and transmute, as it so often is - restlessness as proof of the inspired artist. This feels more organic than the last, but of equal virtuosity, a masterful grasp of the minimal to create such engaging music when you allow it the time.