Band:	Dahakara
Album:	Low Of Wisdom
Style:	Ambient, Experimental black metal
Release date:	February 12, 2015
A review by:	Auntie Sahar

01. Empyrean
02. Augmented Vacancy
03. Gaze Along
04. Great Attractor
05. Black Dwarf
06. Majoris
07. Observables
08. Plaque Found
09. Moment Of Inertia
10. Voids

Istanbul, Turkey has long been one of the world's crossroads, where polar opposites seem to meet up and form interesting fusions that result in entirely new products. Europeans meet Asians and Africans. Christians meet Muslims. The East meets the West in general. Or, if we're speaking from a musical perspective, rather than cultural, in the case of Dahakara we could take Istanbul as a crossroads where black metal meets up with ambient music.

Wait just a moment now. Where black metal meets up with ambient music? "Hasn't that been done plenty of times already?" you ask. What's so new about it? Well, in the case of Dahakara, an obscure little one man BM band coming straight out of Asia Minor, it's the particular way in which this fusion is applied that really makes the music stick out. Low Of Wisdom, the sophomore effort from this project, is certainly not your typical ambient black metal album. This isn't like Leviathan or Darkspace where you're going to hear ravenous black metal tear away at your flesh, get short little ambient breaks from the carnage, and then return to the black metal, in a formula that's become pretty standard for the style. Rather... something a little more peculiar occurs.

On Low Of Wisdom, curiously enough, the ambient music and the black metal are much more divided, and really don't combine themselves except on "Gaze Along" and "Majoris." Other than that, you really either get a fully black metal track, or a fully ambient track, and that's it. The black metal has a rather bright, airy, midtempo, and pretty relaxing atmosphere about it, virtually the antithesis of the style employed on the Evil Of All Decades debut, which was overall darker and more smothering. The ambient music, meanwhile, is mostly driven by synths and electronics ("Observables," especially), but occasionally some very interesting folk-type percussive elements creep into the mix, as on "Moment Of Inertia." Overall, however, the music leans much more towards the ambient than to the black metal, making it seem as if the former is the sound that the eponymous Dahakara prefers to explore, which would explain the fully ambient album that he released this year shortly after Low Of Wisdom.

This technique, the "black metal, you stay over here, ambient music, you go over there" approach, may frustrate some listeners looking for a more seamless fusion of the two. I, however, found it to be extremely interesting. Because unlike the large majority of ambient BM bands who intersperse the two, thereby making it occasionally difficult to discern them from one another, on Low Of Wisdom Dahakara divides these two styles in a strange way that almost makes them seem to be at odds with each other. Yet the way the black metal is employed, in this warm and atmospheric nature, makes the transitions into the purely ambient tracks feel completely natural. Even so, if the two aren't intermingling with each other, as is typical of so many other bands in the style, can this music really be called "ambient black metal" then? It could be. It couldn't be. But that's just part of the beauty behind the mystery.

And that mystery beckons.