ninehertz

This is something special, but equally daunting – an album recorded in a single night, wholly improv and immensely epic – seven tracks totalling a near 100 minutes. Obviously that's an option in drone, but to create something so coherent in that vastness is remarkable.

The songs are named of the planets, cementing the cosmic doom approach. Mercury is so low and minimal to be incidental music, and if you consider the album a soundtrack to an unvoiced documentary of a voyage to our neighbouring planetary beings and this makes absolute sense. There’s no worth in searching for any normal song structure, even when vocals come in more than five minutes in it is in light trance doom drone states, merely adding to the cosmic tranquillity. It is peaceful even with the slightest of doom edges. I'm already totally and happily a lost stowaway passenger on Megadrone Spacedoom’s journey.

Venus has the perfect drone set up, a doom tone guitar repeating the same note, cosmic effects and clouded, chanting vocals as it goes a little heavier, a touch of a droned out Black Shape of Nexus in the cosmic gases, and still, with that pounding doom metronome. Mars’ shuffling minimal background noises are belatedly joined by alien shrieks from the dark, before settling into nice dark end doom drone akin to the likes of Bong. It never gets especially heavy, only a pinch of menace, all in all low lying exploration and absolutely wonderful.

Jupiter has minimal synth noises that give the impression, the aura of space travel, before clanging drums and a thick wedge guitar tone arrive as if we're being pulled in by the giant planet's gravity, the sheer mass of it brings Slomatics vibes - albeit drawn out and masked in the astral clouds. When it goes all in heavy more than nine minutes in, there's still restraint but it sounds cataclysmic and violent. Saturn has another long introduction of ambient noises and drone that give the appearance of having tapped into signalling across aeons between astral beings, it is a whopping eight minutes and more before the weighty doom guitars break free, even in the denseness of the heavy the repetition maintains the mesmeric hold.

Uranus’ instrumentation sounds truly epic from the off, cosmically ethereal and brilliant, leaving only the 25 minutes plus of Neptune. Perhaps fittingly it the most minimal, out in the furthest reaches of our solar system, noises and a faint twinkling your only companion, there’s a gradual increase in the volume and presence of the astral noises – so shallow an incline to be barely perceptible until many minutes pass and you realise its presence. This is drone minimalism crafted expertly – more than 21 and a half minutes before the clanging arrival of doom, a patience that makes the change even more powerful.

The similar patterns on display – spaced out long form ambient opening, weighty doom crashing the party - never feel formulaic, merely the perfect cosmic architecture for the evolving drone signals. Each track – each planet – with its own signature pattern, each completely involving and, with the requisite patience, fascinating expeditions across the galaxy. Doom drone allows for adventure and exploration and this is the perfect vessel to experience it all.