Review: Talvihorros - Descent into Delta

True to its title, Descent into Delta feels as though it’s sinking into the earth. The waves of life and activity that flicker into life during “Gamma” – and flourish during the densely built “Beta” – feel attributable to the outside, anchored by thick hums of bass and distortion but stacked with ambient layers that scrape the sky. Melody plays a prominent role, featuring either as simple bass loops that create a constant around which harmony can shift between forms, or – as is the case as the album descends further – unhinging as a stream of notes that never seems to repeat, luring the listener into a darkness that riddles the path ahead with unknowing. Penultimate track “Theta” (the album’s longest offering) begins to clot the panoramic expanse of the earlier pieces with a thick ambient fog, as the album’s rather conventional sense of melody collapses into abstraction.

Only faint slithers of high frequency congregate around the low hum at the core as closing piece “Delta” whirrs into being – it’s resonant and earthly, inflected by gentle organ tones that hover on the edge of audibility. By this point, the album has sunk from the ambience of infinite galaxies into the slow, weighty shifts of matter in deep and lightless caves, and even as the central drone retracts to let strings whine awkwardly over moody chorus guitar, Descent into Delta is closing in even further. The resultant mood is one of emotional isolation and detachment, but the weight of melancholy vaporises any sense of claustrophobia; the listener’s interaction with space is rendered irrelevant as Talvihorros’ expert handling of emotion takes over.