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Amenti Suncrown, "Zenith Pitch"
The band's name makes striking reference to the Egyptian underworld, and for those non-Egyptologists who didn't get that this would be a dark and ghost-filled album, its provocative title also paints a pitch-black sun. Fluttering and nervous, brooding and cinematic, Zenith Pitch is a nebulous animal which changes it shape & color from moment to moment, like a panicked octopus. With the exception of a few very catchy tracks, like "Blue Khepra" and "Broken Cone," the album tends to focus on the more difficult margins of the dark ambient genre.My favorite track, "White Nine", is pretty representative, although just a fragment at 1:44: An ominously swelling organic drone flips into electronic sparks, while in the distance the music of a circus is slowly enveloped by darkness and abruptly fades into silence. Out of a constantly shifting sea of bleeps and burps, interrupted themes, muttered samples, voices fractured & barely audible, distorted & restless tones, beautiful drones, and bursts of awkward rhythms, this technically polished album somehow manages to evoke a sense of attentive stillness, of a quiet restraint and sparseness behind all the protean activity.
Zenith Pitch has a few weak spots: despite my sense that there's some order to all this restless movement, it leaves me struggling now and then with a feeling of aimlessness, and its musical antecedents — Coil, Scorn, Lustmord, Zoviet France, Nurse With Wound, even Eno — seem at times to weigh in a bit heavily. The trio has a canny ear for samples & lays them down well, but I also think the work suffers from a lack of vocals: without lyrics, the album as a whole, whatever its virtues, remains something of an indecipherable message. If this showed up in my mailbox, it would be an ornate and meticulously crafted envelope, inlaid with gems and crystals, sent from a country of dreams, but with no letter inside. However, since Khryst takes credit in the liner notes for backmasking, perhaps all the real communication only happens when it's played backwards!
The other night I was playing the beautiful fifth track, a chilly travelogue called "Fractured Diadem", when a friend — a Tibetan Buddhist monk, actually — stopped by. He stopped at the door and listened, and said "Cool, you're watching Forbidden Planet, I love that movie!" With that the whole album fell into place for me. For all its borrowings and references, Amenti Suncrown are so distinctive because they're the Krell Musicians from Forbidden Planet: "Ethically, as well as technologically, a million years ahead of humankind!" Although the latter may certainly be true, it is a quirky alien sound that seems to me to be emerging from the heart of this musical project: difficult to get a handle on emotionally, but hauntingly suggestive of strange landscapes of pure thought, of which this often enigmatic music is the sole remaining artifact.
I like this album, and I like what Amenti Suncrown seem to be striving for. I also like that out of a print run of 1000 individually numbered copies of an obviously expensive CD package, they've already given away — as in for free! — the majority of the pressing to people online who'd expressed interest. If by the time you read this there is a single copy left anywhere, I'd suggest acquainting yourself with this promising trio — sooner or later I expect we'll all be getting to know them much better. If you've missed your chance at Zenith Pitch, you won't have long to wait for a sequel: I'm told that ZP's darker twin Golden Nadir is due from World Serpent in late June on amber vinyl only, in a numbered edition of 333.
 
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