My friend put this album on my computer sometime in 2008. I just didn’t get it at the time. It seemed boring, pretentious, overly long. I tried a few times over the years to get into it, but I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t for a lack of patience, I love artists such as Sunn O))), Merzbow, Swans etc. – further to this, returning randomly to the album in 2023, some 15 years later after originally hearing it, and well… I like it hahah
Parts of this thing are just absolutely outstanding. Totally crushing walls of sound. However, perhaps expectedly, it takes a while to get there, and this is not always perfect. I don’t know if all this stuff is improvised or what, but a lot of the runtime seems to go absolutely nowhere. I’ve got no problem with sticking with a piece of music as it builds into something enormous, but for large periods of time, Radiance Of Shadows seems to meander without purpose or meaning. Minutes at a time sail by without circumstance, or without contributing or relating at all it seems to any climax of any individual track. TLDR: when it’s good, it’s incredible. When it’s bad, it’s so boring I begin to wonder if drinking paint will be more fun.
So, in retrospect, this gets a 3.5 / 5 from me, because when it hits, its almost totally perfect. It just takes forever to get there.