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The mysterious Husere Grav (pronounced "Huss-urr-ee Grahv") first rose out of the ashes of black metal duo Homunculus in 2006, and over the past eight years has released some spectacular pieces of utterly dread-filled industrial blackness. Following up splits with Meditations, TRTRKMMR and Robedoor and the 2012 Cd Ten Graves, Husere Grav's latest full-length offering comes via the Crucial Blaze imprint, a seven-song album of macabre ambiance and ghostly black drift that combines the charnel perfume of early 90's black metal with the desolate early industrial sounds of the Broken Flag label and the subterranean reverberations that Lustmord pioneered on albums like Heresy and The Monstrous Soul.
The crushing, crepuscular dronescapes on You Are Transparent are littered with bursts of creepy metallic whirr, pipe organ and ghastly reverb that rises above a sea of churning, distorted low-end rumble, with ritualistic percussion and blasts of distorted synth and distant, incorporeal voices drifting in slow motion through the sulfurous drift of opener "Red Room", adding to the album's already hallucinatory atmosphere. The surreal, creepy vibe runs through the whole disc, as "Terrors" erupts into a raging delirium of angelic screams and black holocaust winds, the swirling dreamlike din drenched in endless reverb; and "Lines" drops a minimal, menacing rhythmic throb into the middle of whirling drones and jet-roar distortion. At times this evolves into a sort of sinister minimalist electronica, pitch black and murderous, sending black lines of distorted bass through the bleak industrial drift. As Transparent continues to drift further out across across the abyss, the sound mutates, later transforming into a vast ethereal roar of sound, hypnotic and speaker-rattling, and elsewhere erupts into walls of incandescent distorted synth. These immense ominous dronescapes and waves of hypnotic industrial rumble are bathed in a carcinogenic glow, which stretches all the way into the closing monstrous mechanical pulse and melodic murk of "No Dreams", which ends the album like some strange combination of Tim Hecker's granular ambient soundscapes and the monotonous blackened rumble of old-school Italian industrial artists like Maurizio Bianchi and Mauthausen Orchestra. This is true dream-music for the end times.
Released as part of Crucial Blast's Crucial Blaze series, the physical release of You Are Transparent comes in a clear DVD-style case with a sixteen-page black and white art zine filled with strange, autumnal images and abstract high-contrast photos and sealed with a printed obi band, a vinyl sticker and a 1" button. Limited to four hundred hand-numbered copies.
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