[reviews] afe101cd
amon vs.
mortar: amon vs. mortar

 
chain d.l.k. []
webzine, italy, april 2009

Given the fact this release came out on Afe you have Andrea Marutti squared and that would be enough to give a strong identification to this product. This CD features material from Mortar coming from late 1996, some went to compose its Oktagon LP plus some previously unreleased materials, everything has been molded and reshaped by Marutti with his Amon moniker and if you've confidence with his previous work with such a project you don't have to expect something that different.

It's misty-ambient, dark-ambient music with an incredible amount of mid-low frequencies and keyboards/synths sounds. I think the original sound source for some of the tracks were synths but don't expect those post-black metal releases with cheap ambient keyboards sounding like a third rate horror movie soundtrack. If you strain and work with your imagination I think here and there you can also guess the cut of some of the original sources is someway old-school, but as you can guess Amon has reshaped the whole recordings to give it a new tissue and here you have it, thus don't consider it as old despite it betrays that old school touch lot's of you may appreciate.

Sometimes I've been quite surprised by the fact Marutti has gone quasi-melodic, like in the passage where he used an organ sound to play a sad melancholic harmony that breaks into the wall of misty clouds you can cross for the whole length of the CD. For those of you who already had the chance to taste some of his Eibon materials, here Amon tends to diversify a lot some of the passages even though the global sound of the work is quite uniform but you have more sounds suspended in the background, sometimes lost in reverb, sometimes something strive to get to the surface, the impression is there's something beyond the steam. This effort also reminded me of Amon collaboration with Nimh in the occasion of "Sator", just a bit less heavy and less powerful, but something brought to my mind that monolithic feeling.

At the end of the day it's a really quiet and introspective CD and I think the desolated rocks Abby Helasdottir/Gydja has put on the cover tell us much more of this release than the majority of the words I've written.

[Andrea Ferraris]

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