Music
The Musical Manifestations of my Work
Eyes of Ligeia
Eyes of Ligeia is my ambient doom project, featuring looping guitars, droning organ, and a hypnotic rhythmic pulse. Musical touchstones that reveal some facet of the elements behind this unique synthesis include: Forgotten Woods, Lycia, Ras Algethi, Anekdoten (From Within and later), and the Swiss band Mordor.
From doom-metal.com:
… brooding sounds of decay and eternal night …
… Mr. Chappell has accomplished something extraordinary here, something mysterious and totally bewitching with this recording, sound-wise/production-wise…
… the guitars, often in unsettlingly slight dissonant and discordant contrast, are largely clean and undistorted, and heavily arpeggiated, almost King Crimson-like - and when they venture elsewhere it tends to be towards Post-rock textural passages. Their evolution, through the long and largely-instrumental compositions, has the hypnotic repetitiveness of Funeral Doom, but presented at much higher tempo and with a Black - or at least blackened - vibe to it. …
From Erebus Zine (via Umesh Amtay):
Eyes of Ligeia does not so much oppress or depress with its signature fashion of doom metal as it just slowly entwines itself around and through the listener’s consciousness with semi-baroque, polished guitar melodies and overarching, swelling (echoing, filling) keyboard additions. Otherworldly, far-reaching, these synths are used in a very sparse, minimalist mode which rides sedately behind the pointed guitars and serves to cushion their constant give and take, their rarely-varied lancing, bleeding through the spaces between string notes to color and provide sustenance to one’s ear in the form of a backdrop, a tapestry that disguises motive and method, and the creator’s hand.
Misdreamt
Misdreamt is my other musical project, in this guise using manipulated field recordings (and other electro-acoustic experimentation) to create a dark, bleak ambient sound suitable for use in ritual magic or introspective meditation into the darkest reaches of the Self.
From Cerebral Rift:
From the opening of the four-part “The Weight of Dreams Against the Harsh Wisdom of the World” the listener is placed in a space where manipulated sound recordings make auditory illusions appear to be true. Voices and sounds emerge from static, instruments appear influenced by the sounds of field recordings around it, and so on.
Inactive Projects
The predecessor to Misdream was Saturnin Sektor, using the same aesthetic and sound elements/construction. Most SS releases have been reissued under the Misdreamt banner, but a few still remain.
The one-off release Undimensional was an exploration of cosmic black metal in the vein of Darkspace, and Rev. Kriss Hades.