Incognito British musician N. Racker doses listeners with a full fourteen minutes of darkness to fulfill your Friday night gloom. If you slept on last year’s chilling Flock Toxicant, now’s your chance at redemption. And you’ll get it for cheap. “glimmers of light” was just uploaded to Mr. Racker’s SoundCloud for easy aural access, limiting listeners’ excuses for enjoyment.

Unlike Flock Toxicant, this new work from N. Racker does actually contain several glimmers of light. Several of the song’s movements make a turn toward the playful. Rather than diminish the dank darkness infiltrating the majority of the piece, these moments embellish them, giving off a false hope before dropping the ears back into an empty, concrète void.

N. Racker comes off as more inviting than before. Perhaps the shadowy figure behind this music (as well as bits of NeoTantrik) might be showing a little humanity. This seems to be a pretty consistent struggle for those circling around the Demdike Stare-affiliated nexus. Like N. Racker, Demdike and Andy Votel find beauty in the tragic and comic, aspects that are exemplified by their compositional influences: Morricone’s numerous projects, giallo soundtracks, drone metal, and modern UK bass music.

Thankfully, “glimmers of light” still shows off the unique aspects of N. Racker’s sound: organically created music, less sample-based than his peers, and far more bleak and dusty. It’s been too long since Toxicant – let’s hope we hear more from this ambiguous entity soon.