This is a limited CDr (100 copies) I picked up last week at the Thoughtforms gig . Ever since taking in that spooky SSOK vibe in a live context, I’ve been eager to hear more …and this collection of tracks is just what my head has been craving...
The opener Feeding Tree is a blur burrowing into the mind’s eye, exotic colours strung along a cobweb of frail heart-beats. Everything is delayed, Escher-like, into a giddy sickness spiral sucking at the void. Secondary patterns break across the surface in shivers of excitement, as scatter cushions of tune clasp tightly around the phantoms.
Insects - ups the tempo, a hammered anvil and tip toed accompaniment , interspersed with the skid of tyres. A pleasing xylophonic vibe, filled with clockwork motion that sit well with the introspective nature of the vocals. Hints of Bjork are in there, but here the voice is definitely richer than the Icelandic pixie’s, bathed in a warm derangement, musing on the subject of screaming eyes and insects chatting about the stock exchange.
She is in my mind is almost too beautiful to describe, as poly-vocals drift across a twilight of instrumentation, punctuated by the fluttering of digital moths. Those bell-like chimes falling in its wake, like infected apparitions dispersing on the back of a hypnotic double take, that literally weaves between the ears in disappearing key motifs.
Snake of the forties is an altogether more edgy jazz infusion, where a sparse reed/lullaby opens up to a squalling clarinet bird call, that dissolves into another curious vocal bath. From here on in, the perspective is thrown into a foreshortened free fall, becoming a nest of twisted voice shapes, spinning and slipping over into the ep’s closer Time is my Eye, where the sound carnivorously eats up the space around it like a Wizard of Oz cyclone.
...If you are around the Croft on the afternoon of 23rd (Aug) you’ll have the rare opportunity of catching these magickal vibes live and what’s more the lovely Lacuna will be joining her… maybe a haunted duet will materialise… it’s sure to mesmerize…
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