Review The Wire (thewire.co.uk)

FALL OF THE GREY WINGED ONE - 'Aeons Of Dreams'

Originally released as a limited CD-R on his own Null Records in 2002, Belgian guitarist Stijn van Cauter's debut album as Fall Of The Grey Winged One has now been reissued by UK Black Metal specialist label Supernal in a bid to attract more listeners to the man's awesome drone. Playing in such underground BM bands as In Somnis, Pantheist and The Sad Sun (a duo project with one EM Hearst), Cauter's latest solo project aims to go beyond the limitations of being a band member by projecting his music in a slightly more distorted direction. Those already tuned in to Earth and Sunn O))) will immediately lock into the low frequency guitar rumble and dungeon door slam technique that booms through the three long songs that make up Aeons Of Dreams. The by now familiar power amplifier surge that courses through the work of Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley is to the fore here, but overlaid with tiny sharpened Metal guitar details that pierce through the sludge of blackened drone and illuminate different angles of Cauter's sonic juggernaut. It is the title track that really impresses, a massive 40 minutes-plus slab of undulating, crushing guitar drone that subsides just enough to allow other musical sections to materialise and rise from the cavernous gloom his anthem invokes.

The most immediate of these is Cauter's carefully placed ambient pulsations that loom out spectrally as the monolithic walls of sound he builds up close in on the listener. From his fretboard resound soft, padding phantom footfalls, while further in a cracked guitar chime echoes the tolling of a distant church bell. Comparisons with Burzum's prison or Abruptum's torture chamber recordings inevitably spring to mind while listening to these flourishes, but deeper inside lurks a more experimental approach to guitar playing (like Oren Ambarchi) which gradually bubbles up and bursts into earshot. The end result is a record that, when winkled out of its Black Metal carapace, could easily be absorbed and accepted by connoisseurs of electronica, trance and ambient glide..
By Edwin Pouncey.