Aldebaran (Disc 5)

Dance of the Moon and the Suns?

Okay, I'll admit it - this Aldebaran album is really starting to get to me.  Maybe because I know I'm at the end of the Natural Snow Buildings discography and there isn't another album to explore after this one, but why does Aldebaran need to be six CDs long?  There isn't enough variation between each composition to warrant 25 tracks, and the whole thing was apparently recorded in only one channel, so all of those multiple layers of overdub all sound compressed and indistinct.  I love a lo-fi sound as much as the next guy, but 5¾ hours of this is enough to tax anyone's patience.

Okay, I got that out of my system. Disc 5 of Aldebaran contains three tracks - one a 32-minute opus and two shorter tracks:

1. Cydonia (13:15)
2. Tiny Kings Of Kadath (10:42)
3. Astral Plane Temple (32:14)

Cydonia is apparently named for a region of the planet Mars known for the so-called "Face on Mars."  The name is popular among a certain group of musicians - The Orb titled an album Cydonia and the drone-metal band Sunn O))) titled a song Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia).  NSB's Cydonia sounds like the other drones on Aldebaran and is 13 minutes long.

Tiny Kings of Kadath is probably named for the H.P. Lovecraft novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.   I've never read it so I don't know if it has tiny kings or not, but the middle track of Disc 5 of Aldebaran is 10 minutes long (nothing tiny about it) and sounds pretty much like all the other tracks on the album.

Astral Plane Temple, clocking in at 32:!4, is the main event of this disc and is probably the most listenable.  Sure, it's in the same style of space/noise/horror drone as the rest of the album, but it has some weight and strength to it, it's own field of gravity. Aldebaran might be interesting, enjoyable even, if it were edited down to one or at least no more than two CDs, and if it were, Astral Plane Temple should be one of the cuts.

We're almost through here.  One more disc of the last NSB album left to go, and then we're all done.