When Silber media scouted for collaborators on yet one more mp3 release from their mother ship website, the response from groups both on and off their label to participate was so overwhelming that us lucky peeps now have a 30 track long album, and it’s all completely free!
This, plus the added bonus of artists appearing such as Attrition, Tara Vanflower and Small Life Form (to name a minuscule portion) and you have not just a great album but a crowning achievement in what not for profit music making can accomplish.
Starting with the heavyweights of the label, Sounds of Halloween opens with lycia and their track, ‘The Dreaming Body’, an ethereal and ambient track that through fuzzy feedback static jumps into a blissfully gothic darkwave sonata, followed not too shortly by Bryce Eiman’s tribalistic, drum focused ‘Itaint’, brimming with IDM sensibility and neo-pagan themes. Glissade meanwhile provides their usual shoegazer fuzzy post rock sound to maximum effect, creating a tune that has the harrow and disquiet of a forgotten seventies ghost story.
But where the album really finds its Halloween feet is with The Undermasks’ ‘Have You Seen the Ghost of John?’, a diminutive one minute and twenty track that echoes of old folk pioneers, Pentangle and Comus, perfect for this dark festival. As too is Planet Cock’s ‘Haunted House Song’ that takes a B-movie Psychobilly twist to the Halloween festivities with a dirty bass line and a kitsch keyboard whine that creates a trick right out of a horror themed sexploitation movie.
The Wades on the other hand, while not particularly Halloween inducing, none the less provides a blissfully psychedelic stoner track, perhaps reminding us that for most, Halloween is about party, beer and the devil’s weed.
Attrition of course is a punctuation mark of complete fineness within the epic scale of the album and definitely a skip to track if ever you hear one. Their industrial pioneer status well and truly evidenced with a loud and menacing hum mixed with whispered and vague children’s monologues. Place the addition of a haunting piano piece and you have one of the more effective tracks on the album, a stand-alone work.
Second only to Attrition’s effort on the album is Tara Vanflower’s ‘Three Witches’. Obviously influenced by the early industrial recordings (and indeed her own career in Lycia), Vanflower has found herein a track that within its warped soundscape is an intriguing fascination that draws the listener in, like one would perhaps cautiously sample the disturbing excitements of a sideshow for instance.
Remora too, another great noise group within Silber’s rogue’s gallery, while not providing a lengthy track, creates enough atmosphere in their 48 seconds long ‘A Few Notes from a Grave’ to chill you to the bone.
Needless to say this review has only skimmed the surface of what is a huge album and while those foolhardy enough to download the low kbs versions of these tracks will come away disappointed, those putting the effort in over Samhain and beyond will find a thirty track wonderland of atmospheric, creepy and spiritualizing sounds that fit perfectly the aesthetic of All Hallow’s and the winter days that have yet to come.
