Empty City
Fire & Rain
Silent Uprising
Chasm
Blind Inspiration

Nicolas Lampert and Dave Canterbury’s follow up album on the debut disc, "Inside Passage" continues their aural theme of meshing the natural as the basis of their dark ambient foray. Theirs is a pageant of forgotten memory and haunted byways, landscapes wreathed in the decay of humankind.

"Silent Uprising" sees a more instrumental inclusion in the album than in "Inside Passage" yet what melody there is remains minimalist and far from breaks Beneath the Lake’s dispositions. With the first track, ‘Empty City’ one is roused from the natural wilderness of their first album into the urban wasteland, the clash of machine and delineated roar of roads is hushed by poignant guitar and wind instrument that unveil dust swept streets and gutted hollows of skyscrapers who are in turn swallowed by the inchoate urban remnants. ‘Fire & Rain’ spits and aspirates flickering flame and heaves a steady stream of gas thrumming instable. Guitar once again paints somnolent notes upon an increasingly voluminous pressure building beneath until the fire consumes itself and thunder unleashes downpour that is difficult to unravel from the sampled flame prevalent throughout and mirroring the fire movement, guitar and melody uplift the mood a notch before the rains part. The namesake track of the album invokes a minatory haze blushing with moaning drifts and rasping macroscopes that plunge the listener into a netherworld of electronic phrasing and oscillating structures crowded with specters entreating the spectator further into the noise runnelled abysm. The longest track, ‘Chasm’, urges boreal winds lacerated with the electronica and scoring noise of the previous track before a nightmare in the gloom swims frantic and tense passages disorientating and maddening. Entrenched in twilight, ‘Blind Inspiration’ whistles mordant shards that lash the cantilevered walls assailing the listener who loses grip and plunges deeper and darker where sound deadens until there seems little egress. There at bottom of the internal gulf guitar lifts the listener in a final moment of reprieve.

Uniquely and gloriously presented, "Silent Uprising" is printed on a 6” x 6” six-panel card gatefold design with the disc recessed in the folds. Desaturated ochre is the dominant colour and the entire artwork and package continues the artistic theme of their debut album, vestigial images of landscape and the boles and fingers of autumnal trees.

NYR