When Prophecy Fails - The Hours Of Darkness FLAC

A bit of archival noisiness from aQ pal Monte, who most of you might know as the man behind brooding twangy heavy drifters Burial Tree, as well as the more ambient projects Dark Matter Halo and Time Spent, but the sound of When Prophecy Fails is something else all together, recorded while Monte was still in graduate school, this chunk of blown out digital noise and dense black ambience was in fact inspired by a book about a cult from the fifties, their expectations of the impending apocalypse, and how they dealt with it all when the end of the world did not come to pass (sound familiar?). So if you're reading this, we can assume the most recent extinction event also didn't end up happening, so once again, a legion of doomsdayers are forced to deal with their (and everyone else's) continued existence. And what better way to represent the ever impending apocalypse and the frustration of a million mysterious and undecipherable end of world prophecies, than with clouds of grinding Merzbowian murk, screeching strings, machine gun analog stutter, heaving swirls of grit and grim and glitch, undulating tangles of sculpted hiss, fracture melodic fragments, mysterious samples, haunting stretches of muted electronic shimmer, pocked with jagged shards of digital errata, guitars and violins, doused in effects, the sounds pulled apart until they're fully removed from their sources. The sound chaotic and brutal for much of the disc, but often settling into haunting passages of serene drift, soft psychedelia blurred into crackling swells and muted smears of dense, tense buzz and howl. These brief respites are of course bookended by dizzying bursts of crunch and howl and skree, but even at it's most chaotic and freeform, there does seem to be a method to this musical madness, which comes into clearer focus on the final two tracks.
The first of which is based on recordings of a mentally ill woman (Monte works in the mental health field and captured these recordings with the woman's permission), her voice cracked and weary, the words garbled, but occasionally certain phrases stick out, "can you help me?" being the most disturbing, and they are looped and layered, subtly effected, some reversed, all tangled into a disturbing collage of pain and anguish, which is as fascinating as it is strangely compelling, and of course chilling. Which leads into the final track, which is downright lovely, albeit creepy and sinister and broodingly dark, as if this was in fact the moment of rapture, deep rumbling tones, lush layered droned, slowly shifting over an expanse of deep black nothingness, the instruments coming to the fore, what could be a bit of guitar drifts amidst this abject sprawl of groaning, moaning minimal ambient creep. The sound subtly glitchy, cavernous and dense, a dark strain of black ambient industrial shimmer, the soundtrack to a timelapse film of the end of the world, a cascade of slo-mo blackened churn, that plays out glacially as everything around it, and us, fades into oblivion.
Cool packaging too, printed cardstock inserts, in a stickered plastic sleeve, each disc accompanied by a doomsday fortune, predicting your end, and what you'll experience at the end, along with six unlucky numbers, all printed on a little fortune sized piece of vellum.