ALBUM REVIEW: Insect Ark, "Marrow Hymns"

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.

“Marrow Hymns” is available here (USA) and here (Europe)

Band info: Facebook || Bandcamp

Theologian - Some Things Have To Be Endured (Album Review)

Album Type : Full Length

Date Released :  18/10/2013

Label : Crucial Blast

 Some Things Have To Be Endured, album track listing :

1). Black Coven Myopia 04:32

2).The Conjoined Deviant Procession 05:13
3). Gore Stained Ramparts 08:32
4). Grand Guignol 04:04
5). Like Love, Only Real 05:38
6). The Conjoned Deviant Procession 04:49
7). Welcome To The Golden Age of Beggars 06:18
8). Writing Corpus Landscape 08:05

Bio :

The latest offering from THEOLOGIAN -- a.k.a. Leech, also the mastermind behind the renowned power electronics/death industrial outfit Navicon Torture Technologies -- Some Things Have To Be Endured features eight new tracks of punishing black industrial, apocalyptic darkwave frequencies, and nerve-rending electronic deathscapes. The album is a collection of collaborations between THEOLOGIAN and a lineup of female vocalists/artists from both within the industrial / noise / dark ambient / coldwave realm and beyond, with contributions from Rachael Kozak (Hecate), Kristen MacArthur (Sewer Goddess), Rachel Maloney (Tonikom), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), Christiana Key (Delphic Oracle), Joan Hacker (Factoria), Shari Vari (Void Vision), and professional opera singer Melissa C. Kelly. The tracks shift from grinding industrial dread to ethereal coldwave beauty, blasts of rumbling blackened synthcrush met with washes of haunting electronic melody, while always remaining rooted in THEOLOGIAN's bleak, jet-black industrial sound. Co-produced with Derek Rush/Dream Into Dust and mastered by James Plotkin, Some Things Have To Be Endured contains some of the most moving and dramatic music to emerge from THEOLOGIAN's black sonic abyss, and the album comes adorned with striking photography by Ione Rucquoi that makes this one of the more visually arresting releases in the outfit’s growing catalog

Review :

Theologian play dark industrial ambient noise, the likes of which has probably never been witnessed before. To listen to 'Some Things Have To be Endured' is like staring into the abyss, and trying desperately not to make eye contact with what stares back at you. Masterminded by NY based noizenik Leech and uniquely featuring a slew of guest female vocalists, the record is seeing a release via the experimental Crucial Blast label in an unholy union that is sure to reap rewards.

'Black Cavern Myopia' commences with Sunn o))) style depth and discordance, before a nauseating industrial beat springs forth to dominate. Throughout the track it's never in danger of becoming overbearing on misplaced, it lurks in the shadows with pure menace, perfectly poised. This is true dark ambiance, ushered forth from a long night of the soul. The vocals of Rachael Kozak are haunting and sensual, and will frankly creep you out. She sounds like she was either drugged or possessed or a combination of both during the recording process. Brilliant.

'Gore-Stained Ramparts' is more uneasy listening, but in a gradual sense. It begins in an inoffensive enough manner, but the increase in tension suggests that testing times lay ahead. And sure enough the clangs of machinery from the seventh circle of hell start to weed their way into the score and the effort starts to sound like a passage from the book of Job. This is suffering in a magnificent manner, the feeling of panic is so tangible and escalating that I actually began to experience anxiety. And if music can start to affect a listener in such a physical way? Well, that's true power right there folks. It never gets seriously loud, and it doesn't need to force it's will upon you. Scary stuff.

'The Conjoined Deviant Procession' features a steady hiss as if something is only half tuned in, and an unsteady beat in the background that could be a health hazard. All the while twinned with more unearthly female vocals, this time provided by Christiana Key of Delphic Oracle. I imagine that being in a sensory deprivation tank for too long could lead to hallucinations that this song could successfully soundtrack. Bleak in every sense of the word, you'll feel heavily medicated with no escape before this composition is through with you.

Not for the faint of heart or expectant mothers, 'Some Things Have To Be Endured' is just what it's title suggests, an exercise in endurance. It will however reward that endurance and repeated plays with an increasingly fantastic record that must have been hell to conceive, and just as difficult to physically create. But what a creation, one of stunning malevolence and bitter beauty.

Listen to Theologian - It should scare the shit out of you. If it doesn't, you're a stronger person than I.

Words by :  Matt Fitton

You can buy it here 

 

For more information :

http://gash-theologian.tumblr.com
http://www.crucialblast.net
https://www.facebook.com/CrucialBlast
https://crucialblast.bandcamp.com

Gnaw - Horrible Chamber (Album Review)

 

Album Type : Full Length

Date Released : 15/10/2013

Label : Seventh Rule Recordings

HORRIBLE CHAMBER, track listing :

1).Humming 5:26

2).Of Embers 5:14

3). Water Rite 7:05

4).  Worm 4:48

5). WidowKeeper 9:43

6). Vulture 6:32

7). The Horrible Chamber 12:05

Bio :

New York’s favorite malignant noise instigators and recent Seven Rule signees, GNAW, will unleash the diseased fruit of their sonic discontent this October. GNAW is the maniacal anti-creation of Alan Dubin (Khanate, Old, O.L.D.), Carter Thornton (Enos Slaughter), Jun Mizumachi (Ike Yard), Brian Beatrice and Eric Neuser. Together they’ve manifested a terrifyingly claustrophobic, seven-track journey of sound where the collective sentiments of fear, trauma, rage and repugnance collide into a cathartic state of brooding, audio disease. Fittingly titled, Horrible Chamber, the follow-up to 2009’s This Face, which Exclaim! proclaimed “noisy, demented and twistedly glorious,” and The Obelisk crowned “extreme, experimental and sonically unpleasant,” was recorded at Seizures Palace by Jason Lefarge (Swans, Akron/Family, Khanate, Angels Of Light), mixed by Brian Beatrice at AudioEngineand mastered by James Plotkin (OLD, Scorn Khanate, Khlyst etc).with additional elements recorded by Beatrice, Dubin, Thornton, and Mizumachi in various chambers.

The Band :

Alan Dubin
Brian Beatrice
Carter Thornton
Eric Neuser
Jun Mizumachi

Review :

I'll be honest, I've had this album in my grubby little hands for a while now without actually being able to fully realise how to accurately convey its existence in words. Gnaw are, as best I can attempt to describe, an experimental doom-noise troupe from New York, featuring within their ranks ex-Khanate vocalist Alan Dubin. Their latest opus of pure terror is the more than appropriately titled 'Horrible Chamber'.

And I'm struggling to review it...

The album begins with 'Humming', an innocent enough illusion. This feeling of innocence is reinforced initially by some simple (yet creepy) piano keys, before it all become clear what the true and vile intentions of this music really are. Ushered in by factory assembly line noise (a bit like that press that crushed the original Terminator), it becomes very disturbing very quickly. And then Dubin opens his mouth, and hell marches forth. His vocals sound like torture tapes, and the lyrics read like excerpts from a padded cell wall featured in a video nasty. It's fucking hard to listen to, man. But in some twisted way it will reward you for your perseverance. It's utterly mystifying. Did I say perseverance? I meant endurance.

'Of Embers' could be praised for its more traditional doom approach, were it not for the fact that it still remains completely horrific. There's no middle ground anywhere here, not even a whiff of fairytale or any kind of happy ending. This ends in a wooden box, every time. EVERY FUCKING TIME. And yet I'm compelled to listen to its hypnotic grimness. Heavy as balls riffs abound. Is there something wrong with me for liking this? This is a serious question, yet like it I certainly do.

'Water Rite' is primarily just a continuous loop of electronic noise. Like a rhythm in the randomness. Like if your kettle could be used to make music. How they manage it, I have no idea. That continuous beat is ritualistic in nature, and could probably be heard echoing through time. Pretty sure it's a warning from the past, most likely translated as "abandon all hope". I really dig this album, but it scares the ever loving shit out of me at the same time.

I'd also like to single out 'Vulture'. Perhaps as 'conventional' as Gnaw are capable of being, it's also maybe one of the heaviest tracks on the entire album, and it all comes down to the rhythm section. As much as the vocals are possibly the star of the show for the most part, here the drums and bass take to the floor like a jackhammer to a skull. Achingly loud and viscerally brutal, the background invades the foreground and stands on your neck. Absolutely incredible effort.

As I mentioned at the start of this quasi-review, or as close as I can get to covering whatever I just subjected myself to for the umpteenth time, I initially struggled to approach any kind of write-up for 'Horrible Chamber'. And that only made me admire it even more. It's well documented within human nature to be drawn in by something that terrifies us. A bit like watching a car wreck. And I suppose that's pretty much what this new Gnaw is - an audio car wreck.

Better buckle up.

Words by : Matt Fitton

You can buy it here

 

 

For more information :
http://www.facebook.com/Gnawtheband
http://www.seventhrule.com