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CD
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CSR 338CD
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Cold Spring presents the brand-new album of shimmering, heathen drone from TenHornedBeast -- the ritual doom-drone project of Christopher Walton (Endvra). The wild goats (Capra Hircus) of the Cheviot hills have lived there for millennia and are the Avatars of the wild places. If there is a heathenry left on this island, it is to be found the places where the wild goats gather, in the secret valleys and alongside nameless burns. They are the Children of Pan in an Arcadia that straddles both the imagination and the real world. This is TenHornedBeast intentionally moving in a different direction from the cryptic doom-ambient of 2022's The Lamp Of No Light (CSR 312CD). Capra Hircus is full of the glowing sunrise of hill-top psychedelia and shimmering, spiraling drones that mimic the abstract lines of the rock-art panels that mark the landscape. The music flows outwards and immerses the listener in looping, hypnotic waves of feedback. CD in six-panel flood-printed matt digipak with photographs taken by Christopher Walton on the High Places of Pennine Horeb.
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CSR 312CD
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For his first release since 2017's Death Has No Companion (CSR 227CD), Christopher Walton (ex-Endvra), a thirty-year veteran of industrial music, has dragged TenHornedBeast back to its pounding doom-ambient roots and recorded his darkest album yet, as a sonic veneration of a medieval sculpture depicting the torment of the damned in hell. In the crypt of York Minster, built directly on the site of the Roman citadel, is the Doom Stone. A relic from the 12th century the stone, carved in deep relief, illustrated for a medieval audience the horrors that awaited sinners in hell. Figures depicting luxury and avarice are licked by flames, leering demons hold a tortured soul in a furnace and the mouths of hell gape, their nostrils licked by toads. Here beneath one of the jewels of western Christendom is a talisman so shocking, so contrary to the modern mind that the very faith that created it has abandoned it. The five suitably monolithic pieces on The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The Yorkshire Doom Stone) form a journey, starting with the first mortal death and ending with the second eternal death of the soul. Walton has used the darkest textures and heaviest drones as way-markers on this journey, as hymns to exalt the scenes shown on the stone. "TenHornedBeast is a vehicle for the sinister current that is woven through life. If Christ is the Light of the World and hymns are sung to him in the Minster then my hymns should be heard in the crypt, where the Doom Stone radiates its No-Light. Without darkness, the light is meaningless." Six-panel digipak with photography by the artist.
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CSR 227CD
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Created from the solitude of the high and lonely places, Death Has No Companion uses the TenHornedBeast aesthetic to explore the isolation of inner and outer worlds. Discordant piano chords build to shimmering blizzards of feedback. Drones and tones fall like snow and settle in the frozen landscapes. Strings flutter in the bitter winds. Does the spirit not falter when the Wanderer sees the night fall before him? Lamentation and sorrow. Winter eternal and everlasting. We all must walk the long road alone. Death has no companion. Best known for his '90s work with dark-ambient occultists Endvra, Christopher Walton controls layers of sub-sonic drones and abstract noise to create a vision that is bleaker and darker than its predecessor. Comes in six-panel digipak.
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CSR 106CD
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2009 release. My Horns Are a Flame to Draw Down the Truth sees five compositions from black ambient/doom overlord Christopher Walton, taken from the same sessions that gave forth The Sacred Truth (2007). My Horns Are a Flame to Draw Down the Truth consists of three remixes/expansions/contractions of pieces from the debut album The Sacred Truth and two totally new compositions in a similar style to this dark masterpiece. Walton has stripped the songs to their bare bones and allowed them space to breathe again. This album is all-new but continues the atmosphere of the debut and can be considered a companion piece. Presented in a matte-laminate, spot-varnished digipak.
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CSR 130CD
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TenHornedBeast's third album for Cold Spring Records is titled Hunts & Wars. Recorded over a three year period from 2006 to 2009, this album introduces subtle changes to the established TenHornedBeast sound, with shorter, delicate interludes separating longer tracks that rage with heavy distortion and doom-drone barbarism. Hunts & Wars progresses the established TenHornedBeast sound using leaden, sub-tuned bass guitar to create rhythms and riffs that dominate a battlefield of vast ritual percussion and droning walls of electric dissonance, creating epic and expansive textures that by turns burn with frost and freeze with fire. Heavily influenced by the oneiric visions of Robert E. Howard and Lord Dunsany. Hunts & Wars seeks to evoke the elemental, anti-modern fantasias of these writers and is presented in a lavish digipak designed by noted American graphic designer Kevin Yuen (Sunn O))), Wolves In The Throne Room) to its full grotesque glory. The days have come when the steel will rule. Titans arise, monuments fall. Ballads of victory and defeat are sung aloud as from the highest steps we are swept on to the eternal Hunts & Wars. Presented in a 6-panel, spot metallic finish digipak.
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