"Fragments of a Nightmare"
Review on http://www.imperiumi.net/
(Translated by Santtu A.)

"I'll be damned, there's only fragments of nightmares here!” exclaimed the Reviewer quietly in his mind, while putting the CD on Play. After half an hour, he was certain of what he had heard: insanity. "What is this madness?" This sentence echoed giving merciless criticism in a vacuum space, which is known to be normally found in the area between his ears. "Violins, are these really violins?" the thought was cut short. Gliding in darkness, the mind flowed towards inhuman, monstrous screams. A squall here, another there. The mess of the sounds was mixed cleverly in obscure and wavering musical parts.

In the kind of a darkly speaking ambient, the sound work that had begun did not give the thoughts any peace. The nightmarish depth of sounds swallowed the reviewer's (who's battling in the bounds of sanity) thoughts, faster than they managed to be born. The pulse-like, humming rhythm clearly tried to mess this creature's pulse, and the deadly, lunatic squalls, the laughing kind of human sounds, tried to steal away the sanity. It is like a horror movie, in the shape of sound. But where are the pictures? The full-of-imagination, sparkling, chaotic, sometimes musical, sometimes mess-like sound work felt to be a lunatic's, or, at the most, an insane genius's work. Like Frankenstein's monster in a musical work.

Too complicated to be ambient, too scattered to be music. The name of the album describes this soundtrack of insanity and horror very well. But the half-hour unity isn't enough to take your sanity, unless the case is of some Elder God-beast, and we're not reaching for these Lovecraft-like spheres. 'Fragments of a Nightmare' could just as well be a mad art, or a horror movie's soundtrack, which depicts the nightmarish and absurd reality, with a Dali-like surrealism. Still, something seems to be missing, in order to praise the album as a masterpiece. Either this, or I listened to it the wrong time of the day.

7½/10

Serpent, 03.06.2004