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Though the name may be new, those who explore the more terrifying sounds found at the intersection where black metal, industrial noise, power electronics and black ambience meet surely know the minds behind this collaboration. Featuring Mories (of Gnaw Their Tongues / Aderlating / Cloak Of Altering / De Magia Veterum infamy) and Australian black noise/metal technician Nekrasov, Mors Sonat sounds little like their other projects, crafting a cold, hallucinatory strain of aural dread that draws from a strange mixture of twilight chamber music, ghastly death industrial sounds, harsh electronic noise and gleaming dark ambient, while tapping into the sort of psychic unease and violent chaos that will be familiar to fans of their previous efforts.
It's definitely a much more atmospheric and often subdued sonic terrain that Mors Sonat explores on 'Comforts In Atrocity'. Across the six long tracks, they blend together darkly gorgeous chamber music sounds (aided by guest cellist Aaron Martin,) with blasts of excoriating black noise, pools of cloudy dark ambience, clanking industrial horror, and vicious bouts of power electronics-style abuse. From the creaking crypt ambience that starts off opener "Holy Holy Holy Nil" that later give way to the gorgeous cello drones, shimmering orchestral strings and smeared horns that coalesce throughout the track, Mors Sonat lays down a highly evocative mix of layered electronic noise and atmospheric sound that slowly builds into walls of howling chaos, something that repeatedly rears its head throughout the album. The rest of 'Comforts' ventures into strange, hallucinatory shadowscapes like "Sanctuary In Soil", where monstrous death-gasps drift over a rumbling black abyss seething with the distant tremors of grinding infernal machinery, and the intoxicating dark drift of the title track where the duo delves into a vast expanse of crepuscular drift and cinematic electronics bathed in the residual glow from a dying sun. On "The Sweet Long Legs Of Hate", this sort of minimal soundscapery reappears as a vast windswept blackness interweaved with eerie background sounds and strains of desolate piano, forming into something akin to a stark, sun-bleached horror film score.
But then there are the nods to classic power electronics and death industrial that are threaded through several of these tracks. On "The Vengeance Of Embrace", spectral hissing voices are surrounded by diseased, pulsating electronic drones and corrosive signals that give this an evil, almost Atrax Morgue-esque feel. And the final track (which bears the very Gnaw Their Tongues-like title 'So shall I weep in liberation within the ecstasy of decay') closes the disc with a vicious maelstrom of howling electronic violence that convulses with harsh demonic shrieks and coruscating waveforms, a rabid snarling chaos fused to extreme feedback manipulation and crushing metallic noise.
Fans of the shambling chthonic evil of Mories' other projects and Nekrasov's black-hole visions will find some of these elements in Mors Sonat's sound, but it's tempered by the use of haunting chamber strings, ritualistic ambience and experimental electronics, diffused into a kind of grim otherworldly soundscape all its own. Recommended to fans of everything from Funerary Call and Nordvargr's blackened electronics, Shinjuku Thief's 'Witch Trilogy', and Cold Meat-style death industrial, the Cd edition presented in a six panel digipack.
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