Altare Productions, based in Portugal, is a label that has been making a considerable statement within the realms of contemporary, strange, and experimental Black Metal releases. Notable in particular for their growing catalogue of entrancing and incredibly raw Blackened projects that frequently lean their sound palates toward a particularly gnarly strain of gripping monochromatic ambience. One such affiliate of the burgeoning prestige of the label is Portugal’s Consummatio. 2022 welcomed the release of the artist’s full-length debut album entitled ‘Desaevio’, with a sound that was so blanketed in its raw approach that it practically congested the buried instrumentation and trod a fine line between distant, over the horizon, hushed black metal and disturbing musical white noise. For all of the tempting and mysterious ambience that the album brought to the Altare Productions banquet table, the album frequently droned on in a rather one-trick slumber throughout its runtime becoming little more than pretty background music for considerable stretches. Refreshingly, album number two, which is entitled ‘Circulus’ hovers its magnifying glass above the writing front more so than its predecessor, whilst simultaneously reinstating the raw strengths that album had already possessed.
The first thing to note is that the whole album is cloaked in a rich shroud of distant and obscured raw claggy ambience. The atmosphere of Circulus is wonderful, and it hydrates my aesthetic thirst for colourless, subterranean dungeon performance despondency with its grainy and textured bare bones production style, whilst being comforting to the ears and not overtly harsh in presentation. The levelling up of this album should be assigned, in particular, to the balance of a more refined structural approach to the songs. The songs engagingly carry the experience and allow the immersive ambience to better work in partnership with the actual music, rather than one overpowering the other. An imbalance which I believe plagued Consummatio’s debut. Take track three, for example: ‘Equílibrio’ with its funereal swelling guitar drones that sound like mournful church bells accompanied by the sound of autumnal leaves crunching under your feet. These guitars almost seamlessly grow in volume to overshadow the leaves and eventually form a multi-layered drone that takes place over the course of the first six minutes of the track. After which, the volume of the central drone lowers, and the single swelling guitar notes return to their former simplicity. You find yourself pacing within the still, lonesome, and hushed environment of the churchyard once again. The audible experience is both entrancing and gorgeous.
Other subtleties; such as the monastic chanting, which is faintly present around the three minute mark on the opener ‘Silêncio’ or the whimsical guitar melody in the opening passages of track IV ‘Eterno’, are two small details among the many on Circulus that enhance the holistically minded intentions of the listening experience. Consummatio has made notable strides towards delivering a stand out raw Black Metal record this time around, and I could see this being of interest to those who enjoyed the cinematic nature of Zéro Absolu’s ‘La Saignée’ album that was released earlier this year or to those who appreciate the raw musical disturbances akin to Portuguese legends Black Cilice and label mates Apparitional Glare.
