With Sielun Kuilu, Abysse Des Âmes sink deeper into the fissure they opened on their debut, returning to Satatuhatta with a second full‑length that feels less like a follow‑up and more like a descent. The title - “chasm of the soul” in Finnish - is no metaphorical flourish; it’s the governing image for an album that behaves like a kind of psychic geology, all pressure, fault lines and unseen shifts. What previously moved in shadowy outline is now rendered in a denser, more coagulated form, seeping from the speakers with the slow inevitability of poisonous bile. This is dark noir avantgarde honed until it becomes atmosphere and symptom rather than genre.
The trio’s method hinges on a volatile balance between control and corrosion. Electro‑acoustic fragments - bowed metal, prepared strings, detuned keys, stray feedback, contact‑mic’d surfaces - are captured in close‑up and then left to drift within a lethargic, heavy ether. Each sound feels fragile, almost translucent, yet the overall field is thick, humid, charged with latent force. Tiny collisions, a scrape against the casing, the resonance of a loose screw, become pivotal events in a landscape where time has been stretched and gravity re‑calibrated. Instead of clear lines, we get brittle textures that crack, flake and reform, like dried paint slowly giving way under the weight of something pressing from behind the wall.
As Sielun Kuilu unfolds, the void itself seems to acquire body. Initially it presents as negative space, a backdrop against which isolated details stand out with forensic clarity. Gradually, that emptiness fills up: low‑end pressure rises, faint mechanical throbs emerge and recede, distant rumblings suggest activity in adjoining rooms. The music moves at a glacial pace, yet nothing is static; energy accumulates in microscopic increments, shaping an ether of force and matter that feels perpetually on the verge of condensing into something more violent. It is noir not because it quotes cinema, but because it shares that genre’s obsession with unseen motives, offscreen threats, the sense that the real action is happening just out of frame.
Mastering by Pentti Dassum subtly seals this universe. Rather than smoothing over the edges, the mastering preserves the trio’s delicate internal dynamics: the sharpness of a single high overtone cutting through a murky swell, the way a near‑inaudible hum thickens the silence, the shock when a brittle texture suddenly splinters at close range. Volume changes feel less like technical choices than like shifts in proximity, as if the listener’s ear were being guided closer to, or further from, the wound at the centre of the sound. The result is a record that rewards immersion at low and high levels alike, revealing new fault lines with each pass.
In the end, Sielun Kuilu functions as both statement and threshold: a consolidation of Abysse Des Âmes’ dark avantgarde language, and an invitation to step into a space where the soul’s abyss is not something to be described but something to be inhabited. It is music that doesn’t so much tell a story as suspend you in one, holding you in the slow, toxic drift between impact and consequence.
