Review Summary: Kreng draws listeners in, as dark ambient is wont to do.
The Summoner’s principal exercise isn’t “The Summoning” itself, but establishing a context for it. Kreng eventually summons
Amenra as dark ambient eventually summons sludge.
There is a lot of silence in this record. The quietened effect would lead you to assume an inconclusive result; that it cannot or ever will make a more forceful indentation in the listener’s experience. As it turns out, this isn’t quite true. Often subdued, it leaves its impression when it has the will to do so, with sound emergent from darkness as if inner turmoil boils to the surface and expels itself as heightened tension swells into the dissonant classical outbursts of “Denial” and “Anger.” It merely bides its time, waiting for an opportune moment as the listener succumbs to regularity in witnessing little eventuation. Then it moves.
A sense of foreboding and apprehension underlie the passing impressions of “Denial” to “Depression.” It seems that something might occur, and one becomes half-expectant that the sound of each of the first four numbers may lead to something. The ambient is definitively dark in nature, encompassing in its environment in which the listener listens tentatively as the sound presents certain comforts whilst instilling trepidation.
Will the impression be lasting? This depends. If the ambient absorbs enough at its least obtrusive, the contrasting extreme brought about by the cathartic heave and presence of
Amenra will seem all the more powerful and potent.
Kreng draws listeners in, as dark ambient is wont to do.
Amenra are the The Summoner’s only voice, and deliver the final and decisive blow in metal. Only then do we come to “Acceptance.”
