ICES AGES This Killing Emptiness LP BLUE , PRE-ORDER [VINYL 12"]

In the dim-lit corridors of the soul,This Killing Emptiness pulses like a slow heartbeat, a ritual quietly played by shadows. From the very first murmur of synthetic breath, a cold, mechanical exhale, it becomes clear: this is a landscape of bleakness, a stark and unrelenting horizon carved from wires and memory.

Richard Lederer, best known for ancient mythic realms through Summoning’s sprawling soundscapes, here retreats inward, into a crystalline inner void. With Ice Ages he constructs something no less profound. Every sequence, every throbbing bass note, every echoing synthetic lament unfolds like a glacier’s inexorable march: majestic, icy, indifferent.

The opening track cracks open the emptiness. A skeletal drum, minimal and precise, sets the pulse. Above it, layers of cold, humming synth halos of light and distortion, phantoms of feeling drifting over the abyss. The melody is almost imperceptible, elusive, like the glimmer of a star seen through shifting fog. Here, Lederer’s voice is distant, emerges not as human warmth but as spectral witness, reciting fragments of despair as though reading from a prayer that has no God.

As the record unfolds, rhythms become more insistent, mechanical footsteps against the frozen earth. The pulses are metronomic, unavoidable: they drag you down deeper into that killing emptiness. Yet in their precision lies an uncanny beauty. The coldness does not repel, it fascinates. The wave of synthetic tones rises and falls, as if breathing, even though it belongs to circuitry, to artifice.

One senses Lederer at work in the mind’s hinterland, excavating memory, grief, solitude. The melodies are like distant sirens: mournful, hypnotic. Perhaps they recall lost worlds, mythic or personal, but most likely they call from nowhere, from a place between consciousness and oblivion. And as each track fades, it takes a piece of the listener’s certainty with it, leaving behind a vacancy that feels alive.

There is a peculiar melancholy in the sparseness. Without guitars’ warm distortion or drums’ organic thump, the emptiness feels magnified. The album has the austerity of a frozen cathedral. The silence between notes is as eloquent as the notes themselves.

Midway through, a track arrives that seems to center everything. A heartbeat stops. Then returns, brittle and tremulous. A slow cascade of cold chords washes over it, like a glacier shedding its weight. And there, in that moment, This Killing Emptiness becomes something broader than desolation: it becomes memory, it becomes ritual, it becomes strange solace.

By album’s end, the void they chart is vast, deeper and frostier than at the start. The final tones drift off as if surrendering to the void. And then silence.

That silence is not peaceful. It’s heavy, profound, an echo chamber of the music’s ghosts. It catches you off guard, makes you aware of your own breath, your own heart. It is the album’s final cipher: not an answer, but an invitation to sit with emptiness, to feel how it sculpts the self.

Lederer’s artistry here is subtle. He does not push narrative or bombast; he whispers, distorts, repeats. He asks us not to believe in something, but to experience the absence of belief. This Killing Emptiness is not a story. It is not even a mood. It is an altar to loneliness, cold beauty, and the human mind’s fragile resilience in the face of silence.

Listening, you may feel the stillness seep into your veins. You may feel the spaces between your own thoughts widen. Or perhaps you will rise from it, unsettled, changed, aware that what you encountered was no mere music, but a meditative journey into the blank, uncharted hinterland between sound and nothingness.

This is Summoning‘s Electro/Industrial version!

SIDE A:

1. Far Gone Light

2. Lifeless Sentiments

3. The Fiend

4. I Come For You

5.  This Killing Emptiness

SIDE B:

1. Heartbeat

2. The Last Time

3. Shades Of Former Light

4. The Denial

5. Lost In Daze