In 2005 Deaf Center left an indelible impression on the cinematic / modern-classical / dark ambient scenes with the release of their first LP Pale Ravine.
[audio:Deaf Center – New Beginning (Tidal Darkness).mp3]After a long wait, the duo of Erik Skodvin (aka Svarte Greiner) and Otto Totland (aka Nest) arrive at their 2nd album in a deeply solemn and contemplative mood.
For the next chapter of their story the mysterious imagery is rendered even sharper, as though someone on the inside wiped a palm on the window of their haunted cabin in the woods.
This is largely attributable to the fact the album was recorded at Nils Frahms’ Durton studio, where the lo-fi graininess and techniques of their early work was brought to life with hi-end engineering and analogue equipment, allowing the duo to articulate their supernatural stories with more evocative detailing and widescreen atmospherics.
Opening to the scraped strings and seismic bass shudder of ‘Divided’, you’re ushered striaght through to a world of sound that’s tangibly more powerful, and equally more sensitive, than anything the pair have produced to date, with Totland’s piano anointing the air of ‘The Day I Would Never Have’ with ethereal pensiveness before Skodvin’s cello expands like a dense, blackened cloud of smoke.
Through the smaller vingettes like ‘Fiction Dawn’, this forested gloom colours the album through to the slow, vacuous pressure system of ‘Close Forever Watching’, its surge of cold black air almost brutally resolving the atmospheric tension.
Dark, deep and hypnotic – excellent work. Digital in Berlin Recommended!
http://typerecords.com | http://www.myspace.com/deafcenter
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