Volume Seven by The Horn

Originally released in 2007, Volume 7 was an experiment. After six albums of genre-pushing Ancient Egyptian Occult Blackened Metal, A Demon Sheen was interested in exploring new ground - or, more accurately, new space. Indeed, as he delved deeper and deeper into the Book of the Dead, he realised that The Horn should not just find itself in crypts and deserts and the rushing waters of the Nile, but must ascend skywards, into the very Milky Way itself - he needed to explore a sound less Earthly, and more Celestial.

To this end, he decided to make Volume 7 an album that featured synthesisers predominantly, occasionally doing without guitars altogether, to create an intergalactic blackened vortex of what he was now dubbing "Ancient Egyptian Occult Spacemetal". Rich, thick, and otherworldly, Volume 7 shimmers with cold nebulae and swirls with heavy gravitational orbits, but has remained hard to find until this 2015 re-release, due to its unorthodox and experimental nature.

Is it still metal? It's hard to tell. Indeed, so borderline-unmetal is Volume 7, when A Demon Sheen first attempted to get The Horn documented in the infamous Encylcopaedia Metallum (shortly after this album was first recorded), they refused him, claiming that the project was too synth-based and not metal enough for inclusion. (After several more album's worth of more traditionally-metalesque material, they changed their minds.)

Started in 1997 by sole member A DMN SHN, THE HORN is putting the words from all 189 Spells of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead to music. Mostly black metal, sometimes dark ambient, sometimes psychedelic rock, sometimes faux folk, sometimes dungeon synth, sometimes pure noise wall, sometimes deranged audiobook, sometimes none of the above.