CD, Triumvirate, 2004?
www.citadel-gate.com
This album is the twelfth release for Triumvirate label, a label with some drone/noise-ambient releases, a genre that describes “Granite Sky” by Citadel, one of the projects of the label’s owner, Mitchell Altum.
Without any delays, this album’s music is covered with this style’s inherent atmosphere, predominantly slow pace which second by second deepens into a state similar to a kind of trance. While listening to “Granite Sky” you’re living in time with the sounds, and some abstract, fantastic images begin to loom in imagination, limited only by the tracks’ titles. Incidentally, the titles of the compositions seem to indicate some sort of plot or story, from the rise until apocalypse and existence after that.
The first two tracks – “Radix” and “Unassailable” – don’t vary too much from the set of sound components, with sharply defined noise elements being common for them. In “Sentenced”, the noise recedes into the background and whispers become the main component, being used in other tracks as well, albeit in small amounts. “Burning Fields”, “Elan Vital” and the last track “Rhadamantine” can be considered as the most radical among the rest by the noise prevalence in the compositions.
“Burning Fields” and “Elan Vital” are the acme of the album, the peak of concentration, where a formless, edgeless, void of other attributes element tries to break free from inside. The last track in “Granite Sky” in the similar manner repeats this attempt.
A certain sameness is one of the faults of “Granite Sky” and sometimes it feels that there is something missing in this album or it isn’t clear why a track is present on the album. By some standards some compositions might even differ only by their titles.
[6/10]
— Igor