Hold hands and take a journey into loneliness and despair. We have all been there, we just put the soundtrack together to your terror. Welcome to a place of warmth and tears.
For this new release, the ‘dev’ and the ‘ant’ did sign once more to Raubbau, a sadly underestimated yet truly stunning label within spheres of (quite generally seen) Ambient, Experimental, Drone and Industrial. After 2022’s The Baring Teeth on Raubbau, as well as Progression Of The Wolf (re-released last year via Reverse Alignment; link for the review: see below), the duo Devin (instruments and song-writing) and Anthony (lyrics and vocals) came up with a new epos to finish their trilogy, ‘as somber as it was birthed from chaos and turmoil’.
Besides the digital opportunity, one might also (try to) grab the physical edition, which is a quite limited cassette version. It comes with sober yet marvellous cover artwork / photography, taken care of by this label’s close relationship / member Salt, representing a black-and-white picture of a thistle (I think) surrounded by a dew-covered spider’s web. …minimalistic and simplistic at the one hand, yet it does reveal a lot about the concept behind this third part of a captivating trilogy, beautifully / ingeniously called A Place Of Warmth Of Tears.
This newest epos consists of thirteen titles that clock more than sixty-seven (!) minutes, and in the vein of the former releases, a personal-emotional subjective thematic essence sort of acts like the conceptual core for these thirteen chapters.
This third chapter differs once more, plunging deeper into the bottomless well of gloomy eeriness, sonic mechanics and transcendental minimalism. This time, the cohesive individual pieces are rather well-thought collections of found sources, like field-recorded material, additional noises, and reverberating sounds from different angles. The whole has a specific dark-tuned effect, with a hidden yet imminent and inevitable doom, like a nightmare one cannot escape from, or a suffocating for crawling closer, slowly yet imminent and inescapable. The result is quite crude and shaggy, yet despite the horrid execution, the amalgam of sounds expresses a subtle finesse for sure. It’s like a pile of levels, and when peeling each layer, one comes closer towards, or deeper into, a tar-black pit of unphysical horror; a horror that discloses dark secrets.
The tracks consist of layers manipulated by digital synths, creating heavy drones of anguish and, at the same time, desire. Yet as mentioned, the major part is taken from a vast offer of sonic sources: crackling textures, recorded voices (from unknown sources), additional percussions, manipulated frequencies, varied field recordings, industrialized and mechanoid noises, sonore transmissions, and electroacoustic elements of eldritch nature. Some moments lean over towards cinematic-styled ambience (cf. a composition like Frozen Steps with its semi-sacral nature, the short piece A New Beginning, or the ritualistic hymn Finding My Way Home), yet the better part collects original and tampered sounds especially, as said.
Anyway, the atmosphere has a threatening character and a paradoxical attitude, i.e. the contradiction of a certain illumination caused by the constructive and open-minded use of sonic elements, versus that obscured ‘heart’ behind, beneath, and within the dusk sound structures / destructions.
https://raubbau.bandcamp.com/album/a-place-of-warmth-and-tears
https://www.concreteweb.be/reviews/dev-i-ant
https://dev-i-ant.bandcamp.com/
https://www.darkodysseyrecords.com/
https://raubbau.bandcamp.com/album/the-baring-teeth
https://raubbau.bandcamp.com/album/shadows-tell-truth