Sky Burial – Threnody for Collapsing Suns

Written by Sage

Artist:  Sky Burial
Label:  Small Doses / Phage Tapes
Cat. #:  DOSE99/PT:151
Genre: Dark Ambient / Death Industrial / Drone

01. Return to the Peripheries
02. The Cadence of Collapse
03. Refractions from the Rift

Michael Page, the infamous entity behind Sky Burial and F/I/T/H has shown us a bit of black and white over the past few years in regards to the nature of both projects.  Fire in the Head started out like a locomotive out of hell with a whole host of limited and now hard to find releases.  Alan Milne at the initial incarnation of Heathen Harvest once hinted that Michael Page had released up to 18 offerings leading up to his release on Audio Immolation Industries, “Be My Enemy.”  The representation that was given to us of the artist was this raw and disturbingly human approach to power electronics.  Incredibly dark and emotional in nature, the music has a skin-crawling appeal to it, almost familiar.  Something very visceral always appeared buried within F/I/T/H’s music.  However, with Sky Burial we see the adverse side of Michael’s personality — the bleak, the desolate, the absurdly non-human.  Void.  Honesty and intellect will tell you that this is the very purpose of death industrial, this droning atmosphere that lacks and deflects anything remotely human in nature, but for fans of both projects simultaneously, the difference can be surreal.

What we have with Threnody for Collapsing Suns is exactly what the title implies.  A cosmic exchange of lamentations towards the stars.  Drones, spherical melodies, feedback and simple experimental sounds are thoughtfully crafted together to make a lush and impressively complex composition.  Layers of interweaving drones are constantly sifting into and around each other in increasingly heated and active skies, as with the serpent tail seen on the cover artwork seems to imply.  Towards the climax of the album we reach a moment of bombastic percussive industrial and even more complex layers of opulent sound at a decisive culmination.  A respect for the now declining hypernova is seen, and the black hole now imminent.  We’re left with the dispersal of remnants, a galactic ballet of dancing, weaving particles and gasious clouds, as the final portion of the second track perfectly compliments.  After this, all that can be left is the inevitable ascent into the black abyss, the cosmic hole from which nothing — not matter, not light, not even dark matter — escapes.  The build, the collapse, the death, the rebirth, and the black hell are all born and are attributable to the various phases of this 50 minute album.

What we’re left with in Threnody for Collapsing Suns is more of the same that we’ve come to recognize from Michael Page.  One of the more forward thinkers in the scene, he has continued to deliver classic after classic, and this wonderful offering on Small Doses is no exception.  The sound on the album is every bit as epic as the natural event the title implies, and through its non-human nature, beauty is born.  I can’t help but be reminded of the famous quote by Neil DeGrasse Tyson:  “Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.“  Thus, perhaps, this music isn’t so inhuman after all.

Rating: 5/5