Cloama and Blutleuchte
From Wasteland Mausoleums
New Old Sentinel
Two European noise outcasts/warlocks, Cloama (no stranger to a good collaboration) and Blutleuchte, have teamed up yet again to cast aside their usual aesthetic interests and craft an album of filmic, yet strangely violated and broken ambiance. Equally enamored of running water, treated pianos, doppler pulses, moonlit forests, European traditional/folk music, and shifting tectonic plates as they are the usual palette of distortion/MORE distortion, From Wasteland Mausoleums coaxes harshness from even the most innocuous of source material.
“Blackbird’s Den” collages together the briefest of synth whispers with lost, monotone vocals and random but spare percussive swirls into a thing of seamless, devotional beauty. “The Tower Covered In Frozen Ectoplasm” sounds like music from the first Castlevania, after the game cartridge has been left out in a rainstorm, or the sound effects tape from a haunted house from the 1970s — Hammer Horror meets lo-fi necessity — fading into some Gothic guitar noodling. “Spirit Risen Amidst The Shadeless Destiny” is altogether more exotic and earthy, raising impressions of an Eastern opium den or an ecstatic rite, with Asian guitar lines sounding like they’re being picked with broken shards of mirror, and Arabic-style vocals, bent and misshapen, all underpinned by one gorgeous, keening synth note. “Archean Quartzite Hammer” turns scummy, lo-fi punk/black metal bashing into a solemn pagan incantation as distortion pedals and sound levels are folded, spindled, and mutilated. “Passage Over Possessed Grave” is silent film soundtrack fodder, in a theater overrun by African killer ants. “Lord of the Equinoctal Fountain” and “Arcjaic Waters Enshrine the Seer” are both intriguingly built around a percussive “spine” of field recordings of running water with rivulets of liquid running down overloaded sheets of doomy guitar and screeching machines.
Similar to the global excursions suggested in Dead Voices on Air’s last album, Download’s more ambient fare, and a more adventurous SunnO))).
New Old Sentinel: http://www.neuroscan.org/nos
