After a 6 year hiatus, experimental dark ambient producer Roto Visage finally resurfaces to deliver his new full length album Out Of Print. This album commemorates "10 years of audio sodomy"; over those ten years he has put out 14 releases on various labels including Autumn Wind Productions and Beast Of Prey, several of these being collaborative albums with acts such as Atum, Inner Vision Laboratory, Mystified, and Worms of the Earth. As with his previous work, Out Of Print is distinctly grounded in a dark ambient foundation, but utilizes various harsh, psychedelic, and enigmatic textures that veer out of the sphere of traditional ambient music. Each song has a strange & shifting path; one that winds as it works its way through its duration. As far as I know this is the first Roto Visage album to work with beats/percussion and the results are quite good. For example, "Mycelium" has an excellent psychedelic passage with dreamy atmospherics and a plodding rhythm which meshes brilliantly with his dark atmospherics, and "Network" is a bizarre amalgam of mutilated 80s industrial, ambient, and witch house-esque elements. Overall, the music is full of tangible darkened moods, while also being unpredictable and abstract (yet controlled and not chaotic). This is something to check out for those who are looking for the overall characteristics and mood(s) of dark & ritual ambient music, but want something with more excitement, volatility and capriciousness than your standard fare. It will certainly take you to places you don't see coming. While I liked his previous full length Where The Mandrakes Grow quite a bit, I think that this album is his best and most refined work for sure. For fans of Aural Hypnox, Handmade Birds, all the Coil type bands, and so forth.
[ check it out ]
[ official website ]
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