Life Toward Twilight is a Detroit-based dark ambient project founded in 1999 by Daniel Tuttle. This 2005 release, the band’s third album, has been gathering dust in my in-tray for a while, which should not be seen as a criticism of the quality of the music contained herein. Instead, it was a result of the fact that the disc arrived all by itself, with no artwork or documentation, not even a track listing. I didn’t even know which Life Toward Twilight album this was (they have released six albums at the time of writing). Eventually, I had to work it out by going to the invaluable discogs.com and comparing the track timings on the disc I had to the listings for the various LTT releases. Obviously, being at least averagely lazy, I put off doing this for as long as possible. There’s a moral in here for bands sending in review material – provide a track listing or press release at the very least, or languish in Guantanamo Bay-style limbo for longer than you might wish!

All of which is a shame, since the music presented on We Waited For A Subtle Dawn is a finely crafted blend of cold, menacing dark ambient, neo-classical compositions and occasional bursts of harsh industrial ambient. Daniel Tuttle was assisted for this release by Brent Nicholas, who provided some of the synth work, and Elyse Reardon, whose abstract, Lisa Gerrard-like soprano vocals make sporadic appearances throughout the album. It’s worth mentioning that this album was composed during a period of great personal tragedy for Daniel Tuttle, as he cared for his fiancée Laura Frances Purdy, who was dying of cancer, and who provided the photography for this release.

We Waited For A Subtle Dawn contains 15 tracks totalling 67 minutes. ‘A Subtle Dawn’ opens with a passage of a cappella wordless female vocals, which give way to a gloriously uplifting orchestral overture mingled with a confusion of looped crowd noise and staccato violins, which recall the work of modernist composer Steve Reich. Cymbal crashes and snare drum rolls add a bombastic martial flavour, but the track is over all too quickly, giving way to the choppy strings and strange scrabbling noises of ‘In A Chalice Shape’. Again, pizzicato strings and heavy rolls of percussion lend this track a cinematic, neo-classical quality. Life Toward Twilight are operating in the same general area as Shinjuku Thief, Frederik Klingwall or A Challenge Of Honour, at the point where neo-classical, orchestral compositions take on narrative overtones, evoking visions through sound. ‘"Time", She Says’ is very different, though, eschewing orchestral instrumentation in favour of thunder effects rumbling across the stereo channels and a dense, gloopy morass of dripping and whispering, with a steady ticking clock fading in to mark the passage of time, a theme which continues into the following two tracks, ‘"Time", She Points Again’ and ‘Years’, all of which reminded me a little of the recent Eight Studies In Transition collaboration between K. Mietzer and Horologium. All these tracks use cold, bleak dark ambient soundscapes, only occasionally introducing conventional instruments – a brief passage of cello, a lonely, remote piano melody, a dissonant blast of horns. The next few tracks are rather samey and indistinguishable – low, industrial ambient drones and subdued strings punctuated by deep, reverberating percussion and vocal samples, but the tenth track, ‘Eclipse II’ stands out, opening with thin, scraping high frequency tones, and bringing in dense barrages of  textural noise and whistling feedback, something like Toroidh or Droin. Elyse Reardon’s vocals float above this uncompromisingly bleak backdrop. ‘Horbehutet’ is the lengthiest track on the album, at nearly nine minutes, and it’s a mesmeric, immersive experience of deep, Ain Soph-like esoteric drones and muffled, distant beats – I’d have been delighted by a whole album sounding like this, but Life Toward Twilight is a very eclectic and diverse-sounding project, ranging far and wide across various musical styles whilst preserving the prevailing dark mood.

If any of the above has whetted your appetite for Life Toward Twilight, the good news is that We Waited For A Subtle Dawn, and several other LTT releases, are available in their entirety as free mp3 downloads from the Bottle Imp Productions website, so there’s really no excuse for not checking out this project, especially if you like releases from labels like Cyclic Law, early Cold Meat Industry and the like. It’s very surprising that after six albums, Life Toward Twilight are still without a label, but maybe they just prefer the autonomy that self-releasing offers.

http://ltt.bottle-imp.com

www.myspace.com/lifetowardtwilight

www.bottle-imp.com