Randal Collier-Ford Bestows A Story of Abomination and Dread Wonder in His Latest Album
High concepts, masterful sound design, and eloquent, unsettling world-building: this a lexicon of requisite to which Randal Collier-Ford excels. His newest release, Advent, available from Cryo Chamber, is a master’s stroke of unsettling, exotic aural textures. Purveyors of the finest in cinematic dark ambient, Cryo Chamber is releasing some of their finest material in this year, alone, and this album is testament to both Ford’s masterful grasp of ambience, as well as Cryo Chambers excellent roster masters in droning soundscapes.
RCF has created a story within this album, a high concept of darkened science fiction and dread apocalyptic resonance - a confection containing the imprinting influences of Lovecraft, Bloch, and Derleth, with some sprinkling, even, of Burroughs (albeit a horrible, malformed, even demonic Burroughs!), along with RCF’s own imagination, building upon the tumultuous foundations of existential dread, forbidden knowledge, lost cult practices, and dreaded wonders beyond the grasp and fathom of humanity’s limited cognizance. Drawled string passages, lilting wind instruments with undulating throat gutturals interspersed - this is a soundtrack of alien divinity and oblation. The music paints a picture of dread wonder, yet with fear and awe, while also displaying a fecund, primal human nature, even hinting at the familiarity of these creatures referenced within the album’s liner notes. As a whole, this album feels like bearing witness to an ancient ritual to which man does not belong.
Three tracks - beefy tracks, mind you, with a special guest appearance by Northumbria in Track 2 - eschewing vistas of tremulous sound design and tapestry; this whole album is unnerving and alien, yet familiar. To listen is to feel at once familiar with some elements, yet Ford delivers his masterful flourishes of sound design, a thick viscous anointing of slow, methodical tension. Elements not only of dark ambient and droning, but also elements of marital industrial, cadence of ritualism that bring the story to an oblique and unsettling end. This is an story of discovery and of trespassing onto sacred lands untouched by humans; but it is also the presentation of forbidden secrets, of creatures unknown to the world, and yet we are given glimpses at the ungodly beasts, the abominations of time and space, surrounded by their cultist followers. Again, the beauty of these Cryo Chamber albums is their oblique narrative - the way they open their stories wide enough for an initial introduction, but then they leave the listener to their own imaginations, to which this album excels.
Aesthetic with these types of albums is important, and the presentation of this album is unique, building upon Ford's previous works, while presenting a whole new iconography, a timbre of unease, especially manifest in the costumes and set pieces displayed on the cover and within the pages of the booklet that accompanies the album. This is one of the finest albums of the year, and one of the best in Cryo Chamber’s celebrated catalogue. Advent releases on November 17, 2020 in digital, vinyl, and CD digipak on the Cryo Chamber Bandcamp page.
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