Landing soon!
Long since presumed defunct Australian duo Hour House return from the wilderness after an 11 year absence with a new long player for Scottish label/NTS show, Are You Before. Their previous two releases popped up on esteemed outposts for the outre Altered State Tapes and Penultimate Press, and while the time away may have changed their chosen label partner, it’s certainly not altered the path they take. The Craags, a brilliantly vivid title may I add, is a woozy, disorienting concoction, operative in similar (liminal) space to that of the blistered DIY psychedelia of Ashtray Navigations and the late night post-everything kaleidoscopic journeying of fellow countrymen CS+Kreme (both by way of Coil, I’d assert). Field recordings and diegetic sounds intersect with leaves-under-foot crunch electronics and folk-y melodies in very pleasingly dissociative ways, creating the sense of songs not so much written but found, between walls, behind doors, on the wind or in the soil, but never really possible to fully take a hold of. These are slippery to the touch configurations charged with spooky riddles. Altered State Tapes described the debut tape as being music for a ‘sophisticated haunted house’, and that mostly holds true here also, a feeling of ghosts in the walls turning the air to a strange electric, phantom power. Over a decade gone and to return with this? Unusual happenings no doubt. In Hour House time isn’t what it seems.
FFO: Ashtray Navigations, Suburban Cracked Collective, CS+Kreme, Coil, Beequeen
