Year: 2026
Label: Steinklang Industries
In the past year or so, I’ve been on a heavy Kenneth Grant trip (see here). I’ve been reading the nine books that constitute his so-called Typhonian Trilogies, which in Grant’s confusing, scarcely consistent and logical fashion delve into the mauve zones of his particular brand of Magick. And despite sometimes feeling like being stuck in the Vale of Apophis during this ordeal, Grant’s occasional brilliant vivaciousness can’t help but colour my perception of things.
Case in point, US ritual dark ambient project Infinexhuma’s most recent tape, Savagery Of The Celestial Forearm. There’s relatively little in the imagery of the release to tie it in with Grant’s Typhonian version of Thelema. And yet, I cannot help but hear reverberations and vague adumbrations of the Tunnels of Set in here.
Quite obviously, Savagery Of The Celestial Forearm is deeply esoteric and occult, and there is a definite chthonic current to the music. Track titles such as Telesmic Rites To All In The Below World leave little doubt about that. However, there’s nothing particularly denominational to be discovered here. Rather sensibly, the US project keeps thing more or less open-ended, allowing for a sort of thematic apophenia.
In a sense, this describes the music as well. Consisting of subterranean, buried drones, ritual percussion reverberating from some distance away, sparsely used inhuman vocalizations, hums and various nondescript sound sources, Infinexhuma’s music doesn’t define itself too constrictively. Is the setting a black magick ritual? Is it a slow descent into the inverse realm beyond Daath? Is it a nightmare landscape? Is it a meditation?
The abstraction provides no set answers. Which is exactly the right approach. Infinexhuma may have had a very specific thematic concept in mind when creating this piece of music, but they do not force it upon the listener experiencing the tape. This gives the tape album both depth and versatility.
Musically, it’s pretty easy to categorize Savagery Of The Celestial Forearm as ritualistic dark ambient. Which in itself is, of course, a pretty vast and vague category, ranging from Halo Manash’ ritualistic drone to Zero Kama’s ethno-tribal ambient. Within this field, Infinexhuma come closer to Halo Manash, but place far more focus on dominant percussive elements.
There’s a couple of qualities to the tape I find particularly conducive to creating an evocative atmosphere. The first is the sense of distance. The production feels like the music is coming from an indeterminate distance away; bouncing from the walls of a long, concrete passageway, or maybe through benighted caverns deep beneath the earth, or maybe from beyond the veil of planes. The second is the rumbling, almost murky quality of the drones; these sometimes wash out details of the sound, but also make Savagery Of The Celestial Forearm sound massive and imposing, like a storm across the horizon.
Musically, Savagery Of The Celestial Forearm is far from the most original ritualistic dark ambient. If you’ve immersed yourself into the genre, most of what’s on offer on this tape will be familiar, from the subterranean drones to the chime of ritual beels to the howl of inhuman voices. But largely, this doesn’t matter. The potency of the atmosphere makes up for any deficiencies.
Only Death Is Real 