**2025 Stock** The Bog, released in 2025, finds Cisfinitum (Evgeny Voronovsky) excavating the mythological and sonic depths of the toad—a figure recurring in folk legends, alchemical texts, and ancient rites. Built on a foundation of re-processed field recordings captured in swamps and wetlands, the album takes the acoustic reality of frogs, amphibians, and environmental ambiance and transforms it via intricate sound design into a single, immersive composition. The result is a brooding, hypnotic journey that blurs the line between music and environmental ritual. Voronovsky’s distinct approach draws on his classical training as a violinist and his longstanding pursuit of electroacoustic syncretism. In The Bog, drones and layered reverberations create an enveloping mass, buried voices and fleeting melodies emerge from the sonic mist, and organic textures underpin the album’s atmosphere of damp mystery. The soundscape continually shifts—sometimes pulsing with uneasy vitality, sometimes dissolving into near silence—mirroring the cycles of transformation and decay central to the toad’s mythic resonance. Rather than polished or artificially serene, the work is marked by natural imprecision, honoring the chaos and fragmentation inherent in its source materials.
Listeners will find themselves drawn into a swampy soundworld where time appears suspended. The use of frogs and amphibious field recordings evokes both real and symbolic metamorphosis: the passage from egg to toad, from water to land, and from innocence into the shadowed mythos of adulthood. Cisfinitum makes this metamorphosis audible, enveloping the listener in layers of sonic sediment that suggest ritual, memory, and forgotten knowledge. Through subtle melodic threads and shifting harmonics, The Bog balances alienation and comfort, inviting meditation rather than resolution. Critically, The Bog stands out in the dark ambient and ritual music spheres for its commitment to source authenticity and its refusal of convention. It is a work that situates the listener in a liminal zone—neither entirely of nature nor entirely of abstraction. For long stretches, the album resists clarity, embracing dissolution and emergence, much like the life cycles of its amphibian muses. In a lineage that includes Russian visionaries and European drone pioneers, Cisfinitum’s latest release is an invitation to descend, reflect, and encounter the mythic and material in equal measure.
