VIDEO / DOWNLOAD: Blissed Out - Drones (Ritualz Remix)

Where did witch house go?  It just ate itself and regurgitated it into an pulse quickening collaboration with neon aacid vomit visuals.  Gnarly retro-active blog music from the blistered fingertips of Blissed Out given a relentless rescrub by dark artisan Ritualz

Download from the Soundcloud or from Mediafire if that's all gone (which it probably has at the time of writing).

DOWNLOAD: Daterape - Empress

Daterape
Empress
DOWNLOAD

Free download 5 track ep from Australian group Daterape. Don't be put off by the name. We've been through this once before.  Industrial undertones dancing over the witch house burial ground seance reflux.  Broken ribs for drum sticks, hollowed out skulls for toms, deep beats carved from flesh and smashed upon the altars of darkness. They're an increasingly potent entity and these five tracks offer more in the same cold vein as previously, with both the title track and Arctic Gesture with 80's laying down cool slabs of 80's club beats and ominous synth backing that occupy a space between Ford & Lopatin and Light Asylum, a dry ice choked dancefloor lead by hypnogogic robotic singers.  Behold is a flashback to the heady days of yesterday when the world was out-spooked by drag and Witch House Mk 1, Atmofukk is another crude title that doesn't do it;s cosmic trance any favours, the cold romanticism of it being far more subtle that fukking would imply.  The final track, Risk It, it a dirty bass/clap stomping double hitter, using it's nostalgic 8-bit blips to populate a landscape of eerie  minimal, spacious and creepy synth tones.

DOWNLOAD: Daterape - Machaevol and Cold Remains Eps

If you couldn't stomach the idea of a joke genre called rapegaze then you might blanch at a band called Daterape - but juvenile name or not, you'd be missing out if you didn't check out at least one of the tracks available to you. Two eps - Machaevol and Cold Remains - are up for free download from this mediafire link - all gone from their Bandcamp source but the artist has made them available here:

DOWNLOAD EPs

Check out Cold Remains and see if this doesn't have the kind of chill pulse that switched you on to the the occult rhythic twitch of witch house in the first place. It also has a similar swirling sigh that characterised Holy Other's own brand of cosmic drag - making that three ephemeral genre's I've thrown at you in the space of two paragraphs - but you can replace them all with a simple electronica if it makes you feel better. If you can handle them you should get a lot out of the eight tracks on offer here.

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers – Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

Vortex Rikers

Wake Up And Smell The AshesAMDISCS
DOWNLOAD

One of the most interesting groups to have emerged from the movement of desolate electronics, Vortex Rikers drop their third release and it's a great one.  AMDISCS have offered up another arresting take on a haunting yet mechanically visceral sound, similar to Dream Boat in the bands abilities to really convey a sense of tense atmosphere and cinematic narrative over short spaces of time.  Named after the spaceship that crashes in a first-person shooter they owe it to themselves to produce an atmosphere quickly, and the opening bars of A False Prophet conjure images of industrial gothic vistas, ghostly metropolises overseen by spectral caretakers; on earthm, in Space; the origin of their sounds is kept ambiguous; there's a cosmic drift to the tracks nudged into existance by sparse yet motorik beats, the upward motion of the tracks inducing a euphoria that gently coalesces amongst the grey, earthy sense that you can roll around in the thick dirt of the drone. The final We Live As We Dream pushes down on the drums that much harder and draws the record to climax, but neither stellar nor tera firma potential is pushed too hard leaving the ultimate experience an entirely subjective one that makes these six tracks all the more compelling.

Tracklist

01 A False Prophet

02 Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

03 Vanishing Point

04 Hope Rhymes With Despair

05 Void

06 We Live As We Dream 

REVIEW: GuMMy†Be▲R! - Spectral Analysis EP

GuMMy†Be▲R!
Spectral Analysis EP

Tundra Dubs

Tundra Dubs drops another stellar release in the form of this, the first of two December releases planned for GuMMy†Be▲R!, the second of which now looks doubtful as a tragic hard drive crash took half of his self-titled album with it. Luckily for fans of the debased electronics end of witch house, the Spectral Analysis EP was already safely in the hands of the label because this is the sound of an artist surpassing himself, once again, with another hermetically sealed little release with narrative and form, that also serves as another smart poke in the eye for the detractors of a scene that is getting simultaneously looser yet more accomplished as it develops.

As the leading edge of Arizona Lights '97 rushes up, the compulsion to throw my right hand up at the speaker is irrepressible. WOOSH! Then it starts in a whirl and thrust of 8-bit reminiscence, twinkling stabs of synth chime and bubble in a clamouring cross-chatter, a call-and-response between fuzzy kick and clean boom, wood block keeping time of the mystery delay between leaving the wet and warmth of the warehouse and looking down on the distant lights and muffled thump from this chill peak of a hillside, far removed and inside a steaming comedown. How did this suddenly happen? That's why The Elders are here for you, in two parts: The first is the overwhelming chant of a thousand wise and ancient voices, to freak you the shit out and make you sit up and attend to the signs. The second just opens its palms and offers you a choice of two red pills. No escape from submitting to the magickal world of this digital shaman. Dial back to the centrepiece (of 4?, we're talking a beast born off-centre, so yeah) and you get Gurl; a track that throws you back to the warehouse through a thick mist of filthy distortion caked beats, melted so close they stick to each other, snatches of fatted voices wallowing through the muck. This one's exceptionally dirty, and again recalls in spirit as much as it references in sound a halcyon period of chemical euphoria. 

Witch house, experimental electronica; this is all Class-A audio, whichever way you cut it.

Tri Angle Records announces debut releases!

Move over Disaro! After months of waiting, Robin Carolan’s Witch House trend-setter in waiting record label TriAngle has announced the full details of its first two releases, and they come from two of my artists of the year.

The first release is set to be the ethereal ghost-dub See Birds by Balam Acab. Alec Koone of Brooklyn's solo outfit works within similar ambient landsacpe as Mount Kimbie, but has a slightly more sinister edge to the shades of the sound.  The debut EP - for label and artist will be released on August 16, on 12” and digital formats.

Tracklist:
1 See Birds (Moon)
2 Regret Making Mistakes
3 Big Boy
4 Dream Out
5 See Birds (Sun)

See Birds is an intensely deep tune that plumbs deep into an occult subconscious, dredging around bass frequencies and tweaking them with ripples of filters and fx, flitting melodies, dreamstate vocals drifting between realms - very similar in tone and style to Forest Swords, whose new single I wrote about yesterday. Many shades of subtle:

Following See Birds comes the debut EP by the San Francisco based Christopher Greenspan's   oOoOO (disappointingly pronounced “oh”, rather than the far spookier...errr..."oOoOO"! - I read it as I see it; ghostly.) That drops on September 27th (another birthday treat for me, along with Deerhunter and Salem) with cover artwork from photographer Alison Scarpulla, whose visionary images are disturbingly evocative of the creeped out, spectral and magickal atmopsheres the genre has the potential to conjure. The NFR banner at the top of this blog is hers.

Tracklist:

1 Mumbai
2 Burnout Eyess
3 Sedsumting
4 Hearts
5 Plains Is Hot
6 Burnout Eyes (Visions of Trees Remix)

oOoOO may be responsible for my track of the year in Seaww; embodying all the most essential elements of Witch House, with the dragged deeply eerie vocals, hypnagogic guitar solo and 808 beats. Hearts comes pretty damn close to repeating that effect, minus the ghostslopped vocals, replaced with their haunting female shadow version, and it's on this release. Here's a youtube of it for you:




As a pre-release-release TriAngle recently put out a tribute album to Lindsay Lohan songs, artists such as oOoOO and Oneohtrix Point Never covering her songs titled Let Me Shine For You, which can be downloaded here.

TONIGHT! Dre▲ms In †he Wi†ch House!

It is finally here. The debut Witch House DJ night descends on Brighton at the Penthouse, with your host FokkaWolfe:

Dre▲ms In †he Wi†ch House

An audio visual hex of Witch House/Zombie Rave/EBM/Tech Noir & Ghost Drone.

With LIVE Witch House remixing of classic 90s rave tunes

and a small smattering of classic goth for those who need to mourn the past.

20th July @The Penthouse.

Above the world famous Freebutt, Brighton.

+

Three film projectors throwing Witch House videos against the walls with backup from

David Lynch, Dario Argento and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Free.

PREVIEW: Dre▲ms In †he Wi†ch House

Coming soon! The debut Witch House DJ night in Brighton - in the UK - possibly even the world! From the hands and mind of FokkaWolfe:

Dre▲ms In †he Wi†ch House

An audio visual hex of Witch House/Zombie Rave/EBM/Tech Noir & Ghost Drone.

With LIVE Witch House remixing of classic 90s rave tunes

and a small smattering of classic goth for those who need to mourn the past.

20th July @The Penthouse.

Above the world famous Freebutt,

Brighton.

+

Three film projectors throwing Witch House videos against the walls with backup from

David Lynch, Dario Argento and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Free.