Une ambiance plus mystérieuse que noire à mon avis, pas plombante, où la vie est encore présente mais malmenée. Je crois qu'Arne Pahlke a quelque chose à voir avec cet album ! Bravo et merci !!

Fundamentally quite a thought provoking, dark and strange, but compelling, inquisitive.intelligent look at a very interesting and insightful look into the macabre, upsetting ways to be killed or to die. It was haunting, amusing even in a bizarre sick way and scary. i could go on. But you get the point. I must admit also this is done with exceptional detail, skill and craft. And is not to be taken as a insult. But a compliment.

Der Gloomster geht hier den Weg des Todes und die Klangwerke bringen einem eine oftmals beklemmende Atmossphäre, eine Atmossphäre die den Tod bringen soll, man fühlt sich unbehaglich, definitiv keine Entspannungsmusik! Viel mehr wird hier der Tod melodisch in vielen Themenbereichen und Variationen thematisiert, mal gelingt das mehr mal weniger, aber definitiv ein hörenswertes Album mit guter Qualität und eine experimentelle Abwechslung des Künstlers Arne.P

The first track, Long Way To The Electric Chair, is a lovely dark mix of musicality and snippets from films. I think it works very well. It's time, and I should imagine it is a long way. Throwing Yourself In Front Of A Train, is just wonderful. I love the sound, albeit through a long, black tunnel. Best place if you are going to do it, less space to change your mind at the last minute. All that clatter and all that splatter. Track three, is scintillatingly terrifying, and suitably so. Quite disturbing, but how else could it be, with spaces in between to add effect. In The Spiral Of Drowning is a beautifully brooding track, that sucks you down into its depths slowly but surely. I love the bells ringing, for whom the bell tolls indeed, they add brilliantly to the overall atmosphere. Some lovely sound effects come into play and with a staggered chorus, that is set to drive you mad enough to want to throw yourself into the maelstrom and have done with it all. Fall From The Trapeze, a testimony to life's tenuous balance in the sway, and that strange desire for the observer to see that fall, that potentially fatal fall to the ground. Schadenfreude! A Date With A SerialKiller, is actually almost something I have done. I once dated for several years a person who ended up being a murderer (and no, I did not drive them to it!). Is that knives I can hear being sharpened in the background, with those nice noises. Wrong-Way-Driver, seems innocuous at first, what's so bad about going the wrong way down a street. But it would be different at 120 miles per hour the wrong way along the Autobahn! Personally, even when crossing a one-way thoroughfare, I always look both ways and people find that odd. Thinking about it, people find me odd generally. How to switch off a brain, use a big word they don't understand. That's how most people drive. Maybe that is the 'wrong' way? My satellite navigation made me do it!!! Killed By Frost On A Mountain. I had frostbite this winter, luckily I was just left with a few scars on my hands, but it hurt a lot, still is tender. When I die, I want to be left scattered on a mountain. Apparently, on Everest they just walk passed the dead bodies and carry on their trek. Seemingly without a care in the world, a typical disrespect of nature's potential harshness, and not a very good attitude to be climbing so high. If I get the chance, K2 is the one for me, a la Crowley. A nicely atmospheric track from what little experience I have of mountains. This album gets more uncanny for me personally as it progresses, I spent a year or so living right next to a slaughterhouse. It wasn't very pleasant but then, even at that age I was already quite a morbid character. I myself, am strange and unusual. The smell, let alone the sound, had a very unique quality. Pigs have souls too and feel pain. Enjoy your rib burger! And again, those knives... As for poisoning, my landlord did not do a gas certification for the property I am just about to move out of. It turned out there was a leak at the mains and the cellar was full of gas. How I didn't go up with one mighty bang is beyond me, but it explained all the vile headaches that I suffered for over a year, my room is right above the cellar. This album is so me!-) Heart Attack was the autopsy result of someone I found parked in a lane, in their car, slumped back in their seat, as their car was so neatly parked to one side. He was still warm when I got there but gone nevertheless. As for Lethal LSD-Trip, I overdosed on the stuff when I was fourteen. I lost about four days of my 'childhood' or rather the remnants of it. Could explain a lot! I tried, I died, then survived. Recurring theme, long story. Interesting track that captures the some of the essence of such a state of consciousness, in its alteration. We finish, on lucky 13 with I Die. In some sense, I already have and feel like a ghost of my former self. It's a plaintive and quite a comparatively soothing and gentle piece of music. Damned good album altogether, very enjoyable.

13 moments of death by The Gloomster (yet another project by the poet Arne Pahlke) is described by the author himself as the "soundtrack" to a "film" depicting the many different ways to die. Death by accident, recklessness or illness, by law (execution), by the hand of a murderer or by one's own hand. Being killed in a war is a serious possibility as well, but that would be an entirely different story and what mostly interests Arne here is, I believe, the view of death as a private, individual experience - a more or less unpredicted occurrence in the routine of an otherwise peaceful, or at least ordinary life (with the obvious exception of Long way to the electric chair) - though "ordinary" is actually a term too generalised to apply to the vicissitudes of each particular person's way of living. Being conscious of their own mortality, and therefore of the tragic irony that defines their existence, humans are the only creatures on this planet who intentionally obliterate their own kind for reasons other than self-preservation; and what is more, who have the possibility to choose the kind of death they will inflict on themselves or others. Man has at his disposition, and is by nature able to devise, an almost infinite array of tools and methods to do away with life - and should one of them fail, there is always an alternative (a characteristic example is that of the poet Kostas Karyotakis whose work, coincidentally, I've been rediscovering of late - at the age of 38 he tried to commit suicide by drowning but being a good swimmer, he spent ten hours struggling in vain; afterwards he rewrote his suicide note, advising anyone who considered drowning themselves to not attempt it if they could swim. The following day he did kill himself on a desert beach, with a bullet through his heart). Art is the sublimated expression of human experience and as such, it can mourn, celebrate (in the event of a heroic self-sacrifice) or simply describe the loss of a life, while death itself is sometimes promoted to a form of art (as in most cases of ritual murder). In 13 moments of death this description is effectuated through an intense musical "narration" which at the same time manages to remain almost passionless on the composer's part - emotions are provoked by the ambience rather than imposed a priori on the listener, the focus resting mainly on the way each "victim" is dealing with his or her own imminent death. The power of Arne's songmaking relies usually on his lyrics, but their absence from this album is precisely what makes it so intriguing - a poet expressing himself without words. The music alone is what captures, and literally acts out (with the help of sound effects) each moment of death, as it is being "lived from within" by the respective moribund: the chilling progression of footsteps towards the electric chair, the desperate fight for a breath underwater, an acrobat's gradually precipitating fall, the slaughtering of animals in an abattoir, the slow immersion in a terminal drug-induced trip, the frantic or waning rhythm of a heartbeat, the heaving, discordant agony of a serial killer's captive... The 13th song, I die, is absolutely hair-raising even in its conciliating tranquility - or rather, exactly because of it. As the subject of death constitutes one of the greatest taboos in Western culture, the contemplation of one's own end becomes viscerally unsettling (and at this point, faithful to the Pagan origins of my Mediterranean upbringing, I will knock vigorously on my wooden desk - auf Holz klopfen - and wish with all my heart a long, healthy and creative life to Arne). The "officially" ominous number 13 is in an odd way exorcised by this eerie catharsis; it is here that the "camera" moves from the recorded "scene" to the 13th protagonist - the "director" himself - bringing him face to face with his personal "black mirror", the fadeout into the "final credits" of his own life. A macabre but beguiling constellation of a deeply existential essence, punctuated with true flashes of genius.

Vom Tod erwarte ich mehr! Mir fehlt bei dem Album der Wahnsinn, die absolute unbeschreibliche Angst, die Dramatik wenn einem der Saft abgedreht wird und man sich windet und nach Luft schnappt. Bis das berühmte Licht kommt.. man oben, unten oder nirgendwo landet und man nur ein Haufen Scheiße auf der sinnlosen Kugel war.

Very dark yet somehow not sinister even though its theme is. Mental imagery as each song plays is both haunting and amusing. Nice one.

Das Thema schreckt vielleicht etwas ab, gerade wenn die dunkle Jahreszeit sich ihrem Ende neigt. So tödlich gehts in diesem Werk dann aber gar nicht zu. Man wird auf eine Klangreise mitgenommen, bekommt den Soundtrack zu einem Hörspiel geliefert, dass man im Kopf weiterspinnen kann. Die Titelbeschreibungen können dazu animieren, man kann aber auch eigene Gedanken schweben lassen oder das Ganze einfach nur als perfektes Ambientspekatel geniessen. Richtig gut gemacht!

Coherente y personalísimo.