C.O.T.A. - Ta'Wil

Dear friends of HFK and featured on the new POST-ASIATIC: LOST WAR DREAM
MUSIC 2CD.We are proud to carry their Ta'Wil. C.O.T.A. blend tribal
percussion, ambient drones and repetitive rhythms with manic undertones to
create an extremely dark mood with mystical atmospheres.
“Ta’Wil” contains 6 tracks that are nothing short of a 100% masterpiece. For
this album, the project created an extremely dark mood with mystical
atmospheres, and of course, tribal/ritual rhythms. “Ta'Wil” is an absolutely
essential release if you're fond of dark soundscapes!
DEAD ANGEL: ISSUE 26 REVIEW
Apparently they are naturalists, judging from the look of the long liner notes
in the disc booklet, although since the words are brown on brown and of a
microscopic typeface, i'll never really know for sure. Regardless of their
politics, their sound is pretty interesting... slow, loping tribal drum rhythms
and spooky, disembodied synth leavened with trancelike guitar passages
(sometimes repetitive figures, sometimes just hum, other times mutant sounds
buried in the background), and only sporadic vox. They're big on the slow-motion
drone and the shortest song is nearly seven minutes... these are good
things....The first track, "Blood and Soil," opens with cycling guitar hum,
running water, chirping birds, voices reading from some exotic text, and
eventually coalesces into a trancelike dirge guitar supplanted by thudding,
distorted drums and an eerie vocal chorus. As the song builds, thick keyboard
drones add another layer to the growing wall of sound. Swirling clouds of guitar
hum also infiltrate "Ismaeli," along with distorted drums more cryptic chanting
vocals and a harsh wall of noise that dies away midway through the song, leaving
behind just a tinkering drum track and various odd, watery sounds. Toward the
end, the singer intones a passage adapted from the prose of Omar Khayyam; i have
no idea who he is, but it sounds awfully exotic....The best track on the disc is
probably the fifth one, also the longest at 12:24 -- "Song for the Fifth World."
A forbidding beat, dark droning synths, and counterpoint polyrhythms set the
engine in motion, often sounding like a mildly heavier version of Voice of Eye.
The hypnotic beat is augmented by regular hissing much like blasts from a
furnace, or perhaps an approaching dust storm. The sound gradually builds in
intensity, growing louder and more complicated, until it finally dissolves in a
spiral of hissing and droning. Hard to follow, but the closing "Spiritual
Warfare" manages to pull it off with gradiose orchestral bombast (not to mention
the occasional burst of noisy fury). The overall feel is somewhere between a
less-crazed Crash Worship and a more orchestrated answer to Voice of Eye... not
a bad combination. The name, incidentally, stands for Children of the
Apocalypse, and apocalyptic is as good a label as any for their dense, brooding
sound.