TRANSMISSION

Darsombra is a Krautrock band from Baltimore that actually started as the solo project of Brian Danniloski, who, at the time, played all instruments and provided all of the vocals. In 2016, he was joined in the project by Ann Everton, who brought her synth and keyboard skills to the project for their 2016 album "Polyvision". In August of 2019, the project released it's 6th full length album "Transmission". This is a single track album with a duration of over 41 minutes of blissful and dark exploration into the darker side of Krautrock, or, what they like to call "Trans-Apocalyptic Galaxy Rock".

The music definitely takes its time, taking you into a trance-like atmosphere with repeating loops that build one layer upon another in a very slow manner. With this continual pulsating sound, the intensity slowly builds. Each layer is introduced, including a layer of repeating, chant-like vocals from both Ann and Brian, which continues in a repeating pattern, becoming part of the trance like atmosphere of the building layers. In the meantime, heavy guitar lines improvise over the top of all of this. At the 16 minute mark, when you have becoming totally immersed in this bliss-fest, rolling cymbals introduce a fuzzy and louder guitar layer and keyboard patterns come in to help anchor the sound, creating another drone layer, this time with changing chords, to replace the previous one. The music is less layered now giving a simpler sound, but the guitar takes more liberties as the synth continues to act as a foundation. The intensity amps up to another layer during the 19th minute as more rolling cymbals take everything up a notch and the guitar becomes even more powerful, screeching and squealing along, then another heavy guitar layer takes over as the previous one becomes part of the repeating background. Things suddenly calm to a simple bass pattern that and a feedback pattern establishes a simple and minimalistic melody. Power chords bring in short heavy bursts of energy, but the sound remains minimal for a while, even when the organ comes in. A short build comes along, then a nice, chiming melody brings the music out of the darkness and brightens the tone at around the 35 minute mark. The overall sound continues to be lighter, which eventually grows when more wordless vocals come in, this time with more volume, and the vocals and guitar passages match each other, the music fades and we are left with a choir-like singing of the final melody, which also fades to silence.

The musicianship is excellent here, however, many might find it somewhat redundant, but then, that is the whole point. The music floats along with hardly any fluctuation in the tempo, which is mostly generated by the looping effects and pulsations in the music. It does the job of transporting you into a blissful state, but also works well as background music for meditation or just free-floating along. The additions of the vocals in different sequences help to mark the passing of time, as there seems to be only one major fluctuation in the entire track, coming along around the mid-point of the track, when the built up drone made out of the introducing of layers drops out of the mix and it all turns to a mostly ambient section for the 2nd half, yet still adding in some dynamic changes to keep it all interesting as mostly the guitar continues to improvise. But that pulsating feel continues to keep the track at an even keel and tempo, which you actually feel more than you hear it. The 41 minutes of this track seemed to pass by quickly for me, and I found that instead of being bored with it all, I actually slipped into its trance inducing sound. That is one way to tell if this music is a success, that it is consistent enough to be considered Krautrock and "mind-freeing", yet dynamic enough to still be interesting. Understanding that this kind of music isn't for everyone, and that you have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy it for what it is, I find that it is effective in it's purpose, thus I can easily give it 4 stars.