AMN Reviews: Various Artists – Music for Ancient Catacombs (2026; Eighth Tower Records)

Music for Ancient Catacombs is the fourth installment in a series of thematic compilation albums from Eighth Tower Records that has established itself as a consistently rewarding project in drone and experimental ambient. The series began in 2023 with Music for Abandoned Monasteries, which invited fifteen artists to contemplate sacred spaces left to crumble and be reclaimed by silence. Later that same year, Music for Haunted Asylums turned its gaze to the deinstitutionalized psychiatric hospitals that litter the landscape of the post-war Western world. Most recently, Music for Alien Temples pushed the concept outward into speculative and cosmic territory, imagining the ritual spaces of non-human civilizations. That album earned a spot on our Best of the First Half of 2025 list.

Now the series goes figuratively underground, a “back to basics” release using drones, texture, percussion, and atmosphere to evoke states of dread, mystery, desolation, and the sublime. Thirteen artists, veterans of the form alongside newer voices, explore varying temperaments, from haunted stillness to barely-contained noise.

Kammarheit opens with In Quiet Depths, a masterclass in restraint. Hushed and synth-driven, the track is suffused with a darkness that feels geological in its patience. Underground Sorrow from progettosonoro is sepulchral in the truest sense. The listener can feel the weight of stone overhead, and something unseen moving just ahead. Nerthus conjures a funerary atmosphere in Missa Tenebrarum, echoing percussion marking time in vaulted spaces while haunted melodic passages drift and dissolve.

Ashtoreth & Penumbral Aethyr’s Khthon is the album’s most unpredictable offering, an abstract, shifting amalgam of noise and disembodied vocalizations that refuses to settle into any particular form. Adonai Atrophia fills The Lowest Chamber with echoing percussive thuds and wafting, processed vocal fragments implying presence while leaving its source unidentifiable. PNÉVMMA’s kry-pti is brief but effective, church bells submerged in gloom, a short passage that is transitional rather than absolute. Aconis continues this trend with Sanctum in the Depths, a quietly unsettling piece built on pulsating static and background crackling.

Guru Bobol’s linthre is the album’s longest track. It is repetitive and hypnotic, with drones and sparse percussion coalescing around intermittent bells in a way that suspends time. Mario Lino Stancati’s Somnium disorients through rhythm rather than noise, featuring lilting electronic motifs that ride pulsing waves. In Entering the Stone Circle, New Risen Throne layers slowly rattling percussion over creaking structures, as waves of thick, oppressive drones stack like sediment.

SÍLENÍ’s Within the Vaults offers the compilation’s sole moment of relative brightness, as luminous tones and watery, chiming textures emerge from the surrounding darkness without fully dispelling it. Sublimatio Mortis follows an ominous arc in A Pilgrimage Towards Nothingness, with bells that give way to harsh textures and fractured melodic figures representing a malevolent coherence. Dapalis Sepolcri’s La Fosse des Cholériques is a compositionally ambitious piece with wide dynamic range, dense layering, and crescendos that build to a point of being nearly overwhelming. It is an outlier in the best sense.

What Eighth Tower Records has quietly achieved with this series is a reliable method for making abstraction visceral. These contributions embody the given premise with conviction. The result is thirteen different perspectives on subterranean dread, unified roughly by style but more by a shared commitment to finding meaning in atmosphere. This is another strong entry in a strong series.

Music for Ancient Catacombs will be released on May 14, 2026 by Eighth Tower Records.

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AMN Reviews: Rapoon – Grain of Light (2026; Unexplained Sounds Group)

Even if you have never listened to Rapoon before, you need to try Grain of Light. This album is a grower that is best experienced at high volume.

As Robin Storey’s alter ego, Rapoon has released dozens of albums over the course of more than three decades. Here, with an experimental-leaning outing, he layers lilting electronics, rolling looped structures, abstract percussion, and slow-moving processed guitar (or sitar) to create evocative and haunting soundscapes.

Take Sunlight in Dark Places, which begins with deliberately plucked strings accompanying shifting drone-based atmospherics. Non-Western percussion with unusual patterns enters several minutes in, and the strings are partially replaced by synth chords. These patterns have odd meters are thus are subtly destabilizing – disorienting with a trancelike effect.

Later tracks are clearly influenced by music from the Indian subcontinent, with sitar and tabla integrated with the loops and chords. Rattling elements populate the foreground, while the background remains repetitive yet busy. Other pieces incorporate long melancholy breaks. The details are easy to miss, thus the aforementioned suggestion to experience this work at sufficient amplitude.

Grain of Light was released on March 12, 2026 by the Unexplained Sounds Group. It embodies the ethno-ambient tradition Storey has helped define, and is a very strong entry in his lengthy catalog.

AMN Reviews: RhaD – Ghost Music Library (2026; Unexplained Sounds Group)

RhaD is the alter ego of experimental ambient artist Sonologyst, who also runs the Unexplained Sounds Group family of labels. This is his second release under this moniker.

Ghost Music Library is like a series of strange dreams. Not necessarily nightmares, just weird psychedelic experiences that disorient while expanding one’s notion of what is possible. Each track on this recording is characterized by different mixes of abstract sounds, including synth chords, soft percussion, rattling and buzzing electroacoustic elements, field recordings, and/or voices.

There is an overall haziness to these pieces, adding to the sensory drift. While the music is clearly mixed, the field recordings and voices tend to be muffled or obscured. On top of that, the entire album has a notably retro feel, ripe with analog hiss, static, and imperfections. Its recordings could serve as a soundtrack to a 1960s or 1970s science fiction film.

RhaD frames these sounds as being pulled from a dusty, fictional catalog, with scraps of degraded audio, output of unreliable machines, and media rot stitched into something coherent. The album taps into a hauntological mood with music that feels like a transmission from an alternate past, or a memory of sounds that were never actually recorded. That sense of lost source material is carried by the texture as much as the composition, suggesting the aforementioned aging formats and outmoded technologies. The result is warm, immersive, and exploratory, but interspersed with a quiet sadness, like the afterimage of a world that’s already slipped away.

Ghost Music Library will be released February 25, 2026, by Unexplained Sounds Group.

UCL: Atalanta favored to edge Union SG in a tight 21:00 CET clash, as Union SG chase an upset and a draw remains a plausible outcome.

Royale Union Saint Gilloise 21.9%
Draw 28.7%
Atalanta Bergamo 49.4%

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Exciting UCL clash as Bayern are clear favorites vs underdogs Union SG; a draw is possible. Kickoff 21:00 CET.

FC Bayern München 71.8%
Draw 19.4%
Royale Union Saint Gilloise 8.8%

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AMN Reviews: Sándor Vály – Early Works 1988-1992 (1992 / 2025; Unexplained Sounds Group)

Another unearthed gem from Unexplained Sounds Group, Early Works 1988-1992 is lo-fi sound art from Hungarian Sándor Vály. The album is a sonic representation of two emotionally-resonant times in his life.

After fleeing a military draft, living in hardship in Paris, and facing imprisonment, Vály spent seven months confined in a mental hospital. There, exposure to extreme human experiences and the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead shaped his outlook. Vály interpreted these events in Bardo Tödol I–II and SoulDrum I, using improvised equipment and instruments.

The former is a set of raw, pulsating, and throbbing drones with a minimal beat. The latter is more rhythm and mechanical-sounding, though overlaid electronics are brighter and almost buoyant. Both have an analog, hazy nature.

After meeting his future wife in 1990, Vály moved to Finland, where in 1992 he first worked with computers and began experimenting with rudimentary sound software alongside cassette mixing, effects, and piano. The emotional impact of marriage, migration, a new language and culture, parenthood, and the northern climate shaped these recordings, from which Limbus Patrum, SoulDrum II, Life-Death, and Melancholy were selected.

Limbus Patrum is by far the longest of these tracks, with an urgent static-oriented beat structure. The repeating structures slowly evolve with echoing and other effects, while Vály explores variations on simple melodies. Over time, Vály includes more abstract and harsh noises, likely real-time effects-laden manipulations. SoulDrum II is based on roiling, scratchy, loop-driven forms. This is in stark contrast to the gentle electronics of Life-Death and the haunting piano of Melancholy that is slowly morphed into white noise.

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