Fortunately, Vidna Obmana is able to add new pleasures and textures to this deeply hidden but richly rewarding canon of music. Most dominantly he manages to build his walls of sounds – be they slow and soft or big and harsh – into vast dimensions, really make them stretch out over time and imagined space. For drones relying so heavily on a single sound or soundsource it is quite a feat. Moreover, these tracks were laid down and recorded in real time. I don’t know out of how many hours of material they were picked, but these two hours of droning guitar moments definitely make up for some fine and exceptional moments. And he does take his time for sure. On some of these tracks he changes between two almost identical chords back and forth for a quarter of an hour, dwelling on the slightest change of sound, building up echoes and washing the vibrato and swelling waves of sound over the listener. Track-durations reach well over the 30 minute mark at times, so it should be clear that Serries is a long distance endurance artist as well as highly acute of small details and changes.

Some of his drones dwell heavily on a dark and sombre atmosphere, hinting at the slowmotion powerchord-distortion-excesses by Sunn0))). With the name, title and black- and white design of the CD these parts of the record will make a lot of headway with those more experimentally inclined metal- and goth-freaks, who like a little dark bombast sound late at nights and check out the more outwardly releases on Southern Lord as well as Current93. But there are also delicate and almost gentle moments hidden in these two CDs that will appeal to the Eno-fans alike. The monolithic drones are still more monochrome or monotone (without being boring, mind you) than all of those mentioned with a lot of subtlety still remaining. So, judging by this, about 67 % of all listeners are habitually wearing black clothes, and 55 % have at one point in their live considered ordering records from Staalplat. Which makes for a great mixture in my book, even if Darkwave and Gothic are amongst those musical genres I was never interested in.

I can see Fear Falls Burning sharing a stage with Deep and Sunn0))), which would make for a great night of concrete-trembling bass-sludge, with at first one person, then two and finally three on stage. And the music doubling and tripling along while the listeners start to sway with the wind produced by the amps on stage. Heavenly bliss and a completely new variation on being “blown out of your mind”.

I've dreamt away again, listening, thinking, waiting for 'it' to happen. This would be the fourth time this week that I'm playing this record, sitting here, with an empty notepad staring at me. Before I know time played it's trick, and it's an hour or so later. The record has finished, not a written word on the screen. Oh, except for that e-mail Miguel just sent me: "How is the review coming along? There's a two-week deadline for each review and it's overdue by now..." Right, how do you respond to this? "I'm sorry, but this record is so damn good, I don't know what to write?" Not a good plan, so there I am again, sitting here, listening for the fourth time, the record just reached it's sixth track and all I came up with is this. Not even half a decent sentence on how great this anthology is.

So there we go, this compilation concers fourteen unreleased tracks from vidnaObmana's noise & experimental phase between '84 and '89, all taken from old casette masters and unreleased studio sessions. They're very well remastered, sounding warm and clear. William Basinski tried the same thing a couple of years ago, trying to digitalize his twenty year old tape loops he found that they deteriorated further with every time they were played. It left him with brilliant recordings though (Disintegration Loops I-IV).

Talking about a short attention span, drifting off again! Treat this Noise/Drone Anthology as a voice from the past, but certainly not an outdated one! vidnaObmana is a true craftsman, something that can't be said about most modern composers. Nowadays everbody can make a piece of decent sounding music, because of all those user friendly synth & recording software packages. Who's still experimenting with actual mixers, synths, sheets of metal or bricks? Too bad, because experimental music is also a physical form of expression in my opinion. Would this be the reason why the noize & experimental music from the eighties still sound so much better then most of today's music? And this anthology for sure! Why hasn't this been released 10 years ago? Or, more important, what else has vidnaObmana laying about on a dusty shelf?

And then of course the record. There's fourteen tracks, each with a couple of main loops around which each piece is crafted, this ensures a great deal of diversity en is at times very hypnotizing. Sometimes warm & intruiging, sometimes chilly & frightening. Take "Sight to deadly accident" for example. We hear a stationary tractor motor looped, a screaming alarm horn, and a heavily disfigured deathscream. Anyway, that's my interpretation. It's not hard to float away on the repetetive motor loop, and all of the sudden it's just there, you see it happen, right in front of you: a man, a tractor, it horns, but it's too late, with his last breath he screams from the top of his lungs. Dead. And again, again, and again.

The collection includes collaborative pieces with cassette-network pioneers Kapotte Muziek, PBK and Big City Orchestra. An essential compilation that puts this project even firmer on the map of experimental music. It also gives young listeners a very good understanding of how experimental music was crafted already twenty years ago.

Very, very good record!

vidnaObmana has moved to the guitar. Maybe now you will have a surprised look on your face. And this is not a strange thing. This Belgian has discovered that the guitar possesses some exceptional qualities to reinvent himself. He Spoke in Dead Tongues is a double album performed in real-time without postproduction, in which Fear Falls Burning surrenders completely to the experimentation of the sounds generated by the guitars. We are in front of a new and different work that opens a door toward other horizons.This time tracks don't have title and their length varies between 7 and 34 minutes, what can give us an idea of the space/ambient that these guitars sound. Anyway, in these 9 compositions you'll find monochord sounds and some "dirtier" ones, there is time for playing with the effects pedal and for discovering a universe of (it could not be otherwise) dense and deliberately inclined to trance sounds. We can understand Fear Falls Burning enthusiasm experiencing with so much intensity on an unknown territory and recording a 2 CD's album full of so much special music. - Javier Bedoya

When First by a whisper, then by a storm, Fear Falls Burning’s first sign of life, was released early this year, it seemed like the perfect companion to a slowly dying autumn and a carefully budding summer. Dewdrops were glistening at the top of the forests’ leaves and tender sounds swirled through the air like the echo of a wonderful, yet long-forgotten time. Now He spoke in dead tongues is released, it seems like the perfect companion to a bitter and frosty winter.

This may sound strange at first, because nothing much has changed on the surface of things. Dirk Serries still has his electric guitars plugged straight into his amplifier, swimming in the tide of the moment and recording his pieces live and without the use of any overdubs. It is the same purity that made First by a whisper, then by a storm such an essential record and the zen-induced result of a harsh method of musical effacement: Lonely tones drift through harmoniously singing clouds of reverb, black streams of crunching distortion flow underneath heavenly harmonics, minuscule melodies appear and drift off and everything seems to ask the question: How long can you repeat this one chord, this one tone, this one motive, before the music collapses? Most astoundingly, it never does and instead keeps the listener’s attention even through the two epic, more than half hour long aural seas that form the heart of the individual CDs of this double-disc set. Even more surprisingly, despite the use of the very same tools, Serries has managed to make He spoke in dead tongues an entirely different album from its predecessor – drifting more unconsciously and with a sensual mood of floating eroticism, these delicately woven compositions of shifting emphases never cease to captivate your imagination.

It’s the same as in meditation: Just when you think you’re wasting your time, there’s a moment of total clarity. Over two hours long, this is both a fantastic field for discovery as well as a tremendous challenge. As Fear Falls Burning prepares for another tour and a busy 2006, one can only wonder as to what will come next. What started as a whisper has indeed turned into a veritable storm.

Vidna Obmana, whose brilliant streams of dark ambient over many albums, recently released an album on Projekt Records, that involve a step away from his normal style and plunges participants into darkness so vast, you need to scrape your nails on unknown surfaces just to see light of any kind. His side project, Fear Falls Burning, is an experimental branch that involves the use of guitar, extracting a steady and discomfiting swell of noise that can only qualitatively be referred to as drone. Add variations of guitar manipulations and other strange guitar noise and you get an interesting work that is an exploration, not only into that of sound exploitation but also that of setting. In Obmana’s Fear Falls Burning project, the 2CD he spoke in dead tongues, a title that sets up the ambient approach, a world in chaos is readily available.

Some tracks employ a soft, dreamlike peek into an alien soundscape of forbidding locations while other tracks are a blast furnace of guitar that immediately set the tone for the scorched earth you’re about to traverse. Fear Falls Burning’s he spoke in dead tongues is not for everyone. It is a journey that requires an appreciation of sound reconstruction, a brave walk through jungles of sometimes abrasive sound. If you’re a connoisseur of dark ambient music and can find worth in ground breaking experimental applications of guitar, there is almost no one better than Vidna Obmana’s expressions of shunned worlds to take you to waterless places. The question is whether or not you can survive the trip. - Matt Rowe

Do not expect airy expressions of optimism here. These soundscapes are dark and surly and designed to disturb.

While the overall sonic disposition of this tuneage is one of eerily manipulated deep tones (bordering on drone), there are instances of harshly jarring chords that growl with dangerous vibrations and seem to hang in the air like lions unwilling to leave. With each track, VidnaObmana explores wholly different sounds and divergent moods, revealing an inventive plethora of unnatural harmonics.

Frequently, the notes are minimal and repeated with infinite patience, generating a surging twilight that counts its way into darker terrain with ghostly determination. Other times, intricate chords are compressed, literally folded back upon themselves until the result is an spasmodic tremble that has grown a thick covering of electric fur. Periodic auxiliary sounds penetrate the soft din, lending the guttural outcries of a secondary beast to the roiling miasma. One track approximates a chorus of guitars, all forced to exhibit their mutations through subdued manners. Another revolves around echoing pulsations evocative of an irregularly chiming machine core.

Both discs feature lengthy and more pensive pieces (33 and 34 minutes long). The one on disc 1 employs expressions that wobble and wind, often resembling the pitch of wine glasses. This composition is more spectral than fearful. Meanwhile, disc 2’s epic opus involves more hesitant sentiments, as if the soundscape is suspicious of the audience. Both pieces, though, are conducive to introspective explorations, albeit sending the listener down reasonably dark paths of contemplation.

Imagine if you gene spliced Glenn Branca and Robert Fripp and then scared the crap out of this newborn entity.

More 'just' guitar records, two in one to be precise. Away from the complex things that Vidna Obmana (synthesizers, EQ-ing, multi-tracking etc.), he sits down with his guitar in his hands and a bunch of pedals at his feet and strums away. Feeding the sound through phasers, flangers, chorus and what have you, Dirk creates a thick but clear pattern of slowly shifting music. Waving wind over an endless desert, space cowboys floating their space ships or sub-aqua movies of schools of fish: it's music that fits a lot of dreamy images, but which also stands by itself quite clearly. As noted before his influences are clear (Windy & Carl, Stars Of The Lid, but perhaps also Oren Ambarchi or Ry Cooder), but Fears Falls Burning has enough of its own to be his own. But having now heard these discs, I can also: where to next?