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Dark ambient musicians renounce the genre's heavenly hum for the infernal simmer, the play of light for the shadows. They think, “What if this turned into a horror movie?” The style has crested in recent years with the likes of Demdike Stare and the Haxan Cloak, whose wide dynamic ranges of choked, blackened drones, windy death rattles, unnerving knocks, and postmortem shrieks nod back to 1980s post-industrial dirges.
Morals and Dogma, the Norwegian musician Helge Sten’s third solo album as Deathprod, floats like a menacing bridge between then and now. Sten calls his assortment of cobbled-together, often archaic electronic devices—tape echo machines, theremins, analog ring modulators, etc.—his “audio virus,” which had already infected his past bands Motorpsycho and Supersilent before taking center stage here. Here, Sten enlists Motorpsycho’s guitarist and violinist, and together they ride through heaving stone vistas with occult intensity. Sudden outcrops of gongs break up the toxified horizon dragged out by the violin, but an eerie songfulness also keeps creeping in, especially the sublime saw centerpiece in the otherwise lightless caverns of “Dead People’s Things.” Morals and Dogma is heavy without harshness, threatening without theatrics, and it shudders inside a silence so large, it could only follow the end of the world. –Brian Howe
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