(written by Islander)
Lovers of science fiction, and especially renderings of cosmic horror, will find a lot to love in the conception of Ageless Gateway’s debut album Corruptor of Stars. It narrates a tale of massive parasitic alien infection of our solar system, and its warping of existence on a breathtaking scale.
In portraying these terrors, this Polish project’s sole creator Apparition interweaves atmospheric black metal with death, doom, and ambient influences to create a chilling and thrilling five-song experience with a compact run-time of 32 minutes, and we’re providing listeners the chance to become immersed in it today in advance of the album’s April 17 release by Godz Ov War Productions.
Before we get to the music, here are further details from the label about the album’s ghastly inspiration:
Inspired by modern works of cosmic horror, it seeks to capture the feeling of vast, unknowable forces behind both inner and outer space – a descent through collapsing stars, forgotten civilizations, and entities beyond human comprehension.
The upcoming debut album, Corruptor of Stars, draws inspiration from the Gemini Home Entertainment series and its vision of a conscious, parasitic planet slowly infiltrating our solar system. The record follows the progression of this infection from distant observation to total absorption, tracing the mutation of celestial bodies and human minds under a malicious, alien intelligence. It’s a look at an infected cosmos, where consciousness and matter have become twisted beyond recognition.
The album’s musical narrative begins with an intro piece named “The One Who Watches“. Presumably this is our introduction to the dreadful planet-sized entity that’s the focus of the tale, as (to our great misfortune) it notices our solar system from afar. Eerie ambient tones, some of them quavering and some of them scratching, rumbling, and wailing, begin creating an aura of mystery and menace. Slowly pinging piano keys, groaning horn-like tones, slowly meandering beats, and a macabre voice seem to channel the thing’s growing curiosity.
But that intro piece doesn’t capture the entity’s terrifying capacities for destruction. We get a fuller appreciation for that in the album’s follow-on title song. There, the music sweeps and sears above heavily hammering drums, ravaging roars, and voracious howls. The layered riffing is dense, abrasive, and engulfing, but shrill, gleaming tones maniacally swirl and soar from within that churning and crashing miasma, capturing the utterly alien nature of what ‘s encroaching upon our solar system.
The music is elaborate, and multi-faceted in its instrumental features as well as its moods. It includes strange percussive permutations, dismally writhing and frantically squirming fretwork, brightly darting keyboards, enormous bass growls, freakishly quivering electronics, and distorted voices. It seems to channel hunger, towering menace, agony, and a kind of very unsettling ecstasy. The experience is both scary and bewildering.
“Visions of Parasitic Consciousness” comes next, and it comes storming… with horrifying howls reverberating above thunderous drums, vast swaths of blistering tremolo’d riffage, and ringing ethereal tones that slowly meander through the cutting swarms and hammering convulsions. The music seems to wail in various frequencies as it inflicts scathing ruin, both demented and dismal in its sensations.
The assaults briefly abate, the layered guitars become emotionally gutting and hopeless, and yet those brightly pinging keys and swirling guitar-leads return, leading an enhancement of the song’s intensity — and the return of freakishly warping arpeggios and hideous roars. The big bass ambles along, musing about the mayhem; orchestral overlays expose wonder; and guitars frantically spasm. This song might be even more disorienting and dazzling than the title song.
With “Deep Root Disease“, Ageless Gateway again pulls away from the tempest in order to create a chilling, rhythmless musical hallucination. It remains hallucinatory even when that musing bass and strangely maneuvering drums return. The guitars are dissonant, dismal, and they drag — but of course this is a tale of cosmic horror, and so the song’s stratospheric reaches are still populated by bizarre alien presences.
The song also makes room for methodically jackhammering grooves, tidal waves of blazing and acidic sound, classically influenced piano melodies that barely sound sane, towering symphonics that portray catastrophe, viciously churning riffage and blasting cannonades, and tones that miserably warp and abysmally moan.
By now, and actually well before, Ageless Gateway has demonstrated an almost baroque songwriting bent, a talent for using meticulously plotted, intricately textured, and strangely contrasting features to create mentally destabilizing and viscerally unsettling experiences, augmented by truly monstrous vocals. And yet Apparition has saved the longest song for last, with maybe the scariest title, given what we know about the album’s narrative — “The Feeding Grounds“.
I’ll resist the temptation to plot the course of this one in as much detail as I have the preceding tracks, because by now you’ll expect (and you’ll be correct) that the music follows a twisting and turning path, variable in its pacing and intensity, variable in its manifold tonalities and stylistic ingredients, almost relentlessly elaborate in its rendering of alien depravity and voracity, breathtaking in its zeniths of world-spanning and reality-warping cataclysm, and crushing in its renderings of pain and haunting hopelessness. And near the end, we get one final reminder that something horrible is consuming celestial beauty.
Especially as the work of a single mind gripped by a singular conception, Corruptor of Stars really is a remarkably successful achievement, as you’ll now have the chance to realize for yourselves:
For Corruptor of Stars, all music, lyrics, recording, mixing, and mastering were handled by Apparition. The album includes eerie cover art by Niemst, logo by Astral Gaze Logos, and layout by WS Artworks.
Godz Ov War will release Corruptor of Stars on CD, MC, and digital formats. Pre-orders can be placed now:
PRE-ORDER:
https://godzovwar.com/shop/en/
https://godzovwarproductions.bandcamp.com/album/corruptor-of-stars
AGELESS GATEWAY:
https://www.facebook.com/AgelessGateway
https://www.instagram.com/agelessgateway