Sempervirens' ethereal soundcraft is skeletal when it comes to instrumental complexity, but soothingly evocative in imagery nonetheless -- you don't so much listen as participate in the music yourself, weaving mindscapes out of this amorphous, transparent tapestry of sound this Estonian act is laying down. All components -- rumbling ambience, voice samples (including a snippet of Edward Norton from "Fight Club"), distorted fragments of classical music and resonating, crisp drones -- are contextualised within this rich thematic framework. They dissolve into some form of aesthetic Gestalt, an audial meta-structure that demands to be heard and absorbed fully rather than being actively dissected / analysed / reduced into its different constituents.

As previously mentioned, it is quite difficult to give an apt description of music that belongs to this particular ilk. Even an arbitrary scale of 0 to 10 isn't quite enough to quantify the impression that any given listener at any given time will experience after listening to the album. This is exactly because the raw sense-experience induced is nigh impossible to objectify. Attempts at such a task abound but are, more often that not, restricted to metaphor. I purposefully tried to avoid such a strategy. Yes, _Dirge of the Dying Year_ might very well sound like resting peacefully at the bottom of an ocean, or like traversing the barren landscape of some far away planet, but is there not any other way? Could there be? Schopenhauer once wrote that pure music is not merely an accompaniment to the listener's surroundings but it -becomes- his surroundings -- I suppose it's as good an answer as any.