WORM GEAR
"Moss and Memory" requires an attentive ear that can also fall back on the imagination to put fragmented pieces of images, emotions, and sound together into a cohesive and personal journey. A song like "Moss and Memory" is effective in that it creates such rich strokes with a simple brush. The track opens with sounds like the tips of fingers manipulating wine glasses just as much as cymbal scraping - both crystalline and metallic. This alone showcases the artist's ability to manipulate sound with an idea striking us as otherworldly. Emerging from these sounds comes a hypnotic and trance-inducing hammered dulcimer melody. The strings of the hammered dulcimer seem to carry a great weight as though moss itself graced them or some sylvan burden preventing them from carrying on as they should. A delay, an echo, an extremely natural reverb? Who can say but the creator? These sounds hit our ears with qualities so familiar to us that we have little desire to be skeptical of their own nature. Instead we become immersed in the world laid out before us as these sounds rise and fall in our subconscious and eventually create a home for themselves in the chakras of the Earth. An underlying theme of the natural world shrouds this release. To my mind, it is specifically the power behind natural forces. "Denned Earth/Decay & Rebirth" displays this energy with horn and chant amidst a damp, moss-covered soil. This energy seems to be harnessed in cyclic themes (both in music and imagery) as something that is continual in nature and in spirit. Because of this, the power behind these sounds as they come and go throughout the album strike the listener with an immediate association to memory or what we have attributed to the soundscape as a whole. Not since an album like "The River of Appearance" by Vidna Obmana have I encountered such an effective journey to the furthest reaches of another's spiritual landscape. This is a rewarding album to take in for all that it is.

JUDAS KISS
Ruhr Hunter is the project of Seattle-based musician Chet W. Scott, who also records as Blood Of The Black Owl, Triage, Your Cell: Yourself and The Elemental Chrysalis. Moss & Memory, released in 2006, is the third Ruhr Hunter album (their have also been a split release with Gruntsplatter and a collaboration with Israeli project Chaos As Shelter), and it marks the project's 10th anniversary.

Although Ruhr Hunter is a solo project, and this album is performed entirely by Chet Scott, a dazzlingly rich array of mostly acoustic instrumentation is used to weave these woodland enchantments, including guitars, acoustic and bowed fretless basses, bowed and hammered dulcimers, organ, piano, harmonium, singing bowls, bells and chimes, bowed psaltery, recorder, ocarinas, harp, horns, drums, and something called a "percussive antique celestaphone", whatever that may be. There are also many field recordings, particularly of various bird songs, but also of thunder, running water and other sounds of nature. Some effects are used, but electronic keyboards are kept to a minimum, being largely used for background drones, and the overall effect is very natural, rough-hewn and organic, something like the work of Sangre Cavallum, Nest or Temple Music, although parallels could also be drawn with the acoustically based ritual ambient incantations of the Aural Hypnox stable of bands and the Polish gong'n'drone trio Hati. There are some lyrics, but they are very few and far between, with half the tracks being entirely instrumental. Ruhr Hunter's music evokes a primordial root connection to the natural landscape, specifically the rain-drenched evergreen forests of the Pacific northwest, and there's many a black metal band out there who would sell their charred and worthless souls to be making music this shamanic, shadowy, heathen and atavistic. However, the delicate drones and melodies of Ruhr Hunter offer a much more refined and subtle route to accessing the spirits of the forest. Let's walk into these enticingly shady green depths and stray off the beaten track for a while...

Moss & Memory contains six tracks, ranging in duration from seven minutes up to 16 minutes. This is deep, absorbing, profoundly nature-worshipping music, and not for the impatient. Ents would enjoy the work of Ruhr Hunter. The album opens with its lengthiest track, the lengthily entitled "Antlers In The Fog, To Will The Spirit In Transit", which blossoms slowly but steadily out of silence as a steady warm drone suffused with a feeling of presence and expectancy. Isolated keyboard are strewn over the drone, as ambient atmospherics manifest in the background. A gently strummed acoustic guitar leads into deep, ritualistic droned vocals. The feeling evoked is both spiritual and primal – this music feels ancient. At around the five minute mark, Chet delivers the lyrics in a hoarse, low rasp: "In earth through death, I wait to begin my journey..." Journey is the key word here – "Antlers In The Fog..." has the feel of a shamanic journey into the underworld and altered stated of consciousness, in search of an obliteration of the ego and a deep communion with the natural world – "The Spirit In Transit". As the vocals end, delicate hammered dulcimer and piano appear to carry a repetitious melody, as our journey inward and downward continues. A muffled drum in the background keeps a steady beat. In the next phase of the song, the drones vocals return, reverberating across the stereo channels as a melodic picked guitar is foregrounded, accompanied by what sounds like the twang of a mouth harp. The drum returns after a little while, although drums aren't actually as prominent a feature on this album as you might expect, given Ruhr Hunter's shamanic orientation.

"An Owl's Gift" opens with owl cries echoing across the channels accompanied by sparse and eerie background noises. As the instrumental piece builds, it develops into a hypnotically repetitive, gamelan-like melody, looping and circling, evoking the nocturnal hunts of the owl, and underpinned with soft, low ambient synth. This track reminds me of Israeli ritual ambient project Chaos As Shelter, in particular the Mirror collaboration with Vishudha Kali. (Ruhr Hunter and Chaos As Shelter released a collaborative album in 2001 on Glass Throat, so this resemblance isn't too surprising.)

The title track "Moss & Memory" follows. High, pure tones call out across foggy expanses, like signals coming through the trees. The melody is carried by the dulcimer again, as deep bass notes sound far away in the distance and the high whistling tones appear and vanish. It's a simple but potent combination, creating an effectively enveloping atmosphere with a really elegant economy of means, although there's not much development or movement within this piece, it takes you into a timeless, transcendent mindspace and leaves you there for some time.

The two-part suite "Denned Earth / Decay And Rebirth" which comes next is the true heart of Moss & Memory for me. Like "Antlers In The Fog...", it enshrouds the listener and carries them off on a shamanic journey. The first part of the track is dominated by low, tuneless horn notes which recall Hati's Genius Loci album, gradually increasing in volume as if sounded by a war-band steadily advancing on the listener. Birdsong and peals of thunder sound in the background, creating an atmosphere of imminent threat and foreboding. A formlessly roaring drone underpins this sense of unease. After around six minutes, the horns cease, leaving us with only the background sounds of a forest clearing, before we move into the second part of the song, in which rumbling thunder and the sounds of a heavy rainstorm saturating the foliage provide a backdrop to slow, deep, funereal drumbeats, a high, plaintive bird call and some extraordinarily eerie throat singing by Chet. Part Tibetan Buddhist chant, part trance-state channelling of tree spirits, this really has to heard to be believed. This closing phase of "Denned Earth" was my introduction to the work of Ruhr Hunter, thanks to its inclusion on the band's MySpace page, and I loved it so much I added it to the music player on my own MySpace page. This means that I've listened to it an inordinate number of times, but after dozens, if not hundreds, of plays it still casts a powerful spell upon me. It's a real masterpiece, and I urge you to check it out for yourself. You'll know after a minute or so of this whether Ruhr Hunter is for you or not.

"Woodlore Communion" opens, like "An Owl's Gift", with birdsong shifting across the stereo channels, which is joined by a melancholy acoustic guitar melody, and then by Chet's voice, this time singing lyrics in a high, clear voice, and hissing them out in a confidential whisper. This track is a lot more conventionally musical than the abstract ambient explorations which have preceded it, yet it still evinces a profound connection to the natural environment, something like Tenhi or Empyrium. The closing track "The Leaving Trees" opens with a wonderfully warm and embracing guitar chord with long sustain, repeating as a backdrop to a high, fragmentary piano melody. Vocals emerge from the distance – in fact, this is the most wordy of Moss & Memory's tracks, although the words are still pretty minimal by ordinary standards, and the lyrics are written by Daniel La Rochelle, not Chet Scott. There are some nice passages of multi-tracked vocals towards the end of this slow and pensive composition, where Chet harmonizes with himself, the harmony of the vocals evoking the harmony of man and nature.

As with all Glass Throat releases, the packaging of Moss & Memory is a real labour of love. The album is a limited edition of 1000 copies, and the standard version, designed by Chet's wife Rachel, comes in an oversized gatefold sleeve of matt textured card, embossed with the Ruhr Hunter raven talon sun wheel logo, with everything in shades of brown as dark, earthy, tactile and sensual as the music itself. To be any more organic than this, the CD would have to be made out of compressed peat. There is also a 175-copy special edition called "The Den", also designed by Rachel Boaz-Scott, in which the album comes buried in a box containing actual earth, moss and various other natural materials, including feathers, leather, twigs, bark, bones and teeth. Can you dig it? - Simon Collins

LAST.FM
Ruhr Hunter's "Moss & Memory" is one of the musical projects of American Chet W. Scott, where he makes ritual ambient music with acoustic and folk influences. The music is heavily inspired by nature and spiritual communion with the surroundings. Chet's wife Rachel is responsible for much of the visual artistic representation of Ruhr Hunter.

EVENING OF LIGHT
"Moss & Memory" is the third album by the American acoustic/ambient project Ruhr Hunter, and it celebrated the projects 10th anniversary. Hailing from the state of Washington, Chet Scott has been quite busy in his own special niche in the underground scene. Besides his releases as Ruhr Hunter and with The Elemental Chrysalis (together with James Woodward), he runs the Glass Throat label with his wife Rachel, who does all the graphic design for these releases. I shall get back to the design shortly.

This album presents six long tracks of a unique mixture of ambient drones, acoustic melodies, field recordings, vocals, and drums. This combination yields a very organic sound, that expresses the feelings of a modern shaman, and shows a world somewhere between culture and nature. The first track is the most varied, containing deep drones, a couple of different dulcimer melodies, and a shamanic invocation. "An Owl's Gift" is a nighttime piece, containing soft, dark waves and the sound of an owl. The title track is a meditative piece around one repeating dulcimer melody. "Denned Earth / Decay & Rebirth" is another shamanic journey, the first half being dominated by a heavy horn sound, the second half by low throat singing and drumming. The final two tracks, both excellent, show the vocal side of Ruhr Hunter. "Woodlore Communion" is based around a foresty guitar melody and Chet's pleasant high voice. "The Leaving Trees" is a beautiful, soft piano and guitar piece, with Chet singing a poem. A review is too short to be able to touch upon the fine detail in these tracks, but take my word for it, each has its own story to tell.

This review would not be complete without mentioning the presentation. I got the limited edition set of this release, called "The Den". The CD is already very richly packaged in its original version, in a 6x6" gatefold sleeve with relief printing. In the limited edition, however, it is buried in an actual piece of forest. A large carton box, with the logo printed on it, and bound with leather, holds a mass of sand, moss, feathers, fungi, bones and other objects, carefully gathered by Ruhr Hunter for this purpose. The smell of the whole thing is wonderful, and the whole is almost too frail to handle regularly, though that is definitely what you'd like to do, the get the full experience from this album.

Needless to say, this is a very special release, in terms of both music and design, proving that this husband and wife make a great artistic pair. This release is highly recommended to everyone who likes atmospheric ambient and acoustic music, or 'nature music'. If the description of the special edition piqued your interest, don't hesitate to get it, because it is ridiculously cheap, especially considering over half of the price is spent on shipping! I don't know how Chet and Rachel manage all this generosity, but I'd recommend everyone to support them, and get some great art in return...(9/10)

HARVEST HOME/UNBROKEN CIRCLE
In 2005 Chet Scott of the enigmatic USA based label 'Glass Throat Recordings' got in touch to introduce his label's music to me. CDs of artists such as Beneath The Lake, Ruhr Hunter and The Elemental Chrysalis duly arrived. These were some of the most fully realised album concepts I had ever seen, runes, nature, sleeve materials, text, script and layout combined to produce a distinctive design.

Originating many years ago from a post-industrial exploration of noise the label has evolved into music that gives voice to our arcane landscapes, the wide open wild spaces of the USA and dense untrodden forests. Combining acoustic instruments, electronic drones and field recordings the label has a consistently immersive approach to production which takes the listener deep inside the music. Slow, lonesome, forbidden, lost places are evoked where nature lives unwatched, unrestrained. Their ways untainted by our presence, ancient forces continuing across eons.

I have often felt the music of the label to act as a series of folk rituals and invocations for these places whether imagined or real. On this collection of music prepared over a few years, Chet as the main musician has produced a singularly powerful work. The label is almost unknown in the experimental folk field yet is one of the leading exponents of music the broad minded will find an intuitive connection with.

Here guitars and dulcimers play slow rippling patterns, keyboards move achingly slow drifting across the land, occasional implied rhythms rise and fall. On the first track 'Antlers In the Fog, To Will The Spirit Of Transit' this sixteen minute epic takes the listener deep into the unseen heart of the landscape. Low throat singing, even a vocal are part of this tapestry which slowly finds form in urgent, tense note patterns.

'An Owl's Gift' is truly unsettling, owls echo all around the listener with the electronic ambient music of unease leaving us along in the middle of the night amongst the feral creatures of the woods. Because the music combines electronics and processed acoustic instruments it does not sound the product of preset keyboard tones. Instead care is taken to make organic, evolving music.

'Moss and Memory' itself has struck glass, metal and bell tones. There are electronics playing flute like melodies and urgent endless guitar ripples. It evokes the music of the Jewelled Antler Collective's 'Franciscan Hobbies' or 'Thuja' or even UK artists such as Venereum Arvum. There is a combination of something ancient, primitive even delivered through modern playing. As it builds this piece has a sense of repressed violence, of impending destruction with an exciting dramatic momentum.

'Denned Earth (Decay and Rebirth)' starts with foreboding low brass notes, a siren call of environmental activity. We hear thunder in the distance and the unsettled calls of animals at the start of a storm. The crescendoing sense of pent up forces in nature is palpable. Later on when Chet is throat singing it is sinister, almost inhuman, more of the earth than the suburbs. The music works in a similar way to Steve Roach's exploration of the digeridoo as trance inducing instrument used within ambient electronic soundscapes.

'Woodlore Communion' is beautiful, desolate piece. Birds cry out to each other across the forest as Chet plays romantic classical style acoustic guitar. Electronic guitar enters and then surprisingly there is a vocal. The piece becomes a proper song, delivered in layered whispers. It's very well done, the looping e-guitar and struck notes add tension to a welcome, unexpected folk song.

'The Leaving Trees' is our final piece where dislocated Harold Budd like piano notes and held guitar notes create a lonesome mood. Again a vocal enters, but here it is more plaintive, lamenting. There is an intense air of meditation, even devotion. Is this piece then a liturgy to the forest, to our onward encroachment into places best left alone?

Maybe the testament of such music is to create a vivid impression of these wild places and their importance. To help us connect with the natural and accept it on its own terms. Maybe then we can learn to work with nature, to leave it alone and to help sustain it. The music works as devotional ritual, as musical prayer and immersive soundworld. In whatever way it is appreciated, we feel the listener returns with a sense of wonder. That the music evokes such spaces completely and seems to transport us in a waking dream state is the best recommendation we can give.

HEATHEN HARVEST
I've sung the praises of Chet W. Scott's project RUHR HUNTER before in these pages, which readers might consult to get a background to this review. Simply put, this latest album surpasses all others, mostly because of its wonderful melodic arrangements that lift this gem well beyond its supposed peers. This album reaches a new plateau of deeply emotional and spiritual expression, being born out of a profound connection to the spiritworld and the earth.

Instrumental passages drift in and out of the mist, perfectly timed to form a psychedelic framework, a net for waking dreams. Pieces such as the ultra-hypnotic "An Owl's Gift" live from wonderful layering, repetition without replication, and well-placed natural sounds. An oddly crystalline celestaphone is used as well as a myriad of other instruments, be they flutes, harmonium, dulcimers, or acoustic guitar. Unique acoustic instruments like the ritual long horn on "Denned Earth (Decay & Rebirth)" prevail.

Scott's vocals have developed as well, from the hoarse invocation in 16 minute shamanic suite "Antlers In The Fog, To Will The Spirit in Transit" to the throat singing in "Denned Earth (Decay & Rebirth)," from the achingly beautiful singing & whispers on "Woodlore Communion" to the quietly intense harmonies of the final song "The Leaving Trees."

I could blabber on about the sounds but the stunning album design and package should really be mentioned as well. It consists of a 6"x 6" six-panel folder that contains no plastic, being made out of textured dark-brown cardstock that is embossed, also in dark brown. The result is tactile, non-glossy and a perfect visual guide to the music.

I feel that RUHR HUNTER really hit upon a special note with their last release "Torn Of This." This note has been amplified a thousand times with this special album. Friends of such artists as IN GOWAN RING, STEVE VON TILL, ALETHES, or even GODSPEED would be well advised to take this journey.

AURAL PRESSURE
"Moss & Memory" is Chet W. Scott's third full length work as Ruhr Hunter, one that has come a full decade since 1996 to this collection of telluric drones and cryptogamous soundscapes. In the face of modern humankind's paring of nature, "Moss & Memory" evokes an atavism and reawakens the animism, which despite being overlooked by a technologically advanced society still pervades all essential beings but truly finds home where nature is unfettered. Gneissic mysticism, as layered as time is immemorial, "Moss & Memory" serves as postern to the wonder of the microcosm as it relates to the macrocosm, an embrasure through an isthmus of modernism and materialism.

The instruments subsumed into this album are too numerous to list here (though detailed in the liner notes of the album's packaging), but range a gamut of acoustic instruments to organic samples of animals and the breathing of seasons, the oscillation of day and night. Susurrous drones shiver the undergrowth of the grove, eld and numinous, guitars meter languid melodies and dulcimer rills thread the boscage. With all bar one track pushing beyond ten minutes, there is a sense of changing landscape, of "journey", as Chet W. Scott so enunciates on the very first track, signaling the cycle of life and death. While the boles of trees pillar a vast canopy, the vicinage constantly changes, guitar, piano and percussion swell into post-rock instrumentation then owls hoot to the tintinnabulation of dulcimer in the eddies of night. Terrene acoustics constantly drag the listener into fecund soil, hollowed animal horns and thunder chime together with throat singing shamanic observances as the forest endures, rain and congeries of birds and insects proscenium for ritual. Ruhr Hunter's ambience is far from cathedrals of despair or the sealed caps of rotting cities, preferring to walk naked that chapel of life.

Glass Throat serves a delicately aesthetic package with the design by Rachel Boaz-Scott, an oversized digipak on textured earthen granulated card, sunken and embossed calligraphy arabesques the gatefold, coloured with runes and the limned forms of ravens. Besides this slim loam one can also purchase "The Den", a limited edition box of earth, teeth, feathers, stones... collected and presented as burial for the "Moss & Memory" digipak, and gathered from the rain forests of the Pacific North West, to celebrate Ruhr Hunter's ten year anniversary. However, one would best check import requirements for shipping of earth around the globe.

AQUARIUS RECORDS
This is the latest disc of dark ritualistic drone music from Ruhr Hunter, aka Chet Scott, the man who runs the Glass Throat label, who in the past have brought us amazing music from Beneath The Lake And Elemental Chrysalis as well as his own Ruhr Hunter. A handful of copies of this disc (made for friends of the band only) came packaged in a box filled with ocean stones, dirt, pebbles, crow feathers, mink bones & teeth, insects, branches & White Birch bark collected from the forests of Maine, a box of death, and earth, sky and water, transition and rebirth, symbols for the musical world of Ruhr Hunter. Sounds born of nature. A true forest folk music, dark ritualistic soundscapes, primal, tribal, shamanic. Lovely and dreamlike. The sound of wind in leaves, the sound of rain falling through trees, rendered in swirls of acoustic guitar, distant shimmering drones, hushed whispered vocals, as well as actual sounds of the wild, animals, and nature, woven into Ruhr Hunter's dense sonic tapestry. A moody and melancholy missive from the heart of a dark forest, a mysterious figure cloaked in a constantly shifting swirl of low end rumble, sits before a black cauldron suspended above a crackling fire, shadows dance wildly on the canopy above, into the pot the figure places a Jewelled Antler, a Dead Raven, blades of grass, a handful of Lichens, a pine cone and a Wooden Wand, a glorious sound drifts from the murky brew, like tendrils of smoke, drifting heavenward, tangled up in the branches overhead, shifting amongst the shadows, filling our ears with a soft warm otherworldly fire.

As with everything on Glass Throat, breathtaking packaging. An oversized brown textured six panel sleeve with the text and imagery embossed in a darker brown, the cover, the instantly recognizable Ruhr Hunter raven talon logo. So nice.

MUSIQUE MACHINE
Moss & memory is knee-deep with dark ritual forest air, you can almost smell the due heavy pine tree, Feel the moss carpet under you, feel the coarse bark against your hands. It's all brought into ever-green existence with a mix of; barren acoustic guitar work, epic almost post rock structures, dank ambience , funeral drones and all manner of darkly hazed folk instrumentation. All tipped with atmospheric bird and nature samples. All Making a truly spine tingling trip into the dark spirit of the forest.

An owls gift is a mix of modified owl's call, deep bassy Synth rolls- which bring to mind John carpenter at his most doomy. Added to by modified stringed interments, giving the feeling of been carried on the nights chilled air, hooked to an owls talons., you can almost see below you the forest deep green changing, into the ragged network of hedgerow broken fields, but the time certainly is not now, there's no roads or houses or street lights to pollute the nights wonder. Denned Earth - Decay and rebirth, Uses the sound of forest downpours, birdsong, ominous droning horn work and brooding percussion. Building up a wonderful feeling of morbid anticipation, like seeing the flaming torches of some strange pagan precession come towards you, through the forest green tangle. Near the tracks half way point it really takes a decidedly creepy tones, as the horn work is replaced by a skin crawling chanted man/ animal sound and later on a slow drum beat and haunted whispering, really dread inducing stuff. It's like the precession has now stopped, the lead priest focusing squarely on were you lay hidden in the undergrowth.

Really a uniquely, atmospheric and epic release that pervades a timeless air, hell at times you almost forget you listening to something thats been recorded, it feels like it was born from oak instead. Often it brings to mind the feel of timeless grief and evil not really felt since some of Burzum's grand and grim forestal moments. And if all this wasn't enough it comes in one of the original packaging, I've seen in a while, a nice dark earth brown art card embossed raven talon circle crows and deer prints. All making this one of the must go and get now releases of this year. To hear samples and to buy direct go here ,to become one with the forest dark beating heart. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.