Black Aleph are a Sydney/Melbourne based Experimental ensemble featuring Lachlan Dale (guitar/effects), Peter Hollo (cello/effects) and Timothy Johannessen (percussion). blackened, droning post-metal and doom from Sydney + Melbourne // Eora + Naarm On their debut album, the trio draw inspiration from diverse sources ranging from Post-Metal to Middle-Eastern Modal Music. Apsides features both composed and improvised pieces that involve the players layering live-loops, ritualistic-beats and doom-metal style musical variations that progressively unfold and build in intensity throughout the performance. Black Aleph’s style has been compared to Justin Broadrick, Neurosis and Godspeed You! Black Emperor – though there is a borderline spiritual quality to the music that comes from the unique instrumentation: guitar, cello, and Iranian daf drum. The sound is tectonic – apt for a record centred around concepts of orbital mechanics, like the notion of ‘apsis’, which is the points of extreme and least distance between a celestial and a primary body (sun-earth-moon) in an elliptical orbit. A second theme concerns the relationship between light and dark, or more specifically the difference between bodies that emit versus those that merely reflect light – and in-between those that obstruct it. “Descent” is the first single from the record, opening with an earth-shattering Drone, before shifting into Blackened Sludge, with Jessica Kenney‘s spectral voice hovering overhead. It’s something of a statement of intent: crushingly heavy and direct, while maintaining the air of mystical procession. “Even to me, the combination of the three of us and the instruments we play results in something I genuinely would not expect,” explains Timothy Johannessen. “This is in part due to the use of the daf as a percussive element, and the cello serving as part bass, part second guitar, part strings. The guitar, too, can fill out the sub-bass register. At times it loops and layers upon itself, building into a mass of melodic layers and noise.