The benighted hinterlands of extreme metal are home to many loners, outsiders, misfits and misanthropes, but even amongst this company Monument Of Urns stand out as being an unusually shy and retiring project. There’s no website, no MySpace page, no interviews, and almost no information is publicly available about Monument Of Urns. The label Hand Hewn Timbre only releases Monument Of Urns, so there’s no way to make enquiries there. The only fact that can be stated with seeming certainty is that the project is based in America. Other than that, it’s largely down to guesswork. It seems overwhelmingly likely that Monument Of Urns is a solo project, but it’s possible that more than one musician is involved.

The Ancient Method, released in 2005, established what has become a regular, even ritualistic, release pattern for Monument Of Urns. Each year, a single, exquisitely packaged 3” CD-R emanates forth from this project, like a ghastly vapour from a shadowed sepulchre. There have been four releases up to now. There’s something very pleasing about the regularity of this pattern. It’s like one of those slasher films where, on a certain night each year, the demented killer sends someone a cake or a bunch of roses as a signal that he’s about to go slicing and dicing once more. Or like a superhero who embarks on a mission of retribution each year on the anniversary of his fiancée’s murder. In a word, it’s ritualistic. And what could be more fitting for a genre like doom, which is all about rigid adherence to ritual form? The Monument Of Urns releases are undoubtedly highly limited editions – no more than 100 copies of each one, I'm guessing – but even the edition size isn’t made known.

The Ancient Method comes in a folded brown paper sleeve printed with elaborate geometrical patterns in grey and a black image of a skeleton in a foetal position, looking like an excavation of a prehistoric burial. The disc itself is housed within a plastic wallet, along with a paper insert with the same skeleton image, and on the flipside, a row of coffins. There’s also a name on this insert – the name of the fellow who is Mr Monument. This name doesn’t appear on the subsequent Monument releases, a decision presumably having been made that anonymity was the way to go. Since I enjoy the mystique surrounding Monument Of Urns, I'm not going to be the one to blurt out Mr Monument’s secret identity. And The Ancient Method is now sold out, so you can’t simply buy a copy to find out. Some secrets are meant to stay secret.

But enough of the mystique, what about the music? The Ancient Method, subtitled The Tomb, consists of one long (16:48) track of slow, relentless, crushing doom, very much in the vein of Sunn 0))), Khanate, Moss et al. Repeated power chords slam emphatically, reinforced with heavy cymbal crashes, feedback bleeding though the interstices, eventually coalescing into a crawlingly slow riff at around the three-minute mark. The vocals are delivered in a drifting, spectral whisper, seeping out over an atavistic tom-tom rhythm. Around the halfway point, thickening waves of electronic static are thrown into the mix, with a multi-layered vortex of vocals increasing in volume and harshness, bringing a black ambient atmosphere to the track, something like Vargr or Habsyll.