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This is the Digital-Only edition. Originally released in 2000. Part Two of a double album, The Surreal Sanctuary is part one.

This is the second half of the extended work begun last year with The Surreal Sanctuary, and represents perhaps vidnaObmana's most challenging and complex work yet. Again includes guest appearances by Jim Cole, Joris De Backer and Steve Roach, and continues the focus on the avantgarde and atmospheric. Vidna Obmana will reveal the solution and reach the light at the end of the sonic tunnel with this Second chapter.

IMPRESSIONS FROM A PARTICIPATING ARTIST:
"These places are like finding understandings of deep origin for the first time. It felt as essential awakenings that calls one in deeper and deeper....to hear again and for the first time.... what it means to be fearlessly alive and possesed to express the true emotions and insights that few answer the call oe act upon."
--Steve Roach

"Having released 24 albums over a career spanning 16 years, Vidna Obmana's music has survived the descriptions:gently atmospheric, post-industrial, tribal ambient, minimalistic,textural, abrasive, isolationist ambient, Fourth World, post-classical, and even traditional. On his latest recording, The Contemporary Nocturne, Vidna Obmana again challanges the musical genre categorizers of the world. The Contemporary Nocturne was conceived of as the completion of the journey begun with The Surreal Sanctuary. The new album continues to explore the secret emotions that inspire Vidna Obmana's music. The album is paced like a night walk through wilderness terrain. Travellers to these musical hinterlands must take utmost care as to where they place their next step forward. We begin in the same strange sonic landscape where left at the conclusion of The Surreal Sanctuary. The listener slowly moves through the uncertainty, led by odd vignetts which provide an unsettling focus. Powerful overtone flute solos are processed and mutated into a kind of dark fanfare for the underworld. A reverberant voice hangs sweetly in the dense atmosphere like a benevolent spectre. Before we are consumed by the tension, mystery and darkness, quietly from the distance, layers of complexly harmonic chords, as a steadying hand in the darkness, shift the emotional content and resolve at journey's end. As The Contemporary Nocturne tests the technological limits of the gear used to realize the unique timbres found on this album, so it also tests the listener's ability to reach beyond themselves and the limits of experience. Part soul's lament, part defining moment, The Contemporary Nocturne will stand much analysis before giving up its secrets to the inquisitive listener."
--Chuck van Zyl, Star's End Radio / WXPN