SOUNDING THE DEEP "GLACIER" (Sonic Meditations)

Lovely, rumbling slab of drone invoking the chill of the artic, the nighttime swirling of black frigid waves and the jutting towers of ice and rock stretching to sky. Foreboding and ominous to the core, this tape is center of the earth type reflection, the sounds pointing towards, and culminating in, a massive expanse of blackened drift that deafens all with its majestic quiet. Total brain temple massage with this one, a testament to the immersive aspects of drone music and the meditative nature of taking things out to their limit. It's pretty much guitar tone stretched into the forever, a ride out in the nothing until everything disappears at the terminus. In Sounding the Deep's universe, the world has a spacial limitation, and "Glacier" will guide you to it.

Four epic tracks bear us out, a sea of terse calm, a feeling of floating into ether. Sort of like what i imagine the isolation chamber in "Altered States" to be like-everything dark and a total primal reversion to a mindset where senses are heightened and everything modern and "outside" is gone. It's pure focus, an inward journey, a tunnel of the psyche spiraling ever, ever down. Guitars ring crystalline and fragile, signalling a chill to come and the desperate, delicate nature of where we're headed. Sounds come and go, ringing and echoing and glowing black with inner light, dulled by the motion and the depth. Nothing shines this far down; no light can reach the surface, if a surface even exists anymore. This world may as well be ether, or astral-either way travel through it becomes a matter of consciousness rather than physicality, as though something far beyond the corporeal is pulling you along. There's a distinctly Lovecraftian element at work here, a sort of soundtrack to "At the Mountains of Madness" or the sounds of the universe endlessly turning in on itself at the very farthest reaches of its expanse, where matter and concept entwine with one another to create something infinite and utterly incomprehensible. This is some dark, scary shit, but not scary in the Nordvargr of Lustmord sort of way. All the menace Sounding the Deep conjure up comes from within, the weight of the natural world brought to bear upon the incredible smallness of one person. This is music that totally engulfs and dwarfs you, and there is no escape. The expanse is everywhere, the idea is inescapable. There is so much more, so much beyond. "Glacier" offers a glimpse for those composed enough to view it.