As Kraft, Robert Hofman offers up ten slices of dark and ominous shoegazey neofolk that makes prominent use of electronic post-production as well as some unusual vocal and found sound choices to give it a distinctive character.

Opening track “The Dreadful Hours” was the project’s starting point, a heavily cut-up jazz demo reworked into a long evolving distortion. The poem at the end of the piece sits slightly uncomfortably and doesn’t really add anything- final track “Zapovit” has the same problem, leaving you in the odd situation where the album’s opener and closer end up being the least successful tracks.

Other tracks such as “Gauze & Effect” have more energy, adding to the steady hums some backwards mechanical rhythms and played-around-with vocal sounds. “Lights Out” mixes human panting, horse noises, DIY sounds and synthetic choral noises in a blend that ought not to work, but really does in a slightly Tangerine Dream-esque manner. The brief, buzzing bee-laden awkwardness of “Black September”, with a sound which seems like an attempt to deliberately imitate the skipping of a scratched CD, is particularly uncomfortable.

Others such as “Gold Into Lead” are more akin to weird ballads, with plaintive melody lines wandering seemingly aimlessly above the bizarre bank of percussion, with “In Tongues” taking a solo acoustic guitar strum and twisting it through delays and effects into something imitating minimal techno. “The Wake” has a particularly strong melodic core, while other pieces feel looser and more improvised.

A standout track is “Ember”, a slightly dub-flavoured track which takes violin and folk acapella sounds treated to sound like old gramophone recordings and marinades them in an echo chamber until they become something much more sinister than they already were.

Messing around on the borders between jazz, drone and neofolk gives “Harvest Of Despair” an unusual and distinctive palette that really catches your attention.