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As the diverse trajectories of guitar exploration have converged on ambient and soundscape paradigms, the field has filled with a new wave of guitar figures, far removed from the fret-fiddlers of old. For today's Axescapist, there's a knowledge pool brimful with a fuel of forms to fish from, from the post- of Fennesz's DSP-depredations to the proto- of Fripp & Eno's evening star tape-delay systems, stretching back from the vanishing point now reached by post-rock's progressions to its beginnings in the sunburst and vapour trails of MBV and Bark Psychosis. Some of the above may have driven Ireland's Cathal Rodgers to turn down the blown-out overdrive of his axe-station with Wreck Of The Hesperus, and cross over to a different darkside. Moonlighting from 'funeral doom' duties, he shapeshifts into Wereju, to eerie from evil twin, to a different deployment of guitar. Dream device supplants blunt instrument to draw out sub-lunar tonal tendrils over shadowlands to sound the "ageless drifting melancholia of an abandoned planet" (his words).
 Now this may sound grim, and some is, deliberately so. But The Gyres seduces with its textures, shifting swathes of tone-cloud floating above forlorn vales of tears in wistful cirrus wisps or darkening cumulus. Eschewing doom's thanatoid inclination to rivers of sludge, "Singing all we've lost" sets a subtler tone with limpid pools of Morphean serpentine motion. The FX-stretched steel's blur of buried melodies falls in the wake of dolorous dream-droners like German oneiromancers Troum, or prolific Canadian stringsmith Aidan Baker, with barely a nod to the turgescent tones of nu-doombient hero Fear Falls Burning. Though sometimes out-bleaking Baker, there's only the faintest tremor from the aftershock of FFB's lumbering metal-on-16rpm. "the gyres (part two)" and its eddies of brighter forms swimming up in serial swells is a (nether)world away, cycling through a wooze of delay-deaths and reverb-decays, shirking generic black for a realm of fluorescent grey ambiance - not so much where the dark stars hang as where the dreamer descends.
 Between Nowhere and Goodbye is similarly inclined, but here Rodgers' tone is subtly more corrosive, with moments of reined-in fierceness. For the most part, again, as on "bulls' blood and whatnot" the sound is a crepuscular gauze, wound with slithery slivers; notes infinitely spooling out, distant thrums and feedback-flirting tintinnabulations. Rodgers may or may not have supped from the cup of Justin Broadrick in his Final incarnation, but if he hasn't, it serves to indicate what lies just beyond the borders, leaking over Wereju's perimeters. Edge of distortion undulations spread out, all mist and sun-thieving shadows. On "two days older than dirt" fog-wreathed whorls of sound and signals from the bleak beyond add to the nocturnal hum, gathering like a storm then breaking into strange cyclings before subsiding. But overall Between Nowhere and Goodbye is less brute beast than brooding black beauty.
 The End of Everything is more of the same, guitar and array of real-time sound effects - flanger, overdrive, harmonizer, octivider, chorus, reverb and delay units - proving as effective sonic devices in Wereju's hands as digital synthesis. The layers and folds of "the miles still divide" and "the end of everything" diffuse into spacey nebulae or Stygian meanders; ominous tone-melts and string-seeps bleed into each other in languorous lilts; slow burns fade to grey and black. There is, though, a pacific quality to these downcast drone rituals, remote from the numbing oppression of the Dark Ambient Overlords (cf. Lustmord and his brood), the tenor closer to meditative elegy than depressive misanthropy. Overall, surveying these collections and about fifteen others in the Wereju back catalogue covering just two years, Rodgers presents as a conspicuously evocative soundscaper, who, with a little more critical scrutiny of his muse, could rein in his release rate and hone his Electric Requiems into a body of work of even higher distinction.
Review by Alan Lockett
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