Gruntsplatter – Dowsing In The Cancer Lands (Album – Crionic Mind)
Genre/Influences: Ambient-Noise, Dark-Ambient.
Format: Digital, CD.
Background/Info: Scott E. Candey setup Gruntsplatter in the 90s and released considerable number of productions. This new opus however is the first new studio album in fifteen years, he this way reactivated the project and his own label, Crionic Mind.
Content: This album sounds like entering a sonic labyrinth, where you rapidly get lost in endless sonic corridors composed by buzzing sound waves. Sharp noises are progressively joining in accentuating the hostile atmosphere of the work. Quite progressively the tracks create an impression of desolation. There even is a kind of break (cf. “The Scrying Caves”), which however remains driven by elements of Noise.
+ + + : Gruntsplatter created a perfect sonic osmosis between Noise and Dark-Ambient. It’s an overwhelming production with an apocalyptic atmosphere. The work has a strong visual appeal, which will bring you to face your heaviest nightmare. The Noisey input constantly accentuates the feeling of torment and despair.
– – – : Scott E. Candey maybe abused a little bit of the sound formula, which becomes quite repetitive and predictable after a while.
Conclusion: The perception of horror has been masterly adapted into a heavy sonic trip mixing Ambient and Noise.
Best songs: “Scarlet Quarry”, “Rites Of The Briar Maze”, “The Phantom’s Augury”.
Rate: 7.
Artist: www.facebook.com / www.facebook.com/gruntsplatter
Label: www.crionicmind.org
About Gruntsplatter
Gruntsplatter is the primary project of Scott Candey, based in Portland, Oregon. Discogs dates the project to 1994, after about a year of experimenting. Candey also runs the Crionic Mind label and the parallel dark ambient project The Corvidae Cabal.
Early releases include two split CDs in 1998, on Glass Throat Recordings and Crionic Mind, and the CDr “Ertragen” in 1999. The albums “The Death Fires” on Crowd Control Activities in 2000, “Chronicling The Famine” on Desolation House in 2002 and “The Eulogists Assembly” on Eibon Records in 2005 followed, alongside the 2004 rarities set “The Organ Harvest: Unreleased & Rare 1994-1999” on Audio Savant. A twentieth-anniversary reissue of “Bisect” appeared in 2015, and the compilations “Accidental Alchemy: Early Works” and “Dragging The Rivers Of Sleep: Rare & Unreleased” in 2020.
“Dowsing In The Cancer Lands” was issued by Crionic Mind on 29 April 2021 as a twelve-track CD in a six-panel digipak limited to 300 copies, recorded in the winter of 2020, mastered by Thomas Garrison in March 2021 and dedicated to the memory of Nora Candey. The double CD “The Trough Of Armageddon” followed on Phage Tapes and Cipher Productions the same year, then “At The End Of The Road” on Crionic Mind and “Predation Monoliths” on Annihilvs in 2022, and “Black Sea Dream” on Crionic Mind in 2023.
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