Band:	Horizon Of The Mute
Album:	Trobar Clus
Style:	Drone doom metal, Funeral doom metal
Release date:	October 26, 2016
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Above Deep Waters
02. Inwardly Increasing Cosmos
03. Marcabru Speaks
04. Sestina

One minute I'm naming Saattue's Kärsimysnäytelmä my current doom album of the year, the next I'm stumbling into the eerie pit of despair that is Trobar Clus. Even with the breakup of 0 X í S T, 2016 has been a good year for Jani Koskela.

Horizon Of The Mute lies distinctly on the ugly, festering side of funeral doom, with croaky vocals and creeping layers of endlessly-building dissonance. This project has a harsh, penetrating sound, but cloaks itself in atmospheric effects to temper the rough impact; Horizon Of The Mute opts to haunt and creep rather than berate or depress. Surprisingly percussion-poor, Trobar Clus feels like an old horror movie soundtrack more than something recognizable as doom, and the presence of keyboards and other unconventional effects add trippy flavors to the grating, evil mixture.

"Above Deep Waters" makes its move a few minutes in, when it slows into a dreary James Bond chord progression and lets fall most of the instruments. Koskela's haunted whispers cover the steady, bare melody as a foreboding humming grows into a maleficent drone. The drone soon becomes a series of full, hellish chords pockmarked by growls, ultimately calling percussion back from the dead and resuming the task of plodding through an eerie funeral doom track. "Inwardly Increasing Cosmos" follows with another chain-rattling, psyche-fissuring dirge, sporting old sci-fi movie synths and building inexorably into "Marcabru Speaks," an even more menacing piece replete with a bass, choir, and synth mid-section. "Sestina" rounds out this harrowing experience with a rambling hymn of churning decrepitude as grim as its predecessors.

Trobar Clus has the perfect atmosphere to soundtrack the gothic horror D&D campaign I'm currently ruining for all my friends, and I think that's a pretty great selling point. Horizon Of The Mute creates a multi-layered, agonizingly-paced, enveloping environment that would approach the psychedelic were it not so clearly geared towards suffering and misery.