3 out of 5

Label: Astral Spirits / Monofonus Press

Produced by: R. Lee Dockery (recorded by)

It’s probably unhelpful to describe drone as ‘underwhelming,’ especially given how my expectations were at least partially at fault here, but Monofonus’ / Astral Spirits’ copy for this release described it as “dense,” and “dark ambience,” and mentioned that the title – Cathedrelic – was telling. So… yeah, I guess I was hoping that this mix of electronics (and bass, though I’m not hearing that) would be exactly that: dark and dense, and with a cavernous sound evoking organs in a cathedral.

The burbling swell that’s produced is not unpleasant, but it’s definitely more subtle than hoped, and, as recorded, not very dense at all. I do really like how the sounds are neither identifiably digital or analog, making for an appreciably unidentifiable mass of almost-there noise. This is where one might make the leap to a ‘cathedrelic’ sound – it’s like a conversation of unclear instruments, echoing in a chamber – but it’s all a bit too distant to really evoke that without a prompt.

The live track that follows is, to my untrained ears, pretty similar, but while the opener comes and goes without much notable change, Live uses its extended runtime to shift the shape of its drone at the midway point, becoming a little sharper, and then especially at the end – an emotive punctuation as the intensity of the swell increases. Probably a properly mesmerizing track to end with.