The Lamp of no Light

Probably best known for his 1990's work with dark-ambient occultists ENDVRA, Christopher Walton controls layers of sub-sonic drones and abstract noise to create a vision that is bleaker and darker than its predecessor.
TenHornedBeast harnesses waves of coiling, shimmering ambience only to see them crash down on distorted bass and sporadic, chaotic drums.
Guitars and bass divide, merge and divide again forcing monochrome washes of dissonance to illuminate black walls of reverb.
Powered by biblical prophecy and oppressive volume TenHornedBeast stalks the neither-neither world where sound is invocation and screaming feedback calls down the elder night.

For his first release since 2017’s "Death Has No Companion", Christopher Walton (ex-Endvra), a thirty-year veteran of Industrial music, has dragged TenHornedBeast back to its pounding Doom-Ambient roots and recorded his darkest album yet, as a sonic veneration of a medieval sculpture depicting the torment of the damned in Hell.
In the crypt of York Minster, built directly on the site of the Roman citadel, is the Doom Stone.
A relic from the 12th century the stone, carved in deep relief, illustrated for a medieval audience the horrors that awaited sinners in Hell.
Figures depicting Luxury and Avarice are licked by flames, leering demons hold a tortured soul in a furnace and the Mouths of Hell gape, their nostrils licked by toads.
Here beneath one of the jewels of Western Christendom is a talisman so shocking, so contrary to the modern mind that the very faith that created it has abandoned it.
The five suitably monolithic pieces on 'The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The Yorkshire Doom Stone)' form a journey, starting with the first mortal death and ending with the second eternal death of the soul.
Walton has used the darkest textures and heaviest drones as way-markers on this journey, as hymns to exalt the scenes shown on the stone.
"TenHornedBeast is a vehicle for the sinister current that is woven through life.
If Christ is the Light of the World and hymns are sung to him in the Minster then my hymns should be heard in the crypt, where the Doom Stone radiates its No-Light. Without darkness, the light is meaningless".

6-panel digipak with photography by the artist.

Tracklist:
I - This Is The First Death (10:14)
II - Into The Mouth Of Hell (12:06)
III - Upon Their Head Names Of Blasphemy (7:42)
IV - Black Furnace (9:04)
V - This Is The Second Death (13:18)

« back