Kristof Bathory, active under this name as well as, currently or previously, being in, or behind, Dawn Of Ashes, Cryo Chamber Collaboration or Void Stasis, started a new project recently, called Bleak Haven. This review will focus on the first recording under that regime.
That one is called Oblivion, and it is themed around a horrific science-fictional story. There was a deep-space mission, Icarus-9, supposed to provide a safe haven for the human kind, ‘a sterile laboratory orbiting in the endless dark’. In the vein of movies like Alien, Life or Pitch Black, an alien, an almost immortal (life) form, vile, hostile, parasitic, merciless, penetrates the human colony. Oblivion is a soundtrack for abhorrence, anguish, atrocity and tardy introspection. Deterioration, remoteness and apprehension are left…
The result is a seven-chaptered adventure, completely written, recorded and performed by Kristof. The album gets released via the strongly upcoming Dark Odyssey Records label, whose crew (represented by the kind human being Devin Sabatini) took care of both mastering and artwork as well. When it comes to that visual part, well, the cover represents the terrifying character of the concept for sure: a wide-open eye(lid), blood-soaked, paralyzed in its focus on an invisible horror. Anyway, Oblivion is digitally available, of course, as well as in digipack format (glass-mastered, two-folded).
The album clocks about one hour and is divided into seven chapters (lasting in between seven and eleven minutes). It’s more Drone / Ambient laden than the works under the Kristof Bathory moniker, yet at least as frightening and Lovecraftian in atmosphere.
Celestrial Void, the opener (and no, there’s no mistake in that song title’s grammar; it is ‘celestrial’ with that ‘r’ in between), is a fine example of this album’s nature. It starts off with a pushing drone-sound, mesmeric waves and long-themed lines, soon morphing towards rather orchestral proportions, injected by deep industro-electronic tides and cosmic streams. It’s oppressive, very downwardly oppressing, yet still maintaining an illuminating finesse that surrounds that obscure oppression. At about half of this composition, things turn into quite psycho-astral spheres, while still focusing on that equilibrium in between subduality and immensity. Step by step, through permanently interacting and interchanging synth-lines and analog manipulations, the whole expands, fades back, and expands once more. The ambience is cold, asphyxiating, ominous…
It’s just a fragment of a complete sci-fi soundscore, which continuously extorts and forces the listener’s endurance. Chthonic Frequencies, for example, promulgates doom and despair, although the sonic content continues the path taken with the opening piece. Industrial drones, pseudo-schizoid symphonies and visionary melodic substances (forgive me my use of anti-poetic liberalism) create an apocalyptic painting of intrinsic horror through profound sonic consonance. With surgical precision, Bleak Haven sculptures bombast and minimalism into one breath-taking sonic phenomenon. Abyssal Dreams, with its rough timbre and subtle beats, its subtly-evolving yet discrete melodicism and the fine-tuned additional elements; the raw-edged and post-industrialized effects and the haunting, even provocative harmonies of Echoes From The Tomb Of Time (such excellent title too, don’t you think); the sheer claustrophobia and paralyzing eeriness behind the sonorities of Last Offering To The Nameless One (possibly my favorite chapter on this album, for what it is worth), with its hidden layers of gloom; what about the dreamlike [= nightmarish?] sound-designing that characterizes The Discordant Zephyr, including carefully injected details, such as these bird-like sounds or distant-orbital-like textures at the background; or the arduous tension that defines the eldritch principles of The Whispering Threshold; all of these chapters are part of one cohesive narrative of the most intriguing aural signature.
…which makes it easy to conclude: a necessary work of bleak ambient magnificence!
https://darkodysseyrecords.bandcamp.com/album/oblivion
https://www.darkodysseyrecords.com/bleak-haven-oblivion
https://www.concreteweb.be/reviews/kristof-bathory