TenHornedBeast - Hunts & Wars

I want to tell you a secret today. I am sure that it will not sound strange to you, but I really love long walks through the woods and over the mountains and I use to repeat such walks quite often. But not those crowded trips with friends and their families. There is nothing more purifying than wandering alone on my own, recalculating and rethinking, getting rid of heavy thoughts that are accumulated during the everyday routine. This kind of a "leisure time" always rises up memories of the moments in life that influenced my way of thinking and implanted a grain of abstract sensibility into my consciousness. Without a doubt, one of the fundamental parts of my youth was an introduction to the world of occultism through different forms of art, like literature and music. I don't remember exactly when and why I encountered with this mysterious world, but what I remember pretty clear is the delight and inner excitement from the new discovery, something that is completely different from my previous experiences, and I must admit, those feelings continue to stay with me for more than 20 years already.

Though some memories evaporate with each year that passes for me, few manifestations of a true art remain with me until now and they stay with me to remind about those special moments in my past. One of these acts is a UK based duo Endvra that guided me through 90ies alongside with the fiction of HP Lovecraft, and it continues to visit my CD player until today. Stephen Pennick and Christopher Walton created dozens of unforgettable soundscapes enough to conjure the horde of demons during ten years of their craftsmanship. I cannot even describe all the depth of my disappointment when this glorious band split up on the edge of millennium leaving a lot of vacuum in the genre of ritualistic ambient music.

But one of the members of Endvra couldn't rest on his laurels for a long time, some internal impulse forced him to return with his new ideas and that's how TenHornedBeast was born. Christopher Walton transformed the experience which he had gained during extremely successful years with Endvra into something different but yet fascinating enough to release more than ten albums and collaborative projects starting from 2004.This time, I take "Hunts & Wars" for the early morning walk through a dripping forest soaked with a predawn mist to become a devoted companion in my leisurely wandering.

With the first minutes of this record's run, I begin to realize that I didn't make a mistake in my judgment when I had chosen it for such an occasion. Mr. Walton definitely obtained the ancient knowledge and gained an ability to apply it in his daring experimentations with a structure of sound. Well-know ritualistic melodies and quotes from occult books were left behind to open a lot of space for ambience. My faithful reader, don't try to search for the form in music, but its spirit is much more important because it is all about the spirit in its purest incarnation. Heavy bass guitar drones move either slowly or very slowly forward creating an extremely gloomy atmosphere. A dark background melody floats somewhere high above the music defining a chaotic infinity which has specific points of contact with the main notional drive. This is the exact moment when the abstract thinking is needed; formless noises roll over, random drum and percussion beats join them here and there without any visible purpose for the structure. Sometimes it seems that all the instruments exist on their own, but their combination and cooperation through the compositions of TenHornedBeast create a truly hypnotic picture.

There is almost no need to concentrate on each track, at least not from the first listening. Remember the spiritual side, don't you? Yet, after three or four runs I begin to recognize the specific moments and parts of this record. It's obvious that the main action is inside three long compositions and all the rest are the areas of transition between them to insert some changes in a very dense hypnotism before it makes an irreversible damage to the listener with its heavy drones. It takes almost five minutes for the first track to saddle up, but finally it reaches the point when guitar riffs release their energy in terms of a high frequency noise generator which is guided by a slow drum beat. "Father of the Frost" raises his wand of ice and breathes with a chilly wind enthroning impenetrable darkness all over the earth; while the same techniques are being exploited to spread the layers of delusion all over the place. A gloomy piece of "Hunts & Wars" is the last and the longest composition of the album where the droning bass guitar continues to jerk off an extreme tension of something really creepy that crawls hidden in the shadows of a darkest night hour.

Even while being quite monotonous and sometimes predictable, this new record from Christopher Walton succeeds to impress me compared to his previous creations of his reincarnation as TenHornedBeast. "Hunts & Wars" organically fits into my current mood and keeps me well entertained on my early morning walk. "I have never found a companion that was as companionable as solitude." (Henry David Thoreau). But this time my solitude had a worthy companion in the sound of the record from Christopher Walton. Aug 19 2014