New Dominions is an epitaph to an era and a rebirth of another. Inspired by Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, it is the profound religious feel of the takeover events that stand out in Weisman's detailed narration. While quite a bleak read, it successfully conveys an image of unstoppable sermon, a service of Life that would continue no matter if humanity or any other species cares to attend it. This collaborative release brings together two of the most exciting artists operating at the forefront of the underground. The groups’ willingness to explore new sounds, textures, and moods sets them apart from other artists operating in heavy music. New Dominions may be the most intense and brooding releases by either group.
The album consists of two extended tracks. “The Gift” begins the record with slowly building layers of bowed and looped percussion, harsh vocals, glistening tremolo guitars, and eerie piano played from the inside. The track ends with sparse, trance inducing, rolling, primordial percussion and mellifluously leads into the next.
The repetitive piano, bass, and percussion of "Our Epitaph" usher in dreamy, chanted, vocals. The instruments become locked in a slowly burning, hypnotic groove as layers of tape loops, guitars, and feedback gradually build and build. New Dominions is an extremely heavy record, but has few of the typical characteristics of a heavy album. The repetition and the subtle changes throughout the album make it all the more bleak and unsettling.
The artwork for the release was done by frequent Horseback collaborator and Russian occultist Denis Forkas Kostromitin. Side A of the LP consists of the album. Side B has an etching of Kostromitin’s “Omega Auroch” drawing. The last few aurochs exist in only one part of the world — the Bialowieza forest, one of the last remaining primeval forests in Europe, which straddles the border between Poland and Balarus. The auroch convey many messages: man’s domination over nature — a fragile natural order, the futility of man’s ambitions (the extinguished candles), the bestial origin of all human religions and spiritual practices (the candelabrum coming out of the bull’s head), and the end of days represented by the inverted omega of the composition itself. The image on the album cover “The Wooden Word” is composed of seven aurochs forming the living basis for the church in the painting. The inspiration for the structure was the elaborate and ancient wooden churches — one of the sacred buildings built without a single nail — which even today stand tall in a few small Russian towns and villages. It is the eternal church of Evolution, the true house of tempest, the Devil’s seat. The church and auroch pieces echo each other, raise the liturgical feel and close the omega.
This collaborating represent the future of heavy music and the material on the release is in a category of its own next to Locrian’s The Crystal World and Horseback’s The Invisible Mountain.