By: Marika Zorzi
Album Type: Full Length
Date Released: 23/02/2018
Label: Profound Lore
With “Marrow
Hymns,” Insect Ark create a sound based on profound
introspection and the listening experience, an intense journey through
themselves. Drones, loops, echoes and layers of sounds engulf, distort and
stimulate the listener’s perceptions in an attempt to reawaken a distant, lost
awareness.
“Marrow
Hymns” CD//DD//LP track listing:
1).
Thelema
2).
Arp 9
3).
In The Nest
4).
Skin Walker
5).
Slow Raw
6).
Sea Harps
7).
Tarnish
8).
Windless
9).
Daath
The Review:
Combining elements of horror-film soundtracks,
psychedelic doom, and atmospheric noise, Insect Ark
is comprised of Dana Schechter (bass, lap steel guitar, synthesizers) and
Ashley Spungin (drums, synthesizers). Insect Ark’s intensely
visual music weaves interludes of fragile beauty with crushing passages of
swirling doom, spinning like a backwards fever dream. “Marrow Hymns” is this duo’s new album, one that exceeds all
expectations.
Formed in 2011 by Schechter (who has also been part of
bands such as Michael Gira’s Angels of Light, Bee and Flower, Zeal & Ardor, Gnaw, and Gifthorse) as a solo
project, from its inception Insect Ark has been
about creating work that transports, both physically and psychologically.
Spungin (Taurus, Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Negative Queen)
joined in 2015 to provide support on the “Portal/Well”
tour, and over the following year, Insect Ark became
something much greater than the sum of its parts. Both women are firmly rooted
in unbounded creativity – they are DIYers, multi-instrumentalists, gearheads,
and visual artists.
With “Marrow
Hymns,” Insect Ark create a sound based on profound
introspection and the listening experience, an intense journey through
themselves. Drones, loops, echoes and layers of sounds engulf, distort and
stimulate the listener’s perceptions in an attempt to reawaken a distant, lost
awareness. The songs seduce and glide slowly toward darkness in a continuum
interrupted by unexpected changes in direction that unveil a striking sense of
melody that reaches compelling, cathartic and totally unsettling peaks of
tension.
This record is a wordless song, a hypnotic voice that
screams and whispers from a place deep in the furrows, from the bones, from the
blood. Defying easy categorization, Insect Ark’s uncommon
sound is in part the amalgamation of these two women’s passions: Schechter’s
sinister bass lines and unconventional use of lap steel guitar (and her
complete omission of electric guitar), and Spungin’s lucid, exacting drumming
and synth work with her own hand-built analog noise pedals (Ormus Electronics).
“Marrow Hymns” is a work of rare beauty that conveys sounds and images and finds its
supreme expression in songs like “Arp9”,
“Skin Walker” and “Sea Harps” in which sounds seem to meet
and overlap to take shape in the absurd. Although this is an instrumental
album, nobody will miss the vocal element. The sounds speak on their own,
immersing the listener in a 45-minute journey. Its nine tracks pursue each
other in a sequence of melodies and pauses that is a constant musical quest.
This is an album to be absorbed, played and replayed,
interpreted, and loved.
