Arrowounds delivers the music, magic and mystery, solidifying the esoteric energies emanated from the underworld into the medium of this album. It’s a perfect soundtrack for getting lost in the labyrinthine depths waiting to be discovered beneath the surface of everyday Ohio and Kentucky.
Shifting subterranean terrain
Ohio. The heart of it all. Place of mystery, place of magic. Former capital of North America when the Moundbuilders and Adena civilizations built their ancient earthworks that still inspire people with awe today. Home of the Loveland Frogman, of Bessie the Lake Erie monster, of a bigfoot type known as the Grassman (and you don’t necessarily need to be smoking any to see him). It is also the home to Hangar 18 at the Wright-Patterson Airforce Base where the remains of the alien and alien tech from the Roswell UFO crash were transported and kept so the military could reverse engineer the gear they salvaged from the flying saucer. Numerous other UFO sightings have been reported in Ohio’s Miami Valley. These may or may not have anything to do with the Air Force base and their secret operations. Not far from Ohio, and connecting it via a bridge that has now collapsed and been rebuilt, are the haunts of the Mothman and the Men in Black who were seen prowling around Pt. Pleasant, West Virginia in the aftermath of the sightings.
But that’s not all. The cryptids, UFO sightings and traces of former civilizations, just scratch the surface of the mysteries of Ohio. Dig a little deeper and you’ll soon cross the river into Kentucky and find the opening to the cave that leads the seeker downwards on a pathworking into the areas rich esoteric underground. Much of it literally is under the ground, in the Hollow Earth. Just ask the I-Am-The-Man from John Uri Lloyd’s proto-science fiction novel of alchemical illumination and underworld exploration, Etidorhpa, one of the inspirations for the album at hand. The book was illustrated by one J. Augustus Knapp, an artist from Cincinnati who went on to be the illustrator of Manly P. Hall’s splendorous elucidation of occult lore, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Knapp later designed a tarot deck with Hall. This music also recalls the Hollow Earth theory of Ohioan, John Cleves Symmes Jr. and his disciples.
Later still in the 1960’s and 1970’s the magical revival kicked off by Eliphas Levi back in the 19th century that was taken up by such initiates as Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, W.B. Yeats, and many others was in full sway. A loose cabal of pagans, polytheists and practitioners of Crowley’s Thelemic magick formed in Cincinnati, and centered around the (oc)cult band Bitter Blood Street Theater, later evolving into the bardic Owen Knight’s Blacklight Braille project. From Bitter Blood the emanations of their occult practices were reified down from the astral light and into the local music scene. Now here is some more music from the Athens, Ohio based Arrowounds. It might best be called “ritual shoegaze sludge,” and I mean that in the best possible way.
Ritual shoegaze sludge ::
Going down these rabbit holes and into the mysterious caverns of the underworld can change a person forever. Arrowounds has bravely strolled into the breach, and given seekers a soundtrack for their exploration of these subterranean secret societies and the labyrinthine passageways beneath the surface of Ohio’s flat farmlands and rolling Appalachian foothills full of geologic wonder. Perhaps those Arrowounds are made from the many flint arrow tips that can be found in the fields around here after a long rain. Certainly, they can be found in places like Athens, Ohio, home of Ryan S. Chamberlain, the person behind this mysterious project.
The title track is a fifty-minute longform piece of mutated post-rock and droning noise that reverberates as if off the walls of a troglodytes cavern. It contains nine distinct segments and begins with a glum resinous murk of scratchy thrums and pounding toms. In the third movement the traveler heads to the Great Serpent Mound for an undulating ceremony. Along the ways of this shifting subterranean terrain, he traverses a psychonautic psychogeography of bent guitar lines that can be followed like a cord into the heart of the maze. All are bathed in the crystal light of softly glowing noise covering everything in washed out distortion and fuzz. Oscillating stalagmites and stalactites are coated with wet spiral curlicues sprouting out of an array of scintillating effects boxes. An undergrowth of hallucinatory fungal sludge permeates the whole.
An undergrowth of hallucinatory fungal ::
The section “Across the Subterranean Mirrored Ocean” is a beautiful evocation of one of the chapters of John Uri Lloyd’s Etiorhpa. The water is coming up from above and down through the karst of carbonate rocks, limestone, to form underground rivers that flow to the underground sea. This piece is a gem shining below the waters, a refracted wordless shoegaze hymn, whose textures reflect the starry heavens above, the starry heavens that emerge once an underworld traveler finds his way across the ocean and back into the light.
The pathway of the Hollow Earth explorer may be lonely, because so few people on the surface have plumbed the depths below, but there is always the lull of cave crickets. Beyond that there are always the spirits, the inner guides and teachers who take the explorer ever deeper into the cave. Synthesizer tones and gently reverberated percussive loops skitter across the granite and limestone as I navigate through the music, like a bat using echolocation.
Undertones as dense as submerged clay mud permeate the loose strings weighing down the bottom end in “Caverns of Amplified Dreaming” recalling the god Asklepios, and the Asklepions where people in the ancient Greek world would go to incubate dreams and receive healing from the sublime deity. This is the meeting ground of shoegaze and ritual ambient in the playground of a specific bioregion and its peculiar mythos. It’s a great place to dream. In this kind of dreaming, I may even find a stairway that takes me all the way to unknown Kadath.
The Bandcamp release breaks out three edits from the longform piece for individual listening after the epic piece. I’m not sure why the whole album wasn’t done as individual tracks, making it a bit easier for sound mixers to throw a downloaded part of into a dark ambient setlist. I do like having the entire album sequenced together in one long track. This is something Robert Rich and Steve Roach have been doing on their releases a lot, but it is also nice to be able to choose whether to listen to a segment, or just a single section. That aside, the music itself is fantastic, and the subject matter is dear to my heart.
Arrowounds delivers the music, magic and mystery, solidifying the esoteric energies emanated from the underworld into the medium of this album. It’s a perfect soundtrack for getting lost in the labyrinthine depths waiting to be discovered beneath the surface of everyday Ohio and Kentucky.
The Loneliness of the Hollow Earth Explorer Vol. 1 is available on Lost Tribe Sound. [Bandcamp]
