This review began as what I thought would be the final installment in a Shades of Black collection of new songs that I will post later today. But by the time I finished, it had become long enough that I thought I should post it separately.

I knew nothing about this album when I started listening to the first song, which is the album’s centerpiece. It will require some dedication to get through it — not because the music is dull or tedious, but because the song (“Spell 1 / Spell 1b”) is almost 20 minutes long. That song is the product of a collaboration between two prolific Australian musicians who call themselves The Horn and Nekrasov. The album on which it appears is named Volume 13, a three-track work inspired by ancient Egyptian funeral texts. It was released via Bandcamp on September 1. Continue reading »