A Closer Listen
Black House Triangle has given listeners a space in which to ’embrace discord, cacophony, accidents, hypnosis’. Because of its exploration of discord, Id Ego Superego is a naturally-dark design, and an ominous start to the shrivelling of 2019. Listen to it on a darkening afternoon. Or when the clock strikes midnight.
At an hour long, and with three movements occupying it, Id Ego Superego, with its levitating drones and spectral displays, can be found at the end of the street. It’s a dark place, abandoned in a hurry, and its front door is always slightly open, allowing heedless visitors a peek into its pitch-black mouth. It was composed on a Folktek Resonant Garden. Nothing else was used. External sounds do not exist.
Dissonant sounds increase in volume, providing a warning to the curious and a subsequent, brutal attack. Weird sounds are captured through the recording, like spirits on a tape, hissing and gurgling and clanking around in a vacant basement. The Resonant Garden creates an atmosphere of menace and unseen threat. The industrial sounds are bleak, eternally dark. Instead of deleting and disregarding accidental sounds, Black House Triangle retains them. They become integral to the experimental and dark-drone soundscape. In modern music, accidents are usually sour, mistakes to be quickly erased, but accidental sounds help to loosen music; these are tonal questions, and there aren’t any answers as to their source or origin.
It is everywhere and nowhere, a landscape rooted in hauntology. In the revival of folk-horror and the rustling of crops. On the coast and upon the cliffs, in the swaying of the grass and the small, untidy villages that forgot to move on.
Just where exactly do they come from? Why are they here?
With Lovecraftian elements of the otherworldly and the unexplained, of a small, unprotected planet sitting in uncaring darkness and surrounded by malevolent entities we can never understand or comprehend, Id Ego Superego has deep roots, and they wrap like slithering tentacles around the psyche. All three pieces build up to a climax, culminating in a shrieking, sustained pitch and an onslaught of volume. This seems to herald the arrival of something from the outside. It’s never made clear just what exactly this is, but I don’t think it wants to make friends or ask for your phone number. It creeps back into the dark just as quickly as it arrives. It’s an hour of supreme eeriness. If you want authentic chills without fake screams or pints of blood, Black House Triangle will welcome you with open arms. (James Catchpole)
Sat Nov 09 00:01:06 GMT 2019