Review Summary: Astounding grip of the dark (no dogs out)
Your dog is not home and the night has claws in its chill. How much more dark ambient can you take? A beat rattles and comes closer. Not the end? Endure.
dS0LAT3 drifts in like a broken signal, a transmission struggling to reach your place. Electronic magus EKtos finds you abandoned in a zone of interference where drones hang heavy and metallic echoes grind against silence.
The first track "6831/bXtU" feels like eavesdropping on machines left to dream in ruins, their rhythms collapsing in slow violence. Every other track is also this way. Astounding. The music isolates, filling the air with a static loneliness that seems to stretch walls outward, shadows moving just beyond your sight. Rust falls from the girders overhead. You realise you are surrounded by metal, only pale light to be seen over concrete. By the time “Ice VII” crystallizes into frozen tones, you’re trapped in a landscape where cold is the only constant.
The middle of the album breathes with strange life. “Law and Dignity” hints at voices buried beneath distortion, a tribunal of rasping static. The effect is both narrative and sensory, environments building pressure until the body feels them as much as the ear. Then comes the stretch of endurance. 15-minute closer "dS0LAT3" smolders with tension, never releasing, surrounding, thickening, pressing against every gap until the album feels less like music than a climate.
This is not background sound. It refuses comfort. EKtos has made an album that occupies space in the way weather does: unignorable, hostile, yet alive with detail. This is the most natural thing about the album. Sit with it long enough and you begin to hear not just decay, but strange resilience woven into the static. Wait longer still, and that dog will come home.
