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I honestly have to say that when I purchased this cd i was looking forward to some dark halloween type music but instead I ended up getting much more than that, This particular artist is amazing. The music is soothingly dark and strangely seductive in a trance like way. I love how the piano commands and creates an eerie yet serene scenario where the listener becomes in tune with the dark side of this awesome music. I will definitely start my own collection of this and other artists who create the same type of dark and seductive moonlight sonatas.
Out of all of Midnight Syndicate's releases, I think this one is the second creepiest behind The 13th Hour. When I listen to this album I really feel like I'm listening to the happenings inside an actual insane asylum.Gates Of Delirium can also be used in conjunction with the D & D module called Cage Of Delirium (Dungeon Crawl Classics #34 in the d20 series of modules). I highly recommend Gates Of Delirium. Play Gates Of Delirium in the background while going through the Cage Of Delirium module for an added musical effect to your dungeon crawl. There are slow songs, faster songs, and everything in between, not to mention a lot of sound effects tracks. This album has many outstanding tracks.
My favorites are Arrival (if you listen closely starting at 1:20, you can hear the song Beyond The Gates from the album Realm Of Shadows playing very faintly in the background), Welcome (wicked sounding organ), Haverghast Asylum (great melody), Halls Of Insurrection (another great melody), Residents Past (great haunting sound and melody), Adelaide (great moaning), Phantom Sentinels, Gates Of Delirium (great melody and voices and a haunting organ), Procession Of The Damned, Dark Discovery (has everything), Morbid Fascination, Alternative Therapy, and the piano ballad-like Ebony Shroud. My top 5 are Dark Discovery, Residents Past, Gates Of Delirium, Phantom Sentinels, and Ebony Shroud.Some things I like about this album are the fact that all the songs vary so much in style. When I listen to Gates Of Delirium, I feel like I'm in a haunted abandoned insane asylum because excellent sound effects are used to provide a "you are there" atmosphere. This album is the prelude to its sister album, The 13th Hour. Maybe it's the fact that the atmosphere is very airy, realistic and consistently creepy with a lot of tracks that run together. This module is actually tailored around Gates Of Delirium. Make sure you buy that one as well, because it's THE haunted mansion album and the setting is Haverghast Mansion.
The sound effects sound clear as a bell, also. The setting is Haverghast Asylum on the grounds of the estate of the Haverghast family. It's also a great Halloween album, of course. This album is very well balanced between the music and sound effects, and seems to have a little of everything. In addition to what I just wrote about the plusses of this album, there is just something about this album that makes me want to listen to the whole thing straight through, and I really can't pinpoint it. This album is the first to have a setting that features the Haverghast family. It's a masterpiece, just like Gates Of Delirium
A nice mix of creepy sound effects and darkly themed tunes. Great mood music for a horror themed party or playing RPGs.
In such places, the inmates were often treated brutally, given unsanitary food and water and virtually no medical care, and at times chained up and left there to die to free up the space for someone else. While Midnight Syndicate has probably done better albums ("Born of the Night" and "Symphonies from the Crypt" come to mind), they haven't done one that's any creepier. By now it's hardly a secret that while there were asylums in Queen Victoria's day (usually for the wealthy) where the inmates were treated with at least some compassion, often Victorian asylums and sanitariums were simply "snakepits", warehouses where people dumped mentally ill friends and relatives (and sometimes inconvenient spouses and children who were sane but unable to defend themselves) so they'd be out of sight and out of mind. It is this world that Midnight Syndicate has re-created, adding to their excellent Gothic music the screams, howls and meaningless babbling of the terminally mad. The result is good background music for either reading ghost stories or for the more Gothic varieties of role-playing (e.g., World of Darkness or Call of Cthulhu), as long as you don't think too much about the fact that places like Haverghast Asylum not only really existed, but were, until the early Twentieth Century, almost the norm for care of the incurably insane in some states and countries.
the midnight syndicate's "gates of delerium" is an amazing album; this is perfect for all haunters and anyone who enjoys the dark gothic classical music that is the midnight syndicate. the haunted house i work at will be playing this album for our 2007 season, we have contacted the midnight syndicate and recieved posters for the haunted house; these guys fully support the haunt community. I have friends who are classical piano players who love this album for it's amazing musical quality.please, do yourself a favor, buy this album. if you have never heard the midnight syndicate, i recomend you look at their myspace page and listen to their music.
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