Spiritflesh – Spiritflesh (LP)

Also known as studio mediums Julian Smith (October) and Boris English (Borai), Spiritflesh is kind of their answer to Coil’s ElpH – a presence that inhabits the wires and circuitry of their well-stocked recording space, and which may be summoned by the most arcane, unconscious and secretive productive techniques. Of course, then again it may just be their imaginations, but who knows what’s real or not these days.

Working at a metaphysical crossroads between Radiophonic exploration and the pharmaceutical experimentation of ‘80s and ‘90s dark ambient on one level, while also nodding to the output of Lee ‘Scratch Perry’s Black Ark as much as Conny’s Studio in the Bavarian forest and the legendary Dome facilities on another, the results speak to a time out of joint and out of place, resonating with a timeless psychoacoustic dread that only comes from endless hours of spell casting at the desk.

The sounds inside really come alive with amplification, projecting a phantasmic play of electro-acoustic apparitions that lurch from and recede into its murky layers. Taking a hold with the gnashing drums and banking noise of ‘Crib’, the LP rolls into unfathomably abyssal electro-dub space in ‘Ever Impeding Doom’, tripping down the labyrinthine arps of ‘Sentient’ before plumbing dankest levels of post-punk dread a la Bourbons Qualk with ‘Beneath The Clouded Veil’, and shoring us up in a hyperreal, heatsick simulacra of tropical no-mans-land with a Ballardian descriptive relish in ‘Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again’.