The bellringer will come forth – wrinkled like autumn earth – and pull the long legs of hanged men like a rope
Under the lost-in-thought grave of clouds, over leaves like bloody tears
Arks carry the heads of decapitated moons to the other shore
Wings torn from ravens line the streets where the dead walk
Into autumn I flow smaller with every step, into fields sown with specters, into columns of dead paeans

This collaboration between Polish-born Smolken of Dead Raven Choir and American drone-athanor Never Presence Forever groans like a rickety tumbrel on its way to the gallows. Inspired by the dead Polish poet, Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski, whose symbolic poems captured the individual tragedy and romanticism was untimely slain through the sights of a German sniper in 1944, Warsaw.

A line of verse marks each agonized track blending the smothering drones and pendent grieving folk instrumentation. Cello sighs openly to mandolin tears under turgid swells throughout the first track, one of the more organic and memorable laments on the album. Fumaroles of oscillating hum and soughing tremolo of distorted cello evoke more saturnine temperament in track two leading the path to noisier forays in track three where shimmering noise and chaotic metalled clangour of stringed instrument further the procession. Vocal fragments from Smolken agglutinate the soft white noise generator of track four before the cavernous finale thrumming with reverberant bass.

Released in a limited edition of 200 in a DVD size hand-made card slip in plastic sheaf.

NYR