Schism
Schism is the second Hands of Ruin album, created between 2011 and 2017.
Personally, I love the level of variation on this album. Dark ambient soundscapes alternate with percussion driven martial industrial music. The latter contain all the right elements too, the repetitive percussion, the orchestral arrangements and the bombastic approach of militaristic march music. Opener ‘Otto della Guerra’ immediately sets the tone and it immediately got me hooked on this sound as well. Yet, dark ambient fanatic as I am, my favorite track here is ‘No divisions among you’, a perfectly haunting piece of music.
This is quite deliberately a harsher and more aggressive album than anything I’ve done previously, and for that reason it has been a difficult project. It has required me to experiment and learn new techniques, and several of these tracks have been revisited and reworked multiple times. Some of the tracks date back to before Empire and Dust, but it has taken all this time to put them together into a coherent release that I can be satisfied with. Difficult as it was, I think the end result is more interesting for being the product of that struggle.