Harme
Ashes of The Soul
Sirenwire, Catalogue number: SW99

There’s always a weird kind of disconnect that comes from listening to dark ambient records in the middle of sunny afternoons, but the weather won’t wait for us so sometimes that’s exactly what we have to do. This here CD from Susan Matthews and Clint Newton’s Harme project (on Matthews’s own Sirenwire imprint) has seven tracks of moody plonking and grating and droning on it, with titles like ‘Flame of the Forest’, ‘Blood Star’ and ‘Shivering Tree’. It’s quite organic sounding, with evil rumbly drones being accompanied by various more physical sounds; clanging bells, piano and the like. Is somebody playing an antler? I think they might be you know. In places it reminds me of the ambient music that happens when shit’s about to get real in the Silent Hill games. Proper shivery creepiness. It’s got the dreadful atmospheres of the likes of Burial Hex but with that earthy physicality of someone like the Rain Drinkers, I suppose. Twitchy, paranoid sounds for late night spook-out action.

Mike, Norman Records, April 2012 (4 out of 5 Stars)