Labels: Ritual Productions
Review by: Alex Deller
I have listened to this album an awful lot since the CD came in the post. An awful, awful lot. And sometimes it’s those ones, the ones that you get a tad too close to that are the hardest to write anything salient about. Tricky, true, but here goes. It’d be a massive fib to say that Bong are exploring wildly different terrain to that uncovered by last year’s brilliant ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ with these two tracks, and yet it hardly seems to matter. Each is sparse yet somehow all-consuming, a pair of slow-to-build exercises in atmosphere and ambience concocted of wordless groans, febrile tremors and layers of sullen murk that swirl around your ankles like an evil mist. This leaves the band swaying at a deserted and somewhat ominous mid-point between Om’s stoned, shamanic vision quests and the dusty meditations of Barn Owl “” a strange place, perhaps, for a band from Newcastle upon Tyne to find themselves, but one well worth visiting if you have endless days at your disposal and a hankering for the chasmic unknown.