Absolutely mesmerizing electronic experimentalism, a truly spectacular release, pure bliss engulfs me every time i listen to this album, Cyclobe are considered Coil's heirs and not without reason.

Something's coming. Really great, evocative (of all the great moorland-set Hammer Horror movies) celestial music.

A sublime, beautiful album and, fittingly, one of the most immaculate sounding vinyl pressings of all time. The music is enchanting, entoxicating and meandering, shimmering with atmosphere and wrapped in artwork sparse and resonant... This is the sort of exacting quality that keeps Cyclobe on the top shelf.

Cyclobe are an English entity composed of Ossian Brown (Simon Norris) and Stephen Thrower. This is their third proper album since debuting in 1999 with "Luminous Darkness". They've not put a full length out since 2001 via "The Visitors". In the space since then, Ossian was a member of Coil during their final years and Stephen (who was also a member of Coil back in the 80s) formed The Amal Gamyl Ensemble and also UnicaZurn. This record has a very tidal, somewhat primitive feel to it, lots of slow builds and unorthodox instrumentation. I don't make out any proper vocals, but I do get a very foreboding sense of dread. Perhaps it's that so many years have passed since Cyclobe put out anything besides singles (two and an EP but who's counting?) and I've forgotten how wonderfully askew their sound is.This album's title was originally to be used for one of Coil's many abandoned releases, so you can imagine that comparisons will be unavoidable. This thing has the same tone as "Astral Disaster", the morbidity of Coil's bonus cd-r to the seasonal singles and yet it also would seem there's some kind of muffled, terribly mutilated brass band crawling around on the ground trying not to be noticed bleeding all over the place. Strange, almost taiko-like arrangements present themselves at bizarrely timed intervals to perhaps snap one out of the trance "Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window" induces. You won't be bored with this sinister creation of Cyclobe's, bank on it. Sadly, this is only available on vinyl with a projected CD release having been pushed back multiple times. On the digital front, part of this is available but who wants just a partial fragment of such a precise occult masterpiece.Gently lilting woodwinds (they sound like it although who knows) are mixed up with strangely rotating, decaying walls of almost alchemical modular electronics. There is a lot of analogue modeling going on in this brew of looped and also synthetically enhanced maelstrom, I'd guess. The Hurdy Gurdy is put to fine use during the title track's herculean push to the finish line. Spectral, haunted sweeps of fantastically manipulated white noise rush to and fro with maddeningly precise placement. I'd love to have heard this thing as they were recording it, god only knows what they left out. Truly magnificent percussive clangs bludgeon you as the curtain comes down but you're too busy being swept out to sea by the other work on here to mind. Then a delicate piano surfaces to deposit you back on shore, the choppy waves subsiding and that disturbing dorsal fin prowling just beyond the light. Welcome to the Wounded Galaxy, you can dream from here as the stars are ripped from the night-time skies. A child's voice lulls you into complacency, you close your eyes.For the last few minutes, the tide slowly come back in. It arrives quietly, unassumingly, driven to ground by a circular and ever expanding wave of squalls. There is nothing to discern between you and the undertow at first, but keep listening to the dastardly clever hymn the drones -which sound like drowned bells- gracefully illuminate and you will see, how you will see if only for a short while. Then the waves strike. They come in a cascading firework of magnificently warped tentacle-laden sonic overload. The processing facilities of Cyclobe must be grand to witness; you can feel each beat washing over you, utterly engulfing you in an exotic envelope of tones, realignment and finally release.

I’ve heard it said that music has no borders, and that it is one of the truly international languages that will be understood wherever it’s heard. I’m sure that’s true, but only up to a point. When listening to this, “Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window” by Cyclobe, I was reminded very sharply that there are yet other styles of music that have their feet in a very specific place and, indeed, time. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this album very much appears to spring from a particular underground stream of paganism and spirituality connected solidly with the very earth of Britannia – an ages-old stream that continues to worm its way through the very history and culture of this Sceptered Isle, even up to the present day.According to the five tracks on here, the pastoral idyll that we imagine the English countryside to be has a much darker edge than we imagine. With our suburban lifestyles, many of us harbour an image of rural life as being somehow ‘better’ and ‘healthier’, more wholesome, than that to be found in cities. Yes it is, generally speaking, but as our ancestors knew only too well, Mother Nature and her attendants could be capricious creatures, bringing plenty one year and scarcity the next. Life is always edged with the knowledge of death and decay, whether on the short timescale of the continuous round of seasons or the (relatively) longer span of a man’s lifespan – as soon as we’re born, we essentially start decaying, both temporally and physically, toward our endpoint.Cyclobe’s musical explorations contain echoes of classicism and folk, music in the vein of Britten and Elgar in places, perhaps, but infused with the stirrings of the worm in the earth, death and inevitable decay, as well as the hidden life of the ground beneath us, and the land that sustains and nurtures us. This is especially true of the opening track, ‘When Acla Disappeared from Earth’, with its soaring ringing tones descriptive of flight and departure underpinned by murmurings of discontent and regret. One could quite easily imagine this to be the logical musical extension and evolution of the kind of evocative music that Elgar was writing last century.But Cyclobe aren’t interested in the superficial realities of the everyday – they want to show us the underlying reality, the one that exists just under our noses and which most of us refuse to even acknowledge. Track two, ‘The Woods are Alive with the Smell of His Coming’, forces us to focus on that other realm of being, injecting notes of the cosmic terror that lurks behind the thin veil – dare I say it, there’s a distinct Lovecraftian feel to this one, whether intended or not. The presences of terrors and alien existences beyond human reckoning entwine their tendrils around every single note, but those notes are simultaneously very much rooted in and of the earth beneath our feet.Indubitably, though, we mustn’t forget that, even in the midst of death and decay, there is beauty, expressed here in the expansively sweeping ambience of the title track, ‘Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window’. Of course, even this beauty is tinged (tainted?) with darkness, and that we must also remember that one cannot exist without the other, that the fabric of life and conscious perception is composed of duality. It is through duality that we exist and define ourselves.This album is a veritable magic carpet composed of multiple threads, by turns dark, dangerous and stupefyingly beautiful. Each of those threads holds within its fibres little treasures and perhaps philosophical truths, just waiting to be discovered with each unravelling. It is indeed like looking at the world and its reality as a whole, and then picking it apart to see just what makes it work. And what we find there isn’t necessarily what we either expect to be there, or what we would want to find. Reality can only really work if we all agree what that reality is, but when we go deeper we find that it’s nowhere near as coherent as we think it is. And that, to some, is a frightening thought – it’s the equivalent of staring into the abyss.Simply put, an absolutely magnificent album.Rating: 4.5/5Written by: SMJ63http://heathenharvest.org/

Definitely Cyclobe's best album so far. Dark, dreamy drone. Perfect for late night listening.