STREAM: I†† - Violent Beasts

Some more graven occult brainscrape from I††, uploaded to Soundcloud yesterday. A slow, treacly crawl through a very dark, airless space, this is about as suffocating as twine bound grim atmospherics gets. Lovely stuff.

REVIEW: I†† - The Lesser Keys

I††
The Lesser Keys

Tundra Dubs

The Lesser Keys is a six track ep of undulating dark ambient soundscape explorations from an artist I keep offering up to you, and one which you should be biting in to, released on rapidly up and coming Berkely, California based label Tundra Dubs. Each is a relatively brief excursion into a field of tone experimentation which greater track lengths could have benefited to flesh out each one's nuances. But that's because I'm a patient person. Other people might find the sub-3 minute lengths just enough to get the message clearly from each. I would quite like to have heard these thematically similar pieces melded together to create a more seamless 16 minutes – there's a progression across all of them, a definite sense of moving deeper into the middle of something, then back out again. 

The album title is reference to a 17th Century text on magickal spells and conjurations, written by King Solomon himself, but I find dispensing with the more arcane bacground and workign with this in a realtime, urban environment work even better at instilling a sense of suspense and atmposhere than overlaying it with doomy sorcery.  The album opens with a metallic sucking hum, a rapid pressure drop, to reveal a swirling cable of gently fuzzing static that gives way to D▲RKST▲R; an airier, less dense version of the first that allows an obfuscated glimpse of a beats, dark shapes moving amongst even darker undergrowth. They ripple and expand in such a way that their effect is less a music percussive propulsion and more a visual trick – bodies ghosting about in the peripheries of your vision, indistinct forms scuttling around. Creepy stuff. The third track is the longest, titled Ph▲sing it does just that, slowly unveiling a modulated phaser tone that unfurls into several strands of sound, some high pitched keening tones that fly into the upper reaches of the sonisphere, while others pitch down and rough themselves under a bed of distortion, burying deep into the bass elements of the track, their presence felt thereafter as waves of throbbing push to the surface. This bass throb continues into the next track that piles more distortion on to them, bending them at a harsher angle into a more triangular waveform with peaks and troughs, producing an eerie polyrhythmic ebb and flow. Then comes a snatch of reality, a clear beat, a fracture in the trance and a frightening moment of clarity. A proper song title: Above a Convenience Store. Not just reality here, but mundanity, the true essence of reality. It's the most kinetically active track of the ep, some kind of voice can be heard, there's a semblance of melody forming amongst the shifting rhythms, the beat, bass and shadow clap deflecting back off the curves of the lower registers. The final track, all high pitched at first. Discordant shrieking, burbling, computer chatter. The most absent of humanity in it's hollow coldness, after the comparative heightened passions of the track preceding it, it snatches any sense of hope away in the cruellest of denouements.

There is so much going on in such a short space of time across this album, it's a tiny vignetted frame of a complicated bigger picture that I'm almost tempted to retract my requests for a longer form of it because it works so well. I'm hoping to hear great things in the future from this artist, transcending several genres, carving out a very clearly defined musical environment for themselves and really elaborating on all the themes they touch on here.

Buy it now from Tundra Dub's Bandcamp page for an absurdly cheap $1.99

ORDER 

Tundra Dubs VNHOLY GROVND Volume Three :: Selected by I††

Yes that's right,  I†† again. this time not his/their own music but the third in Tundra Dubs VNHOLY GROVND mix series.  Almost a best-of the current majorly active people around the witch house scene this is an great re-entry sampler and an awesome mix in it's own right

Tracklist:

How I Quit Crack - Gone Away
fos†ercare - riot control
Dream Boat - Young & Fine
✝NO VIRGIN✝ - I wnt 2 luv u
Party Trash - Rage
SLEEP ∞ OVER - the key
Story Of Isaac - /\LL †HΞ †H!/\/6$ $HΞ $/\!D
▼□■□■□■ - Blueberry
Unison - Intimacy
Ç⋵ℜ⋻♏ð♑ℷa⇂ ╀ - murder shack
I†† - Ph▲sing
Ghoul - Watch U
Crossover - MY WAV (BLΛCK RΛ!NB0VV MashupFXpitch ED!T)
GuMMy†Be▲R! - Planned Parenthood (Nattymari Obliteration)
§ - TPWLYST-Destroy Beautiful Things (The Night ıhe Came Home)



 

VIDEO: I†† - GêçGêåGêç

New video for I††, directed by Ç⋵ℜ⋻♏ð♑ℷa⇂ ╀

VIDEO: I†† - HΔllowed 3

Video for a new track from I††, not on the Preliminary Invocations album I wrote about last week. The video has been made by Ç⋵ℜ⋻♏ð♑ℷa⇂ ╀ (that's Ceremonial Dagger, in laymans terms). they guy has got a whole lot of style and has been creating videos for some majorly interesting witch house related projects.

DOWNLOAD: I†† - Preliminary Invocations

 I††
Preliminary Invocations
AMDISCS
DOWNLOAD

On Monday I put up a new track from husband and wife duo I†† in advance of this: the full AMDISCS released album, Preliminary Invocations. Like I said before, it's the unrefined nature of this that really makes it, and yet again (after Dream Boat) I get to say that AMDISCS release an album with a vision, narrative and form that attempts to create something cinematic, sounds steeped in the creepy and ghoulish; but if it comes off as unrefined, it's only in the same way that early horror films seem somewhat unconvincing with their fake blood and plastic teeth - they were the best tools their creators had at their disposal, and are just a small illustrative, symbolic parts that work in unison with the greater ambition of the story they wish to convey - and that is certainly true of this album; if you pulled the mixes apart, each element wouldn't work, each sound seeming a little slight when thrown into relief - but when they work together, as one heaving, shifting mass then it really starts to bite hard into you.


Starting off as definitively witch house as you like, the violent open handed slap of the clap beats on dis†▲n† make their presence felt with a sharp and deliberately punctuated pace. Following that the shadowy presence of drag gets sucked into the mix; the digital fx of covergirl tear into glottal vocals and drop their guttural pitch shifted remains into an abyss of panning synth scree; then Golden RΔtio drags them even deeper in an oOoOO style.  The following two tracks put the screws into the distortion elements throwing eddies of caustic shortcircuiting atmospherics and outright noise into the middle of the album, backed by the 808, giving it an air of the more primordial †‡† pieces. Goetic Terra lays a darkly howling guitar tone with shades of doomy black metal under a fabric of glitching feedback and from there the album slowly winds down through a final few tracks experimenting within a different palette of supernatural tones, slowly screwing down the tempo, pushing the bass around into moaning silhouettes against the darkening shades that draw around the three final chapters until the final clanking wheeze of The Vibratory Formula of a Bast shivers to a climax.

It all makes for one of AMDISCS more gothically sinister releases, nicely timed for Halloween, and puts I†† up there with some of the better producers of the witch house genre.