The black packaging this release came in heralded "dark ambient" before I even opened it. 'The Pact' is a 3-way split between Misa Tridente (Spain); Lacrimi Si Sfinti (not the restaurant in Bucharet, but Miguel Souto and Alejandro Duran, also of Spain) and Inselberg (Matthieu Canaguier, France) consisting of three lengthy tracks (one for each artist) totaling 71 minutes. The overall description for the album by the elaborate but cryptic one-sheet (actually two-sheet) provided by Cioran Records is Dark Ambient/Musique Concret/Drone. The thing they left out (fairly important here) is any email addresses for the artists, so I presume Cioran will inform them of the review because I don't have time to play detective tracking them down.

First up is Misa Tridente's "In Bellum (Ad Exstinctio)," the second longest at 24:15. It begins calmly enough with dark sounds in the background and intermittent voices by Isabel Sierras. Over time the sonics get creepier and more ominous with Isabel whispering in the background. The doom beats come about five minutes in adding a malevolent measure of madness to the already inhospitable track. Then, the conjured demon rears his ugly head and speaks blasphemously. You're in the thick of it now and there's no escape. The rhythm suddenly stops and an insane synth takes over. More voices by Isabel and by this time you just have to know some kind of infernal ritual is taking place. The sounds keep intensifying and this track isn't even half over yet, quite noisy by this time. Eventually it does simmer down for a bit, but like a rollercoaster ride between crests, it's not over yet. By the end, it's all chaos, maybe the cultists consumed in the ritual. In the end, there's a looped demonic voice repeating a phrase which could be the track's title. Advice to would-be dark ambient artists: If you want to add some spice, get a strong female voice speaking dialogue in a foreign language, the less obvious, the better. Everyone will think that it's a Satanic ritual.

Lacrimi Si Sfinti's "Miserere" is the longest track on the album at 28:02. Described as a "threne" (lamentation for the dead), Lacrimi Si Sfinti combines concrete musique, noise and dark ambient in the umbra of galacian cellars. "Cruxifying the magna mater in the fields of nothing, they embrace the revelations of death and disabuse in the torments of fatidic derelicity." or so the description provided by Cioran goes. What you are going to hear though, is primarily a drone piece that intensifies into noise as it moves along. There is a bit of ebb and flow but the industrial aspect seems to be omnipresent even when the sonic peaks (temporarily) abate. I liked the organish sound that was woven in, and found the second half of the track more enjoyable than the first. This was my least favorite track on the album.

Inselberg's "Sparsum cruorem postibus vastator horret Angelus" begins with the tolling of a lone church bell, and what sounds like a funeral/burial with a pitched-down voice reciting Catholic prayers in Latin. The one-sheet describes: "In the penumbra of Inselberg, the French composer and film-maker, Matthieu Canaguier, a shaken and prophetic genius painting tormented figures and blackened landscapes through an ascetic and industrial drone. In this place, god is a fiend, and his theologians the architects of the torture chamber. Inselberg signs the end of a time and draws the destruction of the universe, by revealing the negative of an immaculate purity in contingent shapes. Through the idea of sacrifice, he offers here the homily of the frontiers of time, projection of his own demiurgic perditions as the ultimate rhetor of the absolute and extinction." In the time it took to read and write that, the scene has shifted from the proverbial graveyard to some droney limbo that continues with some few sonic changes until its conclusion. The shortest piece on the album at 19:28, and actually, my favorite.

My take on 'The Pact' is that it's a very worthy album for lovers of both dark ambient and noise, with each track given the time to develop a world of its own. The compositions are diverse enough to know you're listiening to three distinctly different artists, and each has something special to offer. The CD is a limited edition in an elaborate digipak. Cioran Records also sent me a cassette release by another artist (Pentti) but I'll get to that another time when I get around to playing some cassettes.