I travel for a living, and as I was listening to this record, planning my angle of approach to this very review, I found myself on the road again, this time traveling through a particularly unseemly part of St. Louis. (No disrespect to the fine folks of the Gateway City, but the city beside Interstate 70 between the stadiums and the airport is a bit squalid.) Down by the riverfront stands a fading line of factories, some of them new and some seemingly as old as the river itself, smokestacks jutting up into the sky like the skeletal fingers of the industrialized beast. Staring out the van window and hitting the city just at twilight, I watched as the shadows played long across the factories and the crumbling brick tenements and the warehouses, across broken glass and boarded windows and graffiti-stained walls. I watched them play across all these enormous and seemingly abandoned vestiges of a decaying urban scene, all of it desolate and, while perhaps not devoid of the living, certainly devoid of life.
And as I watched, I listened to Idolatriae, and in those moments of twilight, the combination of sight and sound was perfect. I know that’s all more than just a bit melodramatic, and I certainly won’t lie and say that I had some massive epiphany on the state of contemporary urban society–I’m just not that deep. But I bring it up because it was one of those moments where everything comes together such that one feels like the star of one’s own private film, where the music fits so perfectly with the visual that it’s like the score you shouldn’t be hearing, but yet you are. It was a fleeting moment, but yet one perfectly suited for dark ambient music, the shadowy twilight and the oppressively empty cityscape entwined in some dirty industrial-gothic beauty, and I felt like I and my five companions were the sole survivors of some twisted apocalypse. (Whether or not I’d want to be stuck on an empty planet with these clowns… Well, that’s another story.)
I believe that Italy’s Eidulon is the work of one man, and this seven-song batch of ambient industrial is his first release after a seven-year hiatus. In my pre-review research (yes, I do research, despite not knowing how many people are in the band), the word that came up most often when discussing Eidulon was “bleak,” and I’d say that’s an apt descriptor of this mix of otherworldly ambient eeriness and worldly industrial—and occasionally actually musical—sturm und drang. In fact, prior to my inadvertent blundering into the ugly side of St. Louis, I was going to use another, vastly different cinematic comparison for the visuals that Idolatriae brought to my mind’s eye: the wind-ravaged, rocky exterior of the planet Acheron in the science fiction movie Aliens—the combination of the harsh, forbidding environment and the filthy, mechanized encampment whose unlucky inhabitants became unwilling incubators. (Sidebar: Aliens is one of the best films ever.)
Not quite as mechanical nor as rhythmic as Malignant label-mates Koerperwelten (a review of whose recent record I’m also working on), Idolatriae’s industrial elements are more insidious, rising up through brooding soundscapes, through slow-building drones that are equal parts evocative and eerily empty. These industrial touches take the form of distant crashes, thunderous clanging pieces of metal, hissing static, the thumping of some underground machine, gears grinding and pistons pumping to the martial beat of “Isolamento dello Folle”…
I’ll admit that, as intriguing as I find this record, my interest wanes a bit in the latter tracks. Regrettably, the second section never really steps out of the blueprint set by the better, more developed first half, and the record begins to seem repetitive by the end. That said, in the grand scheme of things, a lack of progression across the entire record isn’t a deal-breaker, at least not to these ears, and I’ve found myself returning to both this disc and the Koerperwelten quite a lot lately. Also, it’s worthy of mention when mentioning the ears: as with any ambient release, Idolatriae must be tackled whilst in the right frame of mind—those searching for anything more engaging than a slowly unfolding unsettling atmosphere will be, at best, confused and, at worst, bored senseless.
In the past year, I’ve begun exploring the world of ambient music, a world I’d previously avoided because I couldn’t see the appeal of actively listening to passive noises. But the more I dig in, the more I dig this kind of thing. I wouldn’t wish a trip through the dark parts of St. Louis upon any man, but if you’re up for a symbolic sonic journey through the decay of the post-modern world, Idolatriae will do the trick nicely. A very solid dark ambient record. Well done.
