TENHORNEDBEAST - 'The Lamp Of No Light'

CSR312CD (April 2022)
CD in 6-panel digipak
Barcode: 0641871745937

For his first release since 2017’s "Death Has No Companion", Christopher Walton (ex-Endvra), a thirty-year veteran of Industrial music, has dragged TenHornedBeast back to its pounding Doom-Ambient roots and recorded his darkest album yet, as a sonic veneration of a medieval sculpture depicting the torment of the damned in Hell.

In the crypt of York Minster, built directly on the site of the Roman citadel, is the Doom Stone. A relic from the 12th century the stone, carved in deep relief, illustrated for a medieval audience the horrors that awaited sinners in Hell. Figures depicting Luxury and Avarice are licked by flames, leering demons hold a tortured soul in a furnace and the Mouths of Hell gape, their nostrils licked by toads. Here beneath one of the jewels of Western Christendom is a talisman so shocking, so contrary to the modern mind that the very faith that created it has abandoned it.

The five suitably monolithic pieces on 'The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The Yorkshire Doom Stone)' form a journey, starting with the first mortal death and ending with the second eternal death of the soul. Walton has used the darkest textures and heaviest drones as way-markers on this journey, as hymns to exalt the scenes shown on the stone.

"TenHornedBeast is a vehicle for the sinister current that is woven through life. If Christ is the Light of the World and hymns are sung to him in the Minster then my hymns should be heard in the crypt, where the Doom Stone radiates its No-Light. Without darkness, the light is meaningless".

6-panel digipak with photography by the artist.

Track listing:

I - This Is The First Death (10:14)
II - Into The Mouth Of Hell (12:06)
III - Upon Their Head Names Of Blasphemy (7:42)
IV - Black Furnace (9:04)
V - This Is The Second Death (13:18)





Reviews:

"A solemn funerary dirge for the condemned... a sombre and truly miserable exploration of the relic through his earthy approach to dark ambient, eschewing any elaborate ornamentation or trickery and instead focusing on creating a grim, lightless world that whoever carved that stone would feel right at home with... There’s something hopeless but reverential here, the sense that hell awaits us all and that humanity is better off resigning themselves to that fact. Not a cheery thought but TenHornedBeast has never been about smiles and sunshine, and this is him at his gloomy best."

"Music needs to find the right moment and hot weather isn't necessarily the right sort of thing for the chilled ambience of, say, Tenhornedbeast. Today it's still mild springtime, but with lots of sun and still (!) I enjoyed this. Maybe I happen to be in the mood or state of mind to receive the ominous dark tones from Tenhornedbeast? The music sustains and rings loudly through reverb, hammers deep into the mind and is spooky as hell... Beautifully scary stuff." (Vital Weekly)

"Fünf längeren Vertonungen, deren musikalisches Fundament im ungemütlichen Sektor von Dronen und anderweitigen schwerwiegenden Texturen verankert ist. Die dabei aufkommende Unruhe nimmt im weiteren Verlauf noch zu, was sich unter anderem in drückender Perkussion äußert ehe sich düstere Schwaden im weiteren Verlauf ihren Weg freibahnen, um unvorsichtigen Seelen zu zusetzen... TenHornedBeast serviert uns am Ende eine finstere Klangreise... im fortgeschrittenen Verlauf, Dunkelheit und Beklemmung enorm an Bedeutung gewinnen". (Raben Report)