Both of them are musical centipedes, dipping their artistic toes in many waters. Sometimes adjacent to metal, other times off in an altogether different plane. The names themselves usually are already quite telling on how out there some of this music is or what would you imagine with monikers like Bong-Ra, Bluuurgh, The Lovecraft Sextet or The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble. The duo even run an electronic project together called Mansur, expect some very experimental mystical music there.

With ‘Transcendental’ they are down to their third full length, after the debut ‘Forlorn’ and the sophomore ‘Thou Shalt’. Both were released on Burning World Records which is kind of the house label for the Roadburn Festival and which has also released all four of Celestial Season’s post comeback records.

For the third one, they have gone with another small Dutch label Lay Bare Recordings, which has housed some really interesting artist like Frayle, for instance. The record slowly rumbles to lie on the opening track ‘Deniers’ with some exquisitely slow doom riffs. This could almost be a Celestial Season track, but then it shifts. The duo has self-monikered their style as “transcendental metal”. Now where Celestial Season’s current oeuvre is very firmly rooted in the death doom tradition of the early nineties, a legacy they helped create, ‘Transcendental’ is much more adventurous. It’s clear they both absolutely adore doom metal, but the twosome draws influences from many other places. Not as glacial as, for instance, another doomed duo from these parts, namely Slow, they do mirror this almost hypnotic, expansive ambiance that permeates the record, but without adhering strictly to a funereal pace.

The term transcendental makes quite a lot of sense, actually: the music is very atmospheric, deliberately shrouding itself in an aura of esoteric mysticism. Köhnen takes care of all the instrumentation here, while Martina is the prime vocalist. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the Hungarian singer has taken a lot of lessons from another Dutch icon, the erstwhile vocalist of The Gathering, the ever charming Anneke van Giersbergen. Especially, the albums ‘Nighttime Birds’ and even more so ‘How to Measure a Planet’ have left an unmistakable impression on them. Just listen to ‘Love is a Dog from Hell’, it would have fit perfectly on that latter record. And I mean this as a real compliment, with that being one of the best, yet sadly underrated albums created in the lowlands in the late nineties. In fact, I would say if you were wondering how in an alternate universe The Gathering would have evolved if they had aimed to remain a bit longer on the metallic side of the musical realm, it might have very well sounded like this.

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