Darkly rendered, high-minded split LP that takes as its inspiration the work of four different poets active in varying degrees during the previous two centuries and with it calls to mind a very particular post-industrial sense of folklorist Olde Europe. The names Militia Aurora and Jota Solo are likely to be new to most, though the artists behind them perhaps less so – the former is an off-shoot of Austrian dungeon-synth act Glasberg, the latter an outgrowth from legendary Vienna group, Novy Svet, whom you may also recall from a previous Quirlschlängle release. Lebensglut presents itself under a very murky sky, four long-form pieces constructed from warped, collagistic electronics and deeply-intoned verse that suggest that all is certainly not well even if the title does somewhat incongruently translate as ‘life’s glow’. Knowing nothing of the poetry referenced (Karl Wolfskehl, Stefan George, and Georg Trakl, and Julius Sturm for the record) and not being particularly fluent in the language in which it’s spoken, the meaning here becomes more impressionistic than perhaps it’s intended – when there’s this many words you don’t understand, you have to instead move on instinct. The accompanying press release speaks of ‘blood soaked battlefields’, ‘war drums’ and ‘sweet decay’, imagery very much reflected in ghostly, broken-down drum machines, fractured synths and distorted drones. Because of the arcane nature of the subject matter, this is the kind of music that mostly only references itself, though in terms of sensibility it feels sympathetic with moon phase era Coil, Nocturnal Emissions Spiritflesh, and Zoviet France, crepuscular dwelling acts that find the beauty in the dark. Lebensglut is an admirable continuation of that romantic tradition.