"Forgotten Realm is the second album published by the duo Andrea Marutti (Never Known, Amon, Sil Muir) and Giuseppe Verticchio (Nimh) under the project name Hall of Mirrors. In this new release, they are seconded by guest musicians Andrea Freschi and Andrea Ferraris who provided field recordings and some guitar parts. If their first offering was a shadowy heavily lugubrious atmospheric ambient manifest (made of static, ferocious, muted dreamscapes), Forgotten Realm is much more a primal-alchemical music procession that could be nocturnal hyms to the genesis, to the ancient time. Consequently the dynamic dronescapes and textural electronic waves are profundly expressive and intuitively beatific. The serene and deeply absorbing ethno-electronic pieces are stylistically close to the most ascentional synthesized works by Alio Die, Vidna Obmana and Harold Budd, but with much more emphasis on nocturnal motives. Thus it is less luminous and most vertiginous with a constant association to mnemonic traces, fractured living memories and melancholic visions.

The opening track is an organic classic ambient piece with long chordal dronespheres. Gates of Namathur partly uses acoustic instruments that seem to flow in a magic worship. Decadent Splendour is a moody-funereal sanctified music ritual for echoing guitar chords and foggy harsh noises. This is among my favourites, the perfect way to experience contemplative ecstasy through music. Among the Ruins is a detached soundscape that connects us to some other worlds. The atmosphere is progressively charged with some kind of high tension including buzzing noises and doom like feelings. During the last minutes we go back to the heavenly origins with superb acoustic flute lines. The album closes with an utterly dark and primordial synthscape, admitting hermetic cyclical melodies into it and guitar epic dreaminess. Forgotten Realm is a voluptuous-essential vertical trip in cristal like spheres and lost paradises." - Philippe Blache