“Deaf Clause” by Mount Shrine

When César Alexandre passed in 2021 due to COVID, the world of dark ambience lost a truly special voice. Whereas many artists in the genre can rely too heavily on horror movie tropes and whatnot, Alexandre — best known for his work as Mount Shrine — produced ambience that relied on subtler, more nuanced sonics that were still quite otherworldly.

Earlier this month, Cryo Chamber, who has released most, if not all of the Mount Shrine catalog, released Alexandre’s final bit of music. The Yasu Ether Project — Yasu Ether was, by the way, one of Alexandre’s other musical monikers — is perhaps a bit lighter in tone than most of his catalog, but I suppose that’s all relative. “Gaseous Peak,” for example, conjures up the same liminal spaces that characterized Lucid’s catalog, while the opening and closing tracks traffic in the sort of grainy nostalgia typically associated with, say, Boards of Canada.

It’s all pretty captivating stuff, to be honest, and it’s been in nigh-constant rotation here at Opus HQ over the last few days. However, the song I keep returning to is “Deaf Clause,” a nearly twelve-minute piece of bleary and blurry ambience that suggests Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume 2 run through Photoshop’s “Gaussian Blur” filter at its highest settings. Alexandre’s bubbling atmospherics are both lush and highly amorphous, resulting in a listen that wavers between serene and surreal, and sometimes both at once.

The Yasu Ether Project is currently available from Cryo Chamber.