After Its Own Death / Walking In A Spiral Towards The House (studio album) by Nivhek

Both tracks here are long ambient two-parters. 'After Its Own Death' is a varied and fascinating piece. It plays more like a patchwork of complementary vignettes than a single ambient piece and this works to its advantage. There's several silences that form the space between the choral arrangements, vocal samples, reverb drenched guitars and drone elements, just to give a few examples of what you find on this track. Despite the difference in the individual sounds of these elements they feel connected in tone and distance, making each new part feel unexpected but coherent. 'Walking in a Spiral Towards the House' is much more pedestrian. It carries the same atmosphere as the prior track but is far less interesting and varied. It feels almost like an unnecessarily long 20 minute outro and doesn't feel like any kind of step forward in the ambient genre, though it's still perfectly listenable. Overall it's still a decent and interesting record mostly because 'After Its Own Death' makes up the bulk of the runtime, but I'm not sure how often I'll be returning to 'Walking in a Spiral...'.

I'm a fan of Grouper, but this album feels dull and lifeless, even by ambient standards. The cover art sets you up for a barren, stripped back experience, yet it fails to make itself interesting. The tracks fail to evolve or develop, a factor only amplified by the tracks' excessive run times. It may seem that I'm missing the point of a deliberately desolate album; however, it fails to evoke any emotion as a result of its disability to stimulate reasonable interest.