Stephen Parsick - Cambrium: Music For Protozoa mp3 album

Fans of Lustmord’s Where the Black Stars Hang should immediately seek out Stephen Parsick’s Cambrium: Music for Protozoa. Continuing on his quest for the ultimate “doombient” sound, Parsick delves ever deeper into the dark crevasses. “Proterozoikum” jumps right into the blackness, a swirling vortex of emptiness put to sound. This would be the perfect soundtrack to a bleak sci-fi film. This is hardcore dark ambient and white noise, with normal musical conventions conspicuously absent. “DNA Sequence” bubbles and churns with a bit more brightness as punchy percussion lends just a touch of electronica to the mix. Back to the stuff of nightmares we go with “Electric Soup Kitchen,” dark and dank. Song titles like “Primordial Glurp”, “Trilobite”, and “Amoeba” aptly portray the primitive yet futuristic sound. I prefer the ones with just a bit of structure to hang onto, like the momentum-building pulsations of “Trilotbite” and the restless electronic buzzing undercurrent of the title track and “Urge to Live.” The latter reminds me a lot of the dark, industrial take on Berlin school that Redshift created on Down Time. If you like dark, organic ambient from Robert Rich or Steve Roach, you will love Cambrium. (Phil Derby / electroambientspace.com)

With "Cambrium" Stephen Parsick presents a stark and slightly twisted landscape of early life on planet Earth. Like a restless wind eerie drones wash over low key rumblings of grinding rock and the alien sounds of bubbling pools of primordial glop, brimming with new and peculiar life forms. As usual, Parsick lets the music speak for itself, which means it falls somewhere in the territory between dark and more traditional ambient. Compared to the original version (recorded in Bochum in 2008 and available on CDr) this performance feels a bit more polished and smooth to the point where I feel it begins to lose some of its primitive nerve (we're talking protozoa after all), and the result is a slightly watered down experience. It is still a wonderful album and now easily available, but I would recommend ambient-lovers to seek out the previous recording which is more raw in nature and, I feel, even better.