Deeper Than Space :: Animal Ghosts (Silent)

Blending ritual electronics with field-recorded mysticism, Animal Ghosts reframes the rave as a portal linking Neolithic spirituality, industrial culture, and a future-memory of ecstatic release.

A future memory of an eternal afterparty

 

On my way to the chill out room at this spectral rave, I get distracted by a worm hole I see in the corner, made from pulsing lights and cascading sounds, like a waterfall of noise. I step into this portal to the otherworld and find myself in a spacious cavern littered with the bones of animals, and as I glance about, I see there are animals painted on the walls of the chill out cave, which is also a reverberation chamber.

The electronics on the first track, the title track, are a bridge to the Neolithic. Back in the heyday of the industrial culture scene, there was a lot of talk about “modern primitives” and “techno shamanism.” This album seems to be an update on some of those strains of thought. Rain sticks and soft synths get liquified in a sonorous swirl that allows the spirits of the animals to dance with the electrified ritualist inside the cave, before they flit out of its opening into the air on a luminous wild hunt.

As I listen I am reminded that I also might still be in an abandoned warehouse, taken over for the evening by Dionysian revelers. Heavy left field techno chord stabs punctuate the bed of hissing wind and spitting rain that make up “mouse mouth moss moth.” There are holes in the ceiling of this space that let in the moon and starlight. It lets in the rain that pools on the oil-stained concrete floor, now glowing with its own chemical iridescence, forming another portal that I fall through into a world of glittering light.

Dawn is coming in this “rave heaven” on the astral plane. I’m coming down from the high of life but waking to a new reality, sensing that everything I knew before was only shadows. What I thought was spectral is now all the more solid in its fluidity. What I thought was the solidity of the material realm, was just an anchor for the soul in a temporary form. “Rave heaven” is a future memory of an eternal afterparty.

Sound as a doorway between worlds ::

Further into the trip it’s time to take a “breath.” Overtone drones emerge from a musical mandala seemingly designed to entrain the brain and aid meditation. The heavy synth chords are back, bridges once again to higher transcendental worlds, all propelled on the carrier tone of a mantric hum, a vibrated om. A drenched snare hit mirrors and replaces the chord stabs from “mouse mouth moth moss” serving as a focal point so the second attention can be more readily accessed.

Drifting back out into the noise fields on the outskirts of the party, a flutter of fractal oscillations emerges from a soft bed of rustling noise. If this “shaker” were a gourd it would be full of seeds, whose dormant life rattles in the darkness of winter, stirring up imaginal vortices of sound whose ripples drift out from the epicenter of the ancient metamodernism of this festive gathering on the fringe and into the wider world. These are metaphysical sounds whose force does not even need to be heard to be felt, though intentional listening solidifies the sonic architecture being formed.

The seeds are carried further on the breath of wind that is “prayer.” The city is waking up with car horns and bells and animal meeps and whelps, alongside the crinkle of junkyard rats moving beneath the metal. The whisper of birdsong carries these prayers further up as the fog covering everything dissipates amidst snatches of conversation, an awakening from the fog of misty dreams. This ambient construction of field recordings and abstract sounds is a prayer for the morning, a prayer for the spectral companions whose spirit lives are hidden just inside a portal, roaming around the same cities as we do, just on the other side.

Animal Ghosts is available on Silent / Dope Computer Music. [Bandcamp]