REVIEWS

Buy this album from iTunes

Netherworld
Kall: The Abyss Where Dreams Fall

Mondes Eliptiques

Posted: Wednesday, April 09, 2008
By: Matthew Johnson
Assistant Editor

Best known for his arctic-themed ambient recordings and the Glacial Movements label he founded to promote them, Netherworld's Alessandro Tedeschi offers on Kall: The Abyss Where Dreams Fall a work of more classic dark ambient, very much in the vein of what you might expect from the Cold Meat Industry label. A single work divided into four parts, Kall is certainly cold enough, but it lacks the peaceful tranquility of Tedeschi's other recent work, opting instead for a sense of oppression and dread. The album's titular abyss is present from the very beginning as breaths echo through cavernous hollows of reverb, snippets of bowed strings flutter like bats near the ceiling, and mournful choirs wail distantly into the endless depths. About 15 minutes in, Tedeschi takes a more industrial direction, with achingly slow percussion sounds and bursts of electronic tone arising sharply then fading gradually into metallic echoes. Hollow windy sounds and moaning foghorns enhance the sense of loneliness, and drawn-out drones under eerie chiming are like hollow exhalations, too tortured to be called mere sighs, but too exhausted to qualify as moans. As its title so aptly suggests, Kall: The Abyss Where Dreams Fall is hopelessness itself, conjured through sound, and if it lacks some of the originality that marks Netherworld's very best work, it's an admirable opus sure to please fans of similarly bleak soundscapes like Raison d'Etre's In Sadness, Silence, and Solitude or Lycia's A Day in the Stark Corner.