Umbra Nihil / The Borderland Rituals

After their debut album „Gnoia“ (2005, Firedoom Records), the Finnish band UMBRA NIHIL comes with a brand new album „The Borderland Rituals“. 5 long obscure, frosty compositions of hypnotic doom metal.

The album's initial concept was inspired by themes introduced to some of us by the writer William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) in the brooding horror novel The House on the Borderland. In order to achieve a suitable claustrophobic sound and eerie, forbidding atmosphere the album has been recorded in an isolated and quarantined abandoned house on the inbred borderland, sullenly crafting the band's sound into a more organic and gelatinous direction.

In epileptic fits of pathetic rage the album betimes raises a trembling and arthritic pale fist at the uncaring cosmos-at-large and its malevolent nightside entities, which haunt hapless Mankind with unfathomable purpose - or lack thereof. Mostly, however, the aural ambience resolves in resigned rudderless levitation towards inevitable mental and physical disintegration.

Additional astrality has been contributed by Tuomas M. Mäkelä of the ambient band Jääportit.

’The Borderland Rituals’ has been mastered by Devo Andersen at Endarker Studio in Sweden.