Białoruski Rytualny Ambientdrugi album tego duetu z roku 1999

Hey, how about a neat concoction of black metal, ritual ambient and martial industrial? The culprit in question is Voist Angiras - a long running staple of the local scene, also responsible for another ambient/post-industrial project PRAGNAVIT. Both entities appear to be something Voist worked on interchangeably throughout the years. PRAGNAVIT was the first to surface on the horizon in the mid-90's and then promptly dropped off to make way for UDUMBAL during the latter part of the decade. Two albums were issued under the name only to see the operation freeze up. The turn of the century perhaps resulted in Voist becoming absorbed with thoughts concerning the meaning of life, his place in the universe and general reappraisal of values, or maybe more mundane material issues. Either way, the man has not been heard from for a good long while, and PRAGNAVIT made an official comeback only in 2007. When will UDUMBAL's turn come again? You can search for answers at the bottom of Krywian swamps. In the meantime, UDUMBAL's second album still remains a good listen.

Voist always nurtured serious obsessions with Vedic esotericism alongside his Belarusian nationalism, so this recording acts as a bit of an umbrella for both, what with the more Slavic-oriented PRAGNAVIT being on sabbatical. Sanskrit and Belarusian track names and lyrical content freely intermingle with one another, and so do stylistic transfusions. Blackened vocals and guitar textures rub shoulders with chunks of dark ambience, neo-classical forays, pseudo-symphonic wadding, militant percussive encrustations and Cold Meat Industry-inspired general direction, plus hefty amounts of faux-mystical, spoken word declamations - all called upon to generate a foreboding ritualistic aura of ancient cults and lost, archaic knowledge. And to a large extent, it all works out considerably well, a few rough edges notwithstanding. Voist even manages to create an impression of greater diversity, despite essentially using altered variations of only a handful of base sounds and rhythmic approaches. But that's hell of a lot more than most of his peers manage to accomplish in the field on a course of more than a single album. Voist divvies up his recording into several interspersing lots and concocts elements in a presentable manner by keeping busy and gradually introducing new variables but leaving plenty of breathing space in between, thus keeping the subjected listener occupied but not stupefied. From oppressively tribal, ceremonial workouts that open the album to slightly lighter, if still dreary, neo-classical fragments that appear more prominently towards the end, "Ahi Budhnya" sails across more than one shade of gloom. In light of that, intermittent, strategically placed, blackened excursions, probably being the weakest links of the equation on their own, do not necessarily throw too big of an axe into the flow but stir things up a bit when timing calls for it and thus manage to more or less successfully squeeze into the overall context and become median, separating pillars without breaking too many doors in the process. Splinters of whispered incantations, female voices, overtone singing, howling wolves, spacey effects and crumbly shreds of noise that are additionally peppered throughout the aural quill add the needed extra fibers to the overall kaleidoscope. Last thing to note would be the somewhat unexpected nods to LAIBACH, which manifest by way of spoken intonations ala Milan Fras and periodic implementations of vaguely post-Wagnerian keyboards, most notably on the eighth track "Agadha Tamas". In fact, if earlier LAIBACH actively cross pollinated and traded world-views with Swedish ritual project ZA FRUMI while occasionally shaking hands with a few random passerby black metal bands and maybe LORD WIND during a couple of instances, "Ahi Budhnya" could possibly be the resulting enfant terrible.

The recording itself is of a quite decent - very much discernable yet still fittingly murky - quality, unlike UDUMBAL's own debut outing (which suffered from an utterly basement production job or lack of thereof) or early output from the likeminded Belarusian ritualistic project BACHUS, who released several demos around the same time period. In terms of its musical palette, though, it places all too well between the more lush and medieval-oriented BACHUS and utterly minimalistic take on "Daudi Baldrs"-style ambient that ZMROCHNY DOL (the one-off side-job from Algkult of PAGAN (Blr)) pulled back in a day. I'd say if you sample those three (plus early PRAGNAVIT of course) and then somehow manage to track down the forgotten folk-ambient project KAPISHCHA - you will get a decent picture of post-black metal Belarusian scene circa the late 1990's.