Band: Phaenon

Album: Submerged

Album Year: 2007

Label: Malignant Records

Genre(s): Drone / Ritual Ambient

Band Website: www.myspace.com/szymontankiewicz

Rating: 5/10

Tracklist:

1. Submerged

I will preface this review with saying that I’m not a huge fan one 1 track albums. I understand the purpose, but it’s not very often where I have a full 60+ minutes to sit down and listen to one track.

Ok so the best way for me to describe Submerged is like this: you’re sitting in a meditative style on the planet Venus staring at an impossibly slow bubbling sea of gas and vapour for 66 minutes. There are of course their pros and cons to that.

If you’re looking for a meditative drone album, then Submerged is great. Because the entire album is set up as a single track, you’re forced to listen to the piece in its entirety. Submerged bubbles and flows extremely slowly over its course…it doesn’t really change or alter its course much at all, but it builds up and relies on a thick atmosphere to transport the listen into other dimensions. There are a few stages of the album, and it takes something like 20 minutes to go from one to the next. But this proves that it is indeed set up as a meditation tool, rather than just some guy making random drone for 60 minutes.

The problem is, of course, if you’re not looking for an album to sleep or meditate to, or for background noise, then Submerged is pretty much useless. It will just sound very slow, empty and boring.  At 22 minutes in, the same exact thing is happening that was happening at 4 minutes.

Basically, Submerged succeeds at being a good meditative piece, but I feel that its lack of versatility is a damaging factor.

-[.d4n b4rr3tt.]

August 2007