SHRINE

eXperimental AMBIENT sound drift.
esoteric dark ambient music.

MP3 FLASH PLAYER

SHRINE's official website

shrine.me.uk

Is it an user friendly webpage?
Well, it depends. Low screen resolutions are not welcome here and besides, all Internet Explorer support is left behind.
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Dark Ambient...

While the ambient music in general is born within the vast electronic/ techno scene, the question how exactly dark ambient subgenre was born is not that clear.
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A photo of Brian Williams (LUSTMORD) A photo of Peter Andersson (RAISON d'ETRE)

Music collection

I've got an idea to present my entire audio collection here, with info and audio samples attached to each release. It's a small selection of cds (~150) but a great one.
I'll post a link here when the "catalogue" is finished.

SHRINE's old website

shrine.me.uk / OLD

If you want to take a look and see how SHRINE's very first website looked, i'm keeping a copy of it online. It's an archaic table design which does not even validate, but it still looks cute:) Click on the link above and see it for yourself.

"SHRINE" AUDIO PROJECT

A photo of Hristo Gospodinov (SHRINE)

My name is Hristo Gospodinov and SHRINE is my own musical project, born of my love for esoteric music and the need to express my obscure understandings of the surrounding world in a nonverbal way. It was started in autumn '2003 when after several years of playing various acoustic instruments i have finally turned to sampling.
Under the hard influence of dark ambient scene from the middle and the end of the 90s, the original idea of the project was to create some noticeable dark ambient works.

Of course the original idea got blurry in the years and has finally disappeared in the wide field of audio experiments. Today SHRINE has no genre limits.
Still, i'm interested mostly in 'drifting' type of music, especially to mix nature sounds with machine sounds and other artificial things in an ambient environment. The sound sources vary from audio synthesis, to acoustic instruments, to field recordings, to whatever i find interesting to make sounds with, so not much of limits here.
It's an experimental art after all, isn't it?

LIVE PERFORMANCES

A photo from SHRINE's third live performance

Years ago i thought live gigs with ambient music are boring. After all ambient music is an introvert and isolationist aural concept to be experienced in privacy, so i couldn't imagine such thing as "ambient party" where lots of people go and stand still & quiet, listening to monotone music. WRONG! My first audio gig with SHRINE - same time & same place with RAISON d'ÊTRE in Sofia in 2006 - changed my mind forever. Of course during my own set i was too busy to think about that, but later - when P.Andersson was on the stage - i realized how powerful experience a live ambient performance can be.

As ambient stuff is quite monotone, in order to deliver a solid experience to the auditory, it is very important to play your music very loud and with a really strong low shelf. With the proper type of sound, all monotone music can be turned into a true aural vortex, leading the mind to a mental extasy.

My own approach to live playing has evolved in the time. At first it was a kind of DJ stuff, mixing prerecorded things and that was all. Quite boring, isn't it, just standing behind a mixing desk, pushing the faders around, and that's everything form the beginning to the end. I'm done with it now. Since 2008 SHRINE's gigs are still based on prerecorded pads but real time synthesis and sample triggering are dominating the sound. In other words - real time composed live playing. And that's far away from being boring.

There were 3 live gigs until now:

~ April '2006 with RAISON d'ETRE in Sofia;
~ December '2008 with ABANDONED SHELTER (and more) in Sofia;
~ April '2010 with FAULT (and more) in Sofia.

SOME NEWS...

SNOWBLOOD - Deep ambient label

April '2010... About my so called "Snowblood" album. Some of you may know that in 2008 i created a new fullength album for the french ambient label SNOWBLOOD running by Niiko (the well established ambient artist ASMOROD) and his wife Hana. The plan was the stuff to be released in the end of 2008 or early 2009. Then suddenly the label stopped all activity and went into a permanent hiatus (family reasons).

So the stuff is still here, untitled, fresh, 60 min long, waiting on my hard drive. It is not pure dark ambient (if it's any dark ambient at all), but something different, as SNOWBLOOD's concept does not tolerate routine dark themes and industrialized sounds. I'm still waiting to see if they are going to restart the label. I really hope this stuff to be released by these guys, so i'm not searching for another label for the moment.

***

May '2010... I'm half way done with my latest audio work called "NIHIL" and this time you can expect some ultra dark stuff. It's including the "HELLFIRE" track that many of you commented through my profile at Myspace.
Well, it was quite a difficult year and obviously this is reflecting on the music i compose. It's not scheduled on a label yet, but i just created a separate page where i brought some demo tracks online. However i'll keep the demo page in private and it will not go to the public domain. It's for labels only.

***

June '2010... I'm going to design LINGUA FUNGI's website. And the question is: How dark should i go with it?

WHERE AND HOW?

A photo from my home music studio

For those of you who are curious how SHRINE's music has been created, i can share some details. First of all i don't think there is such thing as inspiration. As Johan Levin (DESIDERII MARGINIS) once said, all you need is the proper type of mood. Of course moods are always changing, but still there are some constants behind all that.

That's my living room on the picture on the right, which is also my home music studio (yeah, i adore decorative plants). As for the audio gear i'm using to compose and record music, i'm planning to create a separate article dedicated to audio gear and mixing & mastering techniques for ambient musing since there is a serious lack of information on the internet about that.

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