Equimanthorn - Lectionum Antiquarum

Extremely busy these days with my PhD, baby and work so I'm just going to make a rudimentary post without trying to describe music I've only recently heard, but something you will have probably listened to already. Equimanthorn is a side project of ex-members of Absu (usually boring US pagan black metal) playing ritual black ambient. Their first album (Nindinuga whatever) had a Sumerian approach and was mainly boring and I've also heard the 2004 Second Sephira Cella which was absolute shit. But this demo compilation rocks. I first heard it when I was 16 or something, just discovering noise/ambient/drone and kind of getting over aspirations to make Satanic rituals myself and fortunately becoming a rational atheist; I got this cd from a stupid far-right black metal magazine that offered it for free. At that time I was studying too hard for school and for eventual access to university plus I had a very demanding girlfriend, which means I was usually exhausted and sleepy. So listening to these dark, ominous, subdued sounds was kinda calming. But oh dear, one afternoon I was sleeping to it, and I had a sleeping paralysis combined with Lovecraftian nightmares while track 3 ("Black Mountain of the North" - great percussive loop and threatening reemerging sounds for 15 minutes) was playing and it scared the shit out of me. On the whole it's fun; there's some stupid very "live ritual" moments (track 4 in particular), but the first two tracks have a cool guitar-bass drone approach, and tracks 6-10 are from a unified session with more elaborate ritual ambient orchestration that is totally Abdul Alhazred-worthy. "The 131st Spell of Ninazu", with its pulsating loop and Azathothian flutes still makes my hair stand up. 1999 cd on Unisound Records.

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