Wow, just wow is about the best that I can come up with to describe Ten Horned Moses Descended The Mountain from Tenhornedbeast (yes all one word and possibly erroneously capitalized), the solo project of one, Christopher Walton; and, to be completely truthful, that wow might not actually describe this massive album in an accurate enough manner because every time that I listen to this record it feels as if I ran a marathon.
The simple reason behind my state of being flummoxed is that Ten Horned Moses Descended The Mountain is over three hours of music straddling three separate CDs and quite honestly that is a ton of music to ingest and process in one sitting (so much so that I have only made it from start to finish for the album two times but this is not a reflection on the quality of the music itself); so in some sense, the fact that this is split up gives natural pauses in the music to make it all a bit easier to digest. For those that are blessed with the disposition for endurance Ten Horned Moses Descended The Mountain may be proven to be a droning ambient masterpiece in the years to come because in my younger days when I was a long distance runner I achieved a “runner’s high” on many an occasion, which (for those who do not know the term) is a state of bliss and calm that some runners reach on their runs oblivious to the sweat pouring down their brow and the snot gushing from their nose and any pain that their body may be going through; this Tenhornedbeast epic makes me feel similar to how I remember feeling at those times as the blissful droning overtones of “Choose For Yourself The Might Of The Earth” bathes my auditory senses in the analog to blinding white light while subtle and buried undertones toy with your conscious self. Forget getting lost in this because by the time I finally look at where I am during my three plus hour excursion into the world of Tenhornedbeast, not only am I well into hour number two and the slow churning atmosphere of “Celestial Pathfinder”, I seem to have completely forgotten what I had been doing and what I was supposed to be doing (I could swear that I was drooling as well); and when I realize that “The True Voice Of God Is Silence” has been over for a while, it is inconceivable to me as I could have sworn that even at that moment, Tenhornedbeast was still playing in my mind.
Ten Horned Moses Descended The Mountain is an ambitious album that may make you feel like a completely exhausted, used up husk of a human being when you listen to the record in its entirety; and yes, you feel as if you simultaneously ran a marathon, meditated for eight days straight without food or water, and spent a month in a sensory deprivation tank (it feels amazing). I really question whether there is anything other record out there that is quite like this and can only wonder what drew Tenhornedbeast to make such a musical statement; because that is what this massive record is, a statement that deserves the adjective epic more than ninety-nine percent of records that actually get that stamp.
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