Odd Songs for Cold Reflection
Dark ambient, synth, and more
A chill stirs the air, signaling winter’s approach. Night falls sooner, a black blanket to cover the cold. It’s a stage between seasons, strange and isolated. These albums will help you make it through, or at least give you a contemplative soundtrack to the year’s end.
Spiral Cathedral: Infinities of Eons
Friends, please don’t lob vegetables or throw me outta this joint (Substack is rad). But here comes some self-promotion, which I rarely do. Full disclosure/disclaimer: Spiral Cathedral is one of my projects.
Infinities of Eons takes its inspiration from A Short Stay in Hell, a novella about a dead man’s journey through an afterlife that’s an infinite library. As you might’ve guessed, the library is far from fun and is its own form of hell. But I won’t spoil the book for you if you haven’t read it.
With Infinities of Eons, I wanted to capture the tone of A Short Stay in Hell: bleak and sparse, with a sliver of hope. To accomplish this, I imagined what kind of music would play in an endless library where condemned souls wander for eternity.
At first, I wrote Infinities of Eons as a guitar-driven ambient album, but it didn’t feel right. It all started making sense after I converted the guitars to piano, tweaked the arrangements, and added some weird drones. The end result is a dark piano/drone EP with a contemporary classical feel.
The Caretaker: Everywhere at the End of Time
Do you have six-and-a-half hours to spare for a concept album about the stages of dementia? If you answered “yes,” let’s talk about Everywhere at the End of Time for a minute (not 6.5 hours).
The album starts with sweet nostalgia and the vibrancy of a sampled big band. It’s like stepping into a ballroom memory from a century ago. The chandelier glimmers, lighting the lithe steps of dancers in their dresses and suits. The band starts slowly and peacefully, with floating piano notes, gentle trumpets, and plodding upright bass.
But as time passes, instruments stumble in and out of the mix, distorting with static. A voice, a ghost, croons over the decaying arrangements. You can’t leave, and you can’t say if this is the first time you’ve been here. Is it a dream, or is it history? Did you live through this?
The dancers turn to dust as the chaotic sound collage cascades into a pulsing void.
Jute Gyte: Synthemata
Jute Gyte is a one-man project known for wild experimentation, especially in the realm of microtonal black metal. Synthemata contains 0% microtonal black metal. But that’s a good thing. For all the Aphex Twin fans out there: think of this as Jute Gyte’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume II.
Synthemata’s 16 songs run for over two hours. Minimalistic synths loop and drone to create a haunting, alien atmosphere. It sounds like an otherworldy offshoot of dark ambient and dungeon synth, but nothing here will inspire you to wear chainmail, joust, or fight dragons. Instead, Synthemata acts as the ancient warlock casting a spell to trap you in the foggy fields of your mind.
Atrium Carceri: The Old City - OST
Here’s a prime example of an OST being the best part of a game. In The Old City - Leviathan, you explore the remnants of a dead society. While the dystopian, dreamlike environment draws you in, the actual gameplay gives you little to do. Plus, the philosophical dialogue gets long-winded and convoluted.
HOWEVER - this OST rules and is one of my all-time favorite dark ambient albums. There’s an undercurrent of sadness running through everything, from the soft bells of “Childhood I” to the mellow strings of “Sheol.” The OST broods as much as it soothes and is a much more fascinating journey than the game it accompanies.
Snowspire: Hoarfrost Compendium
Hoarfrost Compendium compiles five Snowspire full-lengths into one release that’s a pure distillation of winter magic. Like Synthemata, Hoarfrost Compendium draws from dungeon synth and dark ambient, but its cold embrace is much more comforting. It’s the musical equivalent of trekking through an icy forest toward snow-capped mountains, much like the artic fox on the album cover.
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