Descending before it ascends, The Loneliness of the Hollow Earth Explorer, Vol. 2 finds Arrowounds guiding the listener through ancestral caves and bioluminescent mines, a solitary, ritualistic journey where subterranean sound becomes a passage through hidden worlds, ancient time, and the haunted inner depths.
Descending soundscapes of the Hollow Earth
To attain the heights of experience, the depths must first be plumbed. Those who would seek to voyage into the stellar realms of the heavens above must first walk down into the ancestral caves. Arrowounds (aka Ryan S Chamberlain) has returned with volume two of the Loneliness of the Hollow Earth Explorer, a record made for those seeking the bioluminescent ore to be found in the old mines. What starts off as a brief reconnaissance of a crack noticed in the earth, turns into a maze-like trip across branching tunnels and into hidden passageways. The music leads me into the sacred underworld of the Hollow Earth. It’s a lonely journey because the passages are narrow. This inner expedition can only be taken alone, though ghostly apparitions may appear as guides.
The trip starts with a metronomic pulse that has me entranced as I visualize the opening to a moss and fungi covered cave. As the ears listen the astral body is able to slip away into this interior. There is a moistness to these cracks and tracks. The walls of the caves are wet with the seepage from the rain trickling down from above. I follow the sound along underground rivers and streams that carved out the limestone and other geologic formations making this place the playground of gnomes, dwarves, and faceless beings who lurk in the shadows behind the pillared stalagmites. Another movement in the long piece starts with a slow and low throbbing bass line that acts like a headlamp into the gloom beyond. Liminal fuzz and what sound like sped up tapes or keys heavy laden with vibrato shimmer in the humid air. This transforms into an even wetter reverb, of what sounds like flopping fish in another movement. Are these lifeforms gestating in the dark earthen womb of the mother? What do these blind creatures feed on, I worry, and wonder?
Ritual Shoegaze from earth’s depths ::
Having passed through this pulse quickening zone, I am rewarded with access to further mysteries. Shamanic drums pulse in dripping rivulets of tectonic space. Inviting drones vibrate my bones after crawling up through my feet. The music is grounded in the earth, and grounding. The further down I go, past the fear, the further stabilized I feel. I just need to remind myself to watch out for precipitous ledges on this journey. The darkness and the echoes change my sensory perception. Not all is what it seems, or sounds, and there have been close calls next to chasmic abysses.
In my review of the first volume of these paired albums, I coined the genre “Ritual Shoegaze.” It’s still apt here. Ritual shoegaze takes the esoteric and occult focus of “ritual ambient” and uses it alongside the wall of sound created by guitars and distortion. On this one I hear the bass and lower tones coming through most clearly, more than distinct guitars. But it is more important what the sound does to me, than how the sound was made. There is a distorted murk that surround all the sound in a lizardly and wizardly haze of dust awoken from the floors of the subterranean realm make me think there could be an entire band playing a music of hypnotic regression. If only I could make them out in the sonic darkness that buries everything beneath layers of effects.
Cave travel is geological travel, and geological travel is time travel. This record makes me not just a lonely explorer of the depths, but of vast ancient time scales that make a mere million years, and our puny millenniums, our even shorter lives, just ticks on Earths much vaster clock. Here the sounds slip us into Silurian currents. But just as you reach the end of the trip, a faint flicker of milky way light glitters down from the shafts, recalling me to the world above, and the heavens beyond them.
Loneliness of the Hollow Earth Explorer Vol. 2 is available on Lost Tribe Sound. [Bandcamp]
