Here we have "Between the Woods and Frozen Lake," the tenth(!) release from A Vibrant Struggle's "Molten Snow Tapes" sessions, once again composed from the fruits of piles of tapes that were collected over the course of a single weekend in an abandoned ski resort back in September of 2007. Foxy Digitalis reviewed an earlier installment from the Norwegian trio on the Small Doses label called "Whispering Bones," in which Ryan Emmett allowed his imagination to take hold with visions of an old man in a knit sweater, brutally hunting reindeer for survival with ice picks in the freezing cold. If that old man was cognizant of his surroundings throughout "Whispering Bones," perhaps "Between the Woods and Frozen Lake" finds that same burly white-bearded fellow holed up in his cabin several days later, fat (from reindeer), subdued and drunkenly confused, maybe even letting his guard down a little. He's being stalked—whether that be by his own conscience or by some…thing? hunter? animal?...peering into the frosted window with glowing eyes is perhaps up to you.

The 31 minutes of the piece move through droning dial tone-like harmonics (sonorous, but simultaneously dissonant) and maddeningly hypnotic repetitions of clinking metallic sounds. There are moments of sustained static and growing moans of bowed strings that invoke feelings of dread in its purest form. To hear "Between the Woods and Frozen Lake" is to be inside its creative space, next to a roaring wood stove, beneath a grandfather clock with the radio faintly playing in the background and feeling yourself slowly going insane with isolation as you become hyper-sensitized to the cabin's ostensibly violent ambience closing in around you. A Vibrant Struggle manages to find something menacing here, even when the music is at its quietest. They've created this scene, but they're also capturing it in a way that sounds natural and spontaneous.

It's tough to say whether the music is edited from different portions of the taped sessions, or if this is a live performance. This ambiguity gives the piece a real holistic sense of progression. A Vibrant Struggle's work flips forward like chapters of a book with clearly defined sections that build to unsettling climaxes before tapering off and focusing on the next set of textures. The most powerful portion comes in the final third with what sounds like the dripping of water in a tin pail, rhythmically finding a pattern and intensifying with sustained harmonics over time, transforming an otherwise mundane object into something else entirely savage and threatening.

As the last windy dirge ceases without much warning, A Vibrant Struggle leaves something of a question mark where an epilogue might have gone (a more gradual fade would have given the piece a bit more finality). The veil of their creative process is lifted with this quick turn of a volume knob, reducing what was at once a suspenseful horror story back to what this really is: just a bunch of tapes recorded by three guys in a cabin over a weekend. Nothing to be afraid of… 8/10 -- Crawford Philleo (28 July, 2010)