Gustaf Hildebrand - Heliopause

There have been too many years which have elapsed since we were gifted a new album from Gustaf Hildebrand. He works with others from time to time, bequeathing us with projects like Lacus Somniorum or collaborative material such as the album he did with Arcana's Peter Bjargo (which was recently re-issued you lucky people) but when he's left alone is when the brilliance flows brightest. Hildebrand does not do the usual excursions into darkness, he's not content with just turning out the lights. When you play his offerings, you have committed yourself to the entire release. It is impossible to pick through what he does, the alienated density almost revokes those rules of dimensional space and then pulls you into the burning vindictive heart of the storm. No, there's no sense of direction to be found within this carnivorous dervish put on disc; you can only pray whatever it is you're doing doesn't offend this beast. Before I forget, he also has done an album under the name of Lithium which was the beginning of all this... a saga that drags one out from whatever hiding place you've found and then eviscerates you with a linoleum knife.

When it comes to confrontation, Hildebrand is the master of capturing it sonically. You can keep your pretty boy martial industrial, boys, Heliopause is the bloodied fist you'd encounter during the final round of an exhaustive boxing match. The protagonists are too drained to deliver the last blow, they cling to one another in a dazed delirium of abuse and yet they know they must see this through to the bitter end. A winner and a loser will emerge even if they don't want to know who will be playing whom. Listening to this record is also much the same as getting those final transmissions from any form of government structure left after the planet has been lost and utterly overrun by a new, dominant life form. The sagging weight of futility bears down hard upon that voice you hear and all around outside you witness the beginning of the end. Cast out into an endless blizzard of myriad flurries which break down every last nuance of sanity you have, to know this man's work is to plumb the depths of your own soul.

His is a style of intense reverberations, saturating waves of pounding electronics cascade over you; further and further down you are shoved into the cold, poisonous waters until your lungs fill with this acrid fluid and you sink to the bottom unremarked and unremembered. It is this sensation and the bewilderment of getting overthrown by a sheer wall of exploding strobes that is the sweetest reward. Gustaf comes straight out of the bottle right at you, he wastes no time on building up tension or rationing out the dread: he shoves you face first into a caustic ocean of pure, burning Mercury. Out all night screaming at the stars while the forges explode their sparks without any pause. The vocal samples employed lend themselves wonderously to the inhuman, vulcanized atmosphere of decimation this new work has by the bucket load. Anyone else out there who is considering the field of dark ambient / post humanity expression would do well to listen to this release first and then frankly appraise what you could possibly add.

He hits all the right notes, as he always does. No feeling is left unmolested no hope is allowed to thrive. This man is authoritative in how he chooses to put his tracks together as they never drift nor do they ever become indulgent. Heliopause is a rabid, lean Hyena stalking wounded prey after the sun has gone down. The scent of blood and all the coppery mortality it encapsulates is what breathes life into these almost ritualistic hymns which strip away our thinking mind's evolutionary insulation and return us to a much more primal state. Instinct is king here, I dare any of you to lie back and close your eyes to what is going on here. Odds are, if your countenance waivers you will never find your way back because this is a purely visceral collection that will refine your darker urges whether you want it to or not. It might even expose them to you for the very first time, an edgy return to the land where the sun has died... yet somehow life carries on. And what grotesquely absorbing life it is. Apr 15 2012