Dana Schechter is the muse behind Insect Ark and music is not her only forte as looking her up reveals that she is also a keen visual artist and animator as well as having ties to various projects such as Bee and Flower, Gifthorse and as bassist collaborating in acts and with artists such as American Music Club, JG Thirwell and Michael Gira’s Angels Of Light. As far as this album is concerned she apparently spent a whole year composing it in her Brooklyn studio and it is one that albeit instrumentally explores “corruption of the natural world” and it’s inevitable and oncoming oblivion. I have to say that on reading this and listening I couldn’t help thinking so far so BoHo in SoHo. Yes it does reek of a certain amount of pretention and has me thinking of struggling artist living in a community of likeminded individuals in a hip place all creating a scene that probably won’t get ant recognition until they at least make their mark by overdosing and dying in squalor. Call me a cynic perhaps but as I gave this album the first few spins it did not do much to really change that opinion and Insect Ark’s brand of experimental instrumental doom struck as the sort of sounds that might have artisans weeping into their skinny latte’s as she played the tunes at the edgy coffee shop within her community.
Luckily the music’s moribund vibe of doom, gloom and inevitability does eventually begin to sink in and as the title track takes form and hums and throbs with a cataclysmic feel I do begin to feel that we have a suitably bleak and barren soundtrack to the end of the world. Bass definition is particularly meaty and that’s no surprise as this is the instrument that Dana started off with, apparently after being offered lessons by Cliff Burton at the age of 15. There’s plenty more though as the sorrowful and chilling sound fills the speakers with some shimmering guitar work and slow tolling drums. It’s in no hurry but as everything feels like it is slowly dying there is no need for it to be as we follow it on a road trodden by the likes of Cormac McCarthy in a literary sense. Luckily it was with images of such apocalyptic rites forming in my head that the music began to speak rather than simply plod to me. ‘The Collector’ makes me imagine someone wandering around the wastelands gathering some sort of macabre trophies from their victim and preying on those survivors they encounter. It’s got a sense of mischievous about it with some quirky spring-like bass groove. Octavia could be the last woman left on earth, I think of men fighting over her and it could even start raining fish as in Luc Besson’s Last Battle. Perhaps I am imagining things in just such a pretentious way as I accused in the opening paragraph or perhaps it is all starting to make sense? It’s a sombre dirge of a track with plenty of shades of grey to its low tolling slow shuffle with guitars splashing like the on-going drizzle of acid rain.
A couple of pieces here act as short interludes compared to main tracks such as ‘Taalith’ that are allowed to sprawl out more with repetition at their heart forming desolate soundscapes. This one could almost be a theme from a moody futuristic Western following the last gunslinger on a trail of redemption surrounded by the carnage of mankind’s downfall. For me though it is the abject despair and loneliness of the last couple of tracks ‘Parallel Twin’ and ‘Low Moon’ which work together in essence to bring things into a funeral etched conclusion where the album ultimately succeeds and does exactly what Dana no doubt intended.
This is really downbeat stuff and not immediate at all, the type of music that you as listener have to be prepared to put work in to get rewarded by it. I’m glad I did that and put immediate thoughts and prejudices aside as this soundtrack to our world’s demise is inevitably thought-provoking, imaginative and haunting.
(7/10 Pete Woods)
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