Beschreibung

According to the biography, both sides of this dark ambient split contain the banjo, which immediately grabbed my attention. The banjo is not a very common instrument in the dark music scenes but, as you might know, black metal band Taake threw a brilliant banjo solo in his song Myr .

And if he can do that, all dark music producers can do that. I might probably do that too on one of my upcoming Misantronics releases, who knows. But for now, I ll just enjoy these two elongated drone tracks (plus epilogue). After all, it s still Sunday and I m still into slow and gloomy.

Swamp Flower Rhyme is a duo, started by Tobias Kalt, guitarist for Forlet Sires. He focuses on minimal drones with guitars, tape loops and synthesizers. Longing is exactly that, a long, droning piece of dark ambient, with 21.44 minutes the longest on this split. Minimalism is definitely a keyword here and the whole thing reminds me of something between Raison D Etre and Dirk Serries. Yep, that s a compliment.

Aeronaut (Steve Fors from Shovels Beat The Sun) delivered two tracks, the fifteen minutes lasting drone ambient track American Gothic and the short Epilogue . The first one is weird, driving on what sounds like a broken techno sequence and gradually getting darker, noisier. I like this kind of experimentality, even when it starts nudging towards the harsh noise scene. Epilogue closes in style by being a nice ambient tune.

In all, this is a very interesting split with over forty minutes of excellent ambient experimentation. I can only recommend it to all you droners out there. Buy the album, dim the lights, lay down, press play and let your imagination do the rest. You won t regret it… (Merchants Of Air)