As mentioned, Portland doom great Mizmor and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Black (who's in Mizmor and HELL's live bands) will release the collaborative ambient/drone album Dialetheia on November 20 via Gilead Media (pre-order). We're premiering "Looking At | Looking Through," a gorgeous 16-minute track that combines ethereal synths with gently plucked guitar arpeggios and is highly compelling in its minimalism.
"This song was created during the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown orders, the implications of which seriously changed our way of life as friends, bandmates, and society as a whole," the duo tell us. "Seeing many of our pastimes and social traditions become obsolete in an instant struck us with an overwhelming sense of sorrow, anxiety, and nostalgia. We immediately felt as if we were walking through a museum of our former ways of life, looking at exhibits of human civilization and society whilst being equally confronted with the fact that we were not only the museum-goers, the onlookers, but also the ones within the exhibits themselves. This feeling of cognitive dissonance evoked a strong sense of nostalgia for us, as well as provoked further thoughts about the dualist illusion of the self, being both the observer and the observed, the subject and the object. The song was created remotely through file sharing, which was a novel approach to songwriting and recording for us, that became an instrument itself on this record. The isolation of this situation was a huge influence on the sound of this record."