TenHornedBeast ‎– The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The York Doom Stone)

TenHornedBeast ‎– The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The York Doom Stone)
Label: Cold Spring ‎– CSR312CD
Format: CD, Album
Country: UK
Released: 29 Apr 2022
Style: Doom Metal, Dark Ambient, Drone

For his first release since 2017’s "Death Has No Companion", Christopher Walton (ex-Endvra), a thirty-year veteran of Industrial music, has dragged TenHornedBeast back to its pounding Doom-Ambient roots and recorded his darkest album yet, as a sonic veneration of a medieval sculpture depicting the torment of the damned in Hell.

In the crypt of York Minster, built directly on the site of the Roman citadel, is the Doom Stone. A relic from the 12th century the stone, carved in deep relief, illustrated for a medieval audience the horrors that awaited sinners in Hell. Figures depicting Luxury and Avarice are licked by flames, leering demons hold a tortured soul in a furnace and the Mouths of Hell gape, their nostrils licked by toads. Here beneath one of the jewels of Western Christendom is a talisman so shocking, so contrary to the modern mind that the very faith that created it has abandoned it.

The five suitably monolithic pieces on 'The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The Yorkshire Doom Stone)' form a journey, starting with the first mortal death and ending with the second eternal death of the soul. Walton has used the darkest textures and heaviest drones as way-markers on this journey, as hymns to exalt the scenes... more

TenHornedBeast remains the burthen of Christopher Walton.
Recorded through the winter of 2021/2022 by the side of the Great North Road.

Photographs of the doom stone taken by Christopher Walton.
Graphic Design: Abby Helasdottir
Mastered by Martin Bowes (The Cage Studios)