Corum :: Web Of Midnight (Psychic Sounds)

Even as the music voyages across the celestial empyrean of space, he opens up new territory,  diving downwards into the underworld where the mysteries of Orpheus (poet, musician, prophet) are encountered in their cavernous depths. Here the Orphic lyre is a synthesizer. Here it is a collection of psychotronic modules who route electricity to the point where it tingles with lucid scintillation. This is a third ear music awakening the inner senses to subtle vibrations.

Translucent sonic threads connect across vast distances

Corum’s Web Of Midnight traces an astral cartography and psychic linkage between the psychosexual laboratories of Wilhelm Reich’s Orgonon in Rangely, Maine all the way to the Mount Teide Volcano on the Canary Islands. Different facets of the album were recorded in these charged locations causing the music to erupt with an orgasmic and volcanic force, a subconscious blast and discharge of etheric earth energy channeled through shimmering electronica.

On this outing, Corum, the musician and visual artist who also runs the esoterically fertile label Psychic Sounds, presses his voice, gong, wind synth bell, and a shell into various samplers, sampling keyboards, synths, and uses field recordings from Orgonon and Punta Brava to create a soundtrack for ritualistic ambient journeys.

Before this album was ever recorded, Corum was bathing in the radiant glow of an Orgone accumulator during his meditation sessions. He had built the accumulator from plans purchased at the Rangeley, Maine Orgonon Lab. This lab was Wilhelm Reich’s final home and workplace and continues today as a museum and outpost for getting his important work out into the world.

When I asked Corum about his connection to Reich’s work and how he ended up recording at the lab, he said, “When the pandemic happened in 2020, Wilhelm Reich’s  grounds were fairly empty of visitors with the exception for the caretaker,  and I reached out to see if it would be possible to stay for several days in the lodging, and I set up a small recording studio with an interest in the fresh atmospheric properties, imagining his large scale Orgone chambers and weather experiments being conducted and what that would feel and look like as a contemporary sorcery, and some ideas I’d been working with of topographic funneling, the idea of observing pulsatory movements of atmospheric properties.  There’s also a variety of stories about UFO sightings around there so the grounds seemed ripe for inspiration for the themes to be explored of fusing nature / cosmos, and its unseen knowledge.  Areas like this hold a certain mystery and energy I’m interested in.”

The music made there can certainly be heard as a benevolent sorcery. The residue of Reich’s experiments with Orgone, or what might as well be called the life force (prana or chi or pneuma in cultures that haven’t given up on the idea like the mainstream industrial west has done) percolate from the lab and into the sound studio.

Babbling voices that speak in the babel tongues of diverse holy spirits bring the listener into a sacred communion with the spiders of the void, spiders who weave their webs beyond the mauve zone in a realm of outerplanetary darkness. As the record spins so does the silk. Translucent sonic threads connect across vast distances in the dreamtime where they each receive stellar vibrations, now penetrating the earth from the deepest recesses of space.

A soundtrack for inward travel, destinations unknown ::

This space music could be considered dark ambient or kosmiche, and like the distant cosmic reaches of the universe it is suitably “out there” to please the discerning tastes of brave psychonautic listeners. Seekers who have previously used Corum’s music as fuel for their own remote viewing reconnaissance missions will find this outing as entrancing as his other explorations. Web Of Midnight is a soundtrack for inward travel, destinations unknown.

Another part of the record was recorded in the Canary Islands during the Mount Teide (Mount Palma) volcano eruption in 2025. When asked about the timing of that Corum explains, that, “We were scheduled to play Kraakfest in Belgium, and during the mixing of these sessions (from Orgonon in Maine), I received an invite to record on some tracks with Monopoly Child Star Searchers  (Spencer Clark of The Skaters / Pacific City Sound Visions) at Lagoss‘s studio (home of Discrepant Records) in Tenerife. We had played together in the Pacific City Nightlife Visions Band, and Typhonian Highlife, and he wanted me to lay down some tracks on Monopoly Child Star Searchers. While in transit to there, the Mount Paloma exploded!  The smoke and molten fire could be seen on Palma, the next island over.”  

“The “Apparition of Teide'”  track was a result of solo recording in and around Pacific City Studios in Punta Brava attempt to capture the spirit of the activity of oceanic & volcanic vapor apparitions drifting through Tenerife.  While on the volcanic mountains peak,  the shapes of huge wafts of smoke shifted slowly over the horizon of the Teides black rock crag I was on, my mind thought about the presence of the Teide, who is the volcanic demon spirit according to indigenous Guanche lore, became an expression felt.

Also, very coincidentally enough, Jon Lomberg was showing the painting We Who Became One, that the Web oO Midnight cover detail was taken from, at the Tenerife science center. Sadly I missed the exhibit by a few days.”

Even as the music voyages across the celestial empyrean of space, he opens up new territory,  diving downwards into the underworld where the mysteries of Orpheus (poet, musician, prophet) are encountered in their cavernous depths. Here the Orphic lyre is a synthesizer. Here it is a collection of psychotronic modules who route electricity to the point where it tingles with lucid scintillation. This is a third ear music awakening the inner senses to subtle vibrations.

The cover artwork for the album was painted by Jon Lomberg, a close collaborator with Carl Sagan, and the artist who worked as design director for the Golden Record included on the Voyager spacecraft, that most epic of messages in a bottle. The sounds and imagery presented here are another kind of transmission to and from the cosmic ocean in which we all swim. Listening to this album is another way to become aware of the cosmos within us, and the mysterious way distant locations on earth can be connected together through the applied science of sound.  

Web Of Midnight is available on Psychic Sounds. [Bandcamp]