Forensic I
Rauhreif
Remember
Bitter Love
Asmo's Song

Finsterfelden
Liedchen
Le degré zéro
Die Sommer danach
Forensic II

Kostnice wells in a phantasmagoric cauldron of ominous murk, burrowing with the unparticular appetite of a maggot "all food is equal" but without the nascent development into life, rather it is moribund larvae consuming existence. This otherworldly pallor is dissected and digested in an intestinal tract of grotesque samples and evanescent orchestra; sickly piping hunting for a melody once lovingly fluted struggles amidst epileptic percussion and unlikely oscillations. It is a capacious immurement and transition of fractures with a sense of translucence as whispers of ages and lives lived huddle in the yawing of organs and soughing loops.

While there are moments of dark ambience, industrial eddies, neofolk and peeling sheets of noise, Finsterfelden does not approximate any of these genre or seek to conglomerate them in various combinations, rather having the unusual qualities of a Coil output, disturbing, rarely repetitive, a disparate sagacity that finds unity without invoking harmony. This is not a "Hell" explored in sound despite the dark dimensions traversed, rather the music surmises an underworld without Judeo-Xian-Islamic senses of guilt, shame and punishment, stripping away such notions into pure consequence, cause and effect, that leave the listener isolated, sometimes tortured, soothed and shivering. Coming in just under forty minutes, the vagarious motion of each track makes the journey seem much longer, an excellent descent into netherworlds where the bruises of life that once proliferated now decompose.

Taking their moniker from the renowned Kostnice/Ossuary in the Czech city of Kutna Hora, this their second release though first on French label Reue Um Reue and unlike their self-titled digipak debut this album comes pressed in black vinyl with 5 postcard inserts and a gatefold-out, hand numbered in an edition of 270 copies.

NYR