This is not a record that unfolds gently, beginning with what could equate to a sonic jump-scare from its very first second. ‘The Temple (Hymn)’ opens with pounding percussion, like a malevolent force hammering at the door, demanding entry. From there the track builds into an insistent march, snarls and stabs of distorted atmospherics giving the whole thing an ominous inevitability. A swift and unavoidable fall into what’s to come, the harsh and brutal world of Myths.

If ‘The Temple’ is the descent then follow-up ‘Depth’ feels like an arrival. The track is a slow build masterpiece, all ominous percussion and ghostly groaning drones. Here the drums take a backseat as the ambience gusts and moans like alien gales across the scorched earth of this new landscape. ‘Invok (Pure Kult)’ follows suit, steeped in a dreadful unease, its percussion like the sound of your own heartbeat jumping in your ears in the ominous too-quiet. ‘The Truth’ goes even further, perhaps the record’s subtlest track which plays something like the abstract wind sounds that give so many David Lynch scenes the lingering sense of the strange and powerful.

Myths’ longest piece, ‘Feral Fauna (Severed Myth)’ arises from the previous track with the patience and rhythm of a ritual, ghostly synths snaking from the centre of a shifting ring of rattling percussion. It might not pack the same primal punch as the opening track, but it’s the moment that best captures the essence of the record. A ritual rite, a dark and primitive hymn, a celebration or summons to long-forgotten ancient forces.

Myths is out now and available via Bandcamp. Alternatively, head to Lost Tribe Sound to get the entire subscription series.

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Cóiste Bodhar, the new record by The Phonometrician out now on Lost Tribe Sound, is named after a similar Celtic folktale, this time from Ireland. The Cóiste Bodhar is a death coach that was said to move through a town or village, driven by a headless coachman and his four black horses. To see or hear this visitor was a terrible warning, a portent of death for either the witness or a close family member. The album takes inspiration from these tales to explore both the concept of death and our relationship with it, the strange combination of inevitable mundanity and arcane superstition and the role of art and ritual in every culture’s attempt to explain and cope with it.

The recording project of Mexico City-based composer Carlos Morales, The Phonometrician creates dark, folk inflected ambient/neoclassical music that fits neatly alongside other Lost Tribe artists such as William Ryan Fritch, Western Skies Motel and Alder & Ash (aka Adrian Copeland, who guest stars with cello on the track ‘Death Rides a Horse: Part II’). Morales constructs his compositions from a palette of acoustic guitar, Venezuelan cuatro and synths, the stringed instruments’ cyclical melodies moving above a collection of low-end groans and stomps and thuds, all of which add a foreboding depth and weight. This ominous, uncanny atmosphere is set right from the beginning, opener ‘Death Rides a Horse: Part I’ embodying the approaching coach as it gathers momentum, like a cloud of dust in the distance growing larger as it’s thrown up by those four black steeds.

But if ‘Part ‘’ sees the death coach on the horizon, ‘Death Rides a Horse Part II’ sees it arrive in all its terrible glory. A piece all galloping hooves and quick snorted breaths, Copeland’s cello screaming in an awful hum that sends the townsfolk fleeing to their homes and locking their doors. The sound of fear manifest as an otherworldly visitor, and whether this visitor is real or imagined is beside the point. Because it is the result of thousands of years of ritual and superstition, of genuine emotions of terror and grief.

The funereal march of ‘Death is a Woman’ is a patient slow-burner, making its way unhurried towards its inevitable conclusion, while ‘I See You’ pairs signature tumbling melodies with distorted gusts and howls, like an alien wind across some scorched plain. In comparison, ‘The Light’ feels like something of an aftermath, a misty dawn-time calm descending with the faint solace of weak morning light. It’s just one moment on the record of something like peace and is indicative of how The Phonometrician refuses to simplify its complex subject matter. Death and its surrounding customs are handled with far more than the obvious sense of doom. So while Cóiste Bodhar has its bleak moments, there are feelings too of acceptance, a renewed vigour for life, and even wonder at the sheer unknown that we will all face eventually.

And this is the record’s ultimate strength. The Phonometrician avoids empty platitudes and refuses to offer simple answers, swapping faux wisdom for the instinctive and the ritualistic. In doing so he captures the darkly magnetic pull of the folktales that have been told by people the world over, and both laments and celebrates the eternal mystery that we are no closer to unravelling today. Because no matter where we are from, or how far we feel we’ve come, death is unyielding, and belief in its weird portents will continue to be general.

Cóiste Bodhar is out now via Lost Tribe Sound and is available from The Phonometrician Bandcamp page.

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And this effect is no accident. Translated from Dutch, ‘t Geruis means “the noise” or “the murmur,” and everything the project does is an attempt to capture and explore those intangible sounds and feelings that we all experience but cannot elucidate. Those often fleeting but undeniable sensations that sit right in the texture of things—like the joy of spring sunlight or the sadness ingrained a cool autumn breeze.

The music is therefore as much about listening as it is about creating. About immersion in the rhythm and lyricism that’s all around us, waiting to be heard. “Music hides when we are not looking for it,” he describes. “There are very many found melodies in these pieces, a gift from trees, wind, machines and people. A fluttering piece of music we could easily miss.” ‘t Geruis draws on these melodies directly, utilising the natural world almost as another suite of instruments, weaving recordings of animals and plant life and weather events in alongside deteriorating drone loops and sombre piano. The birdsong of ‘langoureuse’, the honking geese of ‘gracieux’, even the ghostly echoed wails of ‘verzengend’, all sounds that surround us but are often obscured by our human noise.

The overall feeling is hard to describe accurately. There is a sense of melancholy, yes, but melancholy as the close cousin of nostalgia, of inspiration. There is something affirming about Slow Dance on Moss Beds that is strangely familiar yet impossible to put into words. In the same way a painting can be more evocative than a high definition photograph, the album captures not the world we “see” everyday but one we feel when we take the time or when conditions align just so. See how ‘iets kostbaars’ (tr. “something precious”) sounds gentle and pastoral, like soft sunbeams on rolling hills, or how ‘entre les arbres’ captures that almost tactile non-silence of a quiet forest. The murmur is always present, always calling, and thanks to ‘t Geruis we can take the time to stop and listen.

Slow Dance on Moss Beds is out now via Lost Tribe Sound and you can get it from the ‘t Geruis Bandcamp page. For discounts on all the albums on CD or digital, you can also subscribe to the Salt and Gravity Series via the Lost Tribe Sound Bandcamp page.

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Despite the tumult and uncertainty of the last eighteen months, Lost Tribe Sound persevered with Built Upon A Fearful Void, a subscription series that released 16 new albums between June 2020 and present. Releases from the likes of Claire Deak & Tony Dupé, Several Wives and William Ryan Fritch‘s Vieo Abiungo project formed a rich and varied response to a very difficult year.

Ever prolific, this month sees the start of a brand new Lost Tribe Sound subscription series—Salt and Gravity. The current schedule will see it unveil eight new full-length albums between now and February next year, with what the label promise to be “some of the most texturally pungent music we’ve ever released… the good stuff that makes your whole body hum versus just rattling around inside your head.”

The first release in the series is The Rise and Fall of the Melting World by Arrowounds, the experimental project of Athens, Ohio‘s Ryan S Chamberlain. The album forms something of a continuation of the previous two Arrowounds releases, forming an unofficial trilogy which explores Chamberlain’s role as a carer for a loved one being treated for cancer. While the previous two were claustrophobic and suffocating, The Rise and Fall of the Melting World feels deceptively spacious, as if Chamberlain is able to fill his lungs with air for the first time in too long.

Which is not to say this is a record of blue skies and sunshine. Badness lurks in the shadows, the dark waters of The Loneliness of the Deep Sea Diver puddle and pool and threaten to rise. More general concerns encroach across the six tracks too, reminders that personal crises do not insulate us against global ones. As the press release puts it “[the] overall climate of anxiety [in] the world… threatened to darken and pollute the soundscapes during their creation.” Opening track ‘Antarctica’s Spherical Anomalies Leave Residual Trails’ is the perfect example, pairing ambient recordings of birdsong with a leaden oppressive atmosphere and great rumbling cracks like the sound of icebergs calving into the ocean.

Chamberlain says The Rise and Fall of the Melting World is intended to explore the “aftermath and resurfacing” following the previous two records, and this sense manifests sonically. Songs like ‘Insect Dream Surfacing’ are thick with a shadowy surreal logic, but have pinpricks of lightness too, while ‘Maps to Where Poison Grows,’ feels quite literally like sailing through a tempest. But even as the wind roars, wooden beams creak and threaten to break, the vessel remains above water, refusing to succumb to its murky green depths.

But the sense of re-emergence is perhaps strongest on ‘Caverns of the Behemoth.’ The track is submerged in a briny gloom, but nevertheless emerges into a hidden grotto where there is air to breathe and the mineral drip of stalactites offer a monumental beauty. It captures something intangible that is present across the record, something about perseverance, about survival. It’s comforting only in that it exists, in the inherent rejection of the alternative that sits pale and limp on the kelp-strewn seabed. The most significant element is the systolic percussion, the constant steady pulse that rings in the ears as a reminder in the darkness that even this wreck is survivable.

The Rise and Fall of the Melting World releases on 27th August and you can order it now from the Arrowounds Bandcamp page. You can subscribe to the Salt and Gravity series via the Lost Tribe Sound Bandcamp page.

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The album is “an expanse of impressionistic tonal color,” Lost Tribe explains, “where elliptical patterns of horns, reeds, bowed metals and the ecstatic chatter of unfamiliar percussion cluster, rise and decay.” Fritch weaves this panoply of elements into something peculiar yet organic, conjuring an experience at once menacingly ominous and lushly evocative. You awaken in the shambling fever dream of ‘Balkanize’, amygdala visions of a reeling forest canopy illuminated in stark torchlight. The reedy flutes join a malarial chorus of clicks and clacks that circle in a wicked dance, and woodwind groans like laboured lungs, a faraway melody snaking like candleflame in the night.

The album continues in this vein, Fritch again demonstrating his ability to call forth worlds of his own making to create music that defies any conventional description. ‘Unfulfilled Promise’ grows in intensity towards a cathartic midpoint, while ‘A Cold Calculus’ unfurls in a lazy writhing motion, skittering percussion scuttling from the corners like paranoid thoughts. Remaining relatively subdued throughout, it’s part somber, part sinister, but fades into a white glow that feels neither, resisting the urge to throw off its shackles and erupt in noise.

The title track is a journey into an unknown, perhaps toward some strange destination deep in the folds of the brain rather than anywhere physical. Galloping percussion rattles across a wash of tone and texture, giddy horns mewling and whispering from within the murk. Beyond the halfway point there’s a hush, the whole track falling away to a tribal shuffle and oppressive negative space. Then the far-off moan of a ghostly choir approaches and suddenly you’ve been turned around, find yourself right back where you started.

Closer ‘Empty Heroics’, the record’s longest track at just over ten minutes, proceeds on its own path. Encapsulating the entire album, it shifts from the near-devotional choral quality of its opening to menacing stomps of sound and beguiling negative space. By the halfway mark bedraggled percussion has shuffled in, a junkyard beat that ebbs and flows in unlikely rhythm, an orchestra of rattles, thuds and scrapes that Fritch reanimates and directs to his bidding. Nobody else makes music quite like it. Here’s to ten more years of Vieo Abiungo.

At Once, There Was No Horizon is out 16th October on Lost Tribe Sound and you can get it via the William Ryan Fritch Bandcamp page. Alternatively, subscribe to Lost Tribe’s Built Upon a Fearful Void series to get the album as one of 15 releases over the coming months.

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With a double William Ryan Fritch album (Deceptive Cadence: Music For Film Vol. I & II) due later this spring, Vieo Abiungo was resurrected to fill a gap while fans, particularly those subscribed to the We Stayed The Path That Fell To Shadow album series, waited patiently. Fritch gave Lost Tribe Sound access to his considerable archive of lost and abandoned albums, and like intrepid explorers in some faraway tomb, they blew away the dust and cobwebs and found some real gems. The resulting album, titled The Dregs, showcases these songs in all their uncanny glory, a collection that “buzze[s] with the same raw and texturally unpredictability” that Fritch has made his own.

Despite the dichotomy between projects, Fritch’s aims with both are similar. He uses Vieo Abiungo as a vehicle to transport the listener, creating what Lost Tribe describe as “music that leaves its tattered edges proudly in place, acoustic instrumentation blended seamlessly with dirty mechanics, timeworn sound worlds rooted in the muck and mire of the present.” The Dregs is no different, a tangled cacophony of ramshackle percussion and viola de gamba, joined by an array of horns, marimbas, vintage keyboards, mbiras, and Tuareg-style electric guitars. The result is akin to a North African fever dream, an opium den of swirling poly-rhythms and genuinely surprising percussive shifts.

From the ominous shuffling stomp of opener ‘Fronting’ to the expansive heat-stroked white-out of ‘A Branch Gave Way’, the album remains unpredictable and illusory throughout. To add to the swirling surreality, Lost Tribe’s Ryan Keane has also made a video for ‘Cobble Together’. Taking footage from the Prelinger Archives, the video is made of gauzy overlaid layers of old black and white images, a dream-like collage of yawning hippos, tribal masks and convoys of both camels and 4x4s.

The Dregs is out now on Lost Tribe Sound and you can get it on cassette or download from the William Ryan Fritch Bandcamp page.

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The duo, comprising of Roberto P. Siguera and Attilio Novellino, moved across Europe to record the album, including stints in Stockholm, Manchester, Munich and Turin. In addition to the orchestral scores, composed by Siguera and performed by Luton Sinfonietta Orchestra, both musicians also contributed a variety of instruments, including classical guitar, ancient Russian zither, piano, electric bass and guitars, e-bow, pedals and electronics. And this diversity has the desired effect. From the ominous distorted thumps that see out opener ‘Mount Kenya Imperial’, to the ghostly pulsing and mournful strings of ‘Sodermalm Phantom Cab’, the album is enveloped in an evocative and often unsettling atmosphere. At times it’s spacious and sad, others strange and surreal, a claustrophobic fever dream that unfurls mirage-like across the folds of your brain.

The album’s shortest track, ‘Eternal Now’ is slow and subdued, led by ponderous piano and a gentle ambience that threatens to grow like a cumulonimbus before dissipating as quickly as it arrived. But it’s a portent for the rest of the album, a sign that storm clouds (meteorological or otherwise) are always on the horizon.

Not that every song provides a cathartic release. ‘Black Concrete’ is taut and reserved, holding significant power in what it leaves unsaid, while ‘Night Avalanche’ feels like the onset of a blizzard, dark clouds obscuring the moon as snowflakes tumble like ash and the distant peaks begin to creak under the extra weight. ‘Submergence’ begins sparse and crystalline, developing into something twitchy and unsettling, a latent madness veering just out of sight, while ‘Ice Museum’ is as cold and cavernous as the title suggests, with the funereal solemnity of an empty cathedral.

Final song ‘Silent Fireworks’ also feels grandiose, but on a much smaller scale. It’s jaded and elegiac, like a late afternoon breeze shifting a lace curtain in an abandoned home, the owner long dead but the weight of history sitting heavy as the dust on the possessions within. It’s a very strong end to an album that keeps surprising to the last, music with such depth and feeling that it feels almost tangible.

You can get Black Box Animals on CD and download via Lost Tribe Sound on the Luton Bandcamp page.

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Well, try telling that to William Ryan Fritch. We’ve featured several of the California artist’s albums over the last year or so, and have admired just as many from a distance, with no discernible dip in quality despite his rapid-fire production. He makes music to fall back in, to follow into the murk and marvel at where you’re taken. Fritch’s newest release, Behind the Pale, his latest on Lost Tribe Sound, is no exception. Listening to a new William Ryan Fritch feels like returning to some strange land, familiar only in its oddness and pure artistic expression.

But Behind the Pale also has other qualities. It’s an album created during a period of great turmoil in Fritch’s life, as his daughter was born 3 months premature and then had to remain at the hospital for weeks on end. As he describes, “The ecstatic and cataclysmic personal event of having a child was thrust upon us sooner than we could have imagined. Blinded by the radiance of the limitless love and the enveloping clouds of abject fear there are no senses that are attuned to guide you but the ones that say simply ‘Onward!’”

Things are dark and ominous at the beginning, the A-side furry with worry and disorientation. ‘Never is it Enough’ drops the listener into a fog-shrouded landscape, an unintelligible moan sounding from the murk. But soon the track gains a certain clarity, and Fritch’s vocals come through surprisingly clear in an undulating groove. ‘Depths of Our Minds’ is all anxious twitches and black syrupy vocals, while ‘Sheep in the Fog’ sounds like The Antlers in a sleepwalk, Fritch’s vocals rising to a falsetto as the instrumentation creeps and thuds around him.

‘In Our Blood’ is something else altogether, a glittering jam that’s rich with elegance and romanticism. And the track seems to signal a change, as follow-up ‘Greedy Things’ sounds similarly bright and grand, infused with a sense of what Fritch describes as a “wounded but assured hopefulness”. Not that Side B is suddenly full of sunny pop songs, there are still shadowy corners threatening to leak closer, but there’s definitely a different feeling, a glow that illuminates the tracks from within. The man himself puts it best when he describes the emotion behind the sensation. “Much remains uncertain”, he says, “but in the small moments basking in the untainted love and goodness of your child, the future for the first time seems undimmed.”

With Behind the Pale, William Ryan Fritch continues his work as one of the most singular and prolific musicians at work today. This is an album tempered in the flames of real emotion and created with a verve that is simply beyond most musicians. As Lost Tribe put it: “Like all good art, it does its best to translate complex, abstract emotions into palpable and compelling expression.” Best of all it requires almost as much of the listener, revealing itself slowly over numerous plays, a counter-punch to the immediate sugar-rush effect of playlists, and a reminder that there’s always a room for real, finely-wrought art in our lives.

Behind the Pale will be released on the 20th of October on Lost Tribe Sound.

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Copeland’s main tool is a cello, which, with the help of a loop pedal, paints pictures that are vividly affecting. The music of Alder & Ash is strongly influenced by the natural world, and brings with it all of the beauty, complexity and horror that can be found in nature. As the bio on his Bandcamp page states, “Alder & Ash is a counterpoint of two extremes. The music lies in stillness, introversion, and penitence. It lies in violence, cacophony, and angst.”

The entirety of Clutched in the Maw of the World has this balanced atmosphere, from the quiet beginning of ‘The Merciless Dusk’, with its stark and sombre cello like a breeze on some distant North Sea shore, to the ominous ‘A Seat Amongst God and His Children’, which begins with vaguely martial percussion, joined soon by the same wheezing cello. But things take a turn for the strange before too long, the instrumentation blown-out and distorted, moving from ominous to downright unsettling, like the manic brain patterns of some volatile and war-crazed leader.

This is a recurring pattern with Alder & Ash. Like much of the Lost Tribe catalogue, their music is undeniably atmospheric, with a widescreen, cinematic feel, but this is not just some soundtrack to rugged vistas. Yes, on the surface it’s stark and elemental, as old as the landscapes that inspire it, but it becomes quickly apparent that it’s weirder than that. There are as many nods to experimental drone and doom metal as there are to classical convention. Think Warren Ellis meets Colin Stetson, beauty and abrasion laying side by side. This is neoclassical aimed through the prism of a fever dream, like an anthem for some ancient Nordic race.

‘The Great Plains of Dust’ is a great example of this, the reverberating march of its percussion like some terrible army approaching mirage-like on the horizon. This ominous pursuit falls away in the middle section, a period of quiet paranoia, the guitar a mere scorpion scuttle. ‘Seeds of a Sallow Earth’ is altogether more reserved, while ‘The Merciful Dawn’ winds and wends like a cool wind across a blue-grey morning. The final track ‘The Glisten, The Glow’ again lacks the harsher edges of some songs, instead closing proceedings with a sense of grandiose melancholy, like viewing a scene of apocalyptic ruin dappled in dewdrops and moonlight. It’s a fitting end to a big, complex and challenging album, one where wonder and dismay stand side by side, and where beauty is always present, even in the strangest and stormiest moments.

You can get Clutched in the Maw of the World via Lost Tribe Sound and from the Alder & Ash Bandcamp page. It’s available as a download or limited edition handcrafted CD, which can be bought in a bundle with the other Alder & Ash album, Psalms for the Surrender. If two albums aren’t enough, consider joining the Lost Tribe Sound subscription series, A Prelude to Decline, which will get you discounted prices and all kinds of other goodies.

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The release defies simple description, with folk and drone meeting a modest grandeur that would be at home in the neoclassical canon. Like all Lost Tribe Sounds releases, it’s music that’s meticulously planned and executed, dense compositions that are enmeshed with themes and narrative arcs despite their wordless nature. The vibe is difficult to pin down – at times mystical and hallucinogenic, others downright ominous. As Cartwright describes, “Recorded & mixed over a period of two weeks whilst feeling the heat (both literally & politically) I opted for a threatening, even apocalyptic EP title. Saying that, I think most of these songs can offer up a tranquility to counteract the gravity of these uncertain times, a calm inside the eye of a storm.”

The title track introduces this thematic juxtaposition, and, despite the beautiful guitar work, darkness is never far away. Behind lurks a sound like the blare of a siren, as if warning of incoming terror, a tornado or air raid.

‘Seen As a Black Road’ bubbles with rustic guitar, coming across as sparse Americana until synths rise beyond like some spectral light in a desert sky. ‘The Good River’ wheezes and breathes its way to life, the percussion a steady pulse in the background, the 12-string guitar morphing into a mournful dirge. To my mind ‘Returnee’ sounds autumnal, the guitar dipping and swirling like a cascade of golden brown leaves, while ‘Overgrown Courtyard’ is dark and pensive, the rightly wound lead guitar tumbling over foreboding drone. The tape closes with ‘Passage Of Old’, which sounds morosely grand and somehow more European than the other songs on the album, like the theme of some beleaguered monarch watching his kingdom burn from a hilltop.

You can get I Can See the Smoke now on cassette or digital download from Lost Tribe Sound, via the Seabuckthorn Bandcamp page.

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