Antlers In The Fog, To Will The Spirit In Transit
An Owl's Gift
Moss & Memory
Denned Earth / Decay And Rebirth
Woodlore Communion
The Leaving Trees

"Moss & Memory" is Chet W. Scott’s third full length work as Ruhr Hunter, one that has come a full decade since 1996 to this collection of telluric drones and cryptogamous soundscapes. In the face of modern humankind’s paring of nature, "Moss & Memory" evokes an atavism and reawakens the animism, which despite being overlooked by a technologically advanced society still pervades all essential beings but truly finds home where nature is unfettered. Gneissic mysticism, as layered as time is immemorial, "Moss & Memory" serves as postern to the wonder of the microcosm as it relates to the macrocosm, an embrasure through an isthmus of modernism and materialism.

The instruments subsumed into this album are too numerous to list here (though detailed in the liner notes of the album’s packaging), but range a gamut of acoustic instruments to organic samples of animals and the breathing of seasons, the oscillation of day and night. Susurrous drones shiver the undergrowth of the grove, eld and numinous, guitars meter languid melodies and dulcimer rills thread the boscage. With all bar one track pushing beyond ten minutes, there is a sense of changing landscape, of “journey”, as Chet W. Scott so enunciates on the very first track, signaling the cycle of life and death. While the boles of trees pillar a vast canopy, the vicinage constantly changes, guitar, piano and percussion swell into post-rock instrumentation then owls hoot to the tintinnabulation of dulcimer in the eddies of night. Terrene acoustics constantly drag the listener into fecund soil, hollowed animal horns and thunder chime together with throat singing shamanic observances as the forest endures, rain and congeries of birds and insects proscenium for ritual. Ruhr Hunter’s ambience is far from cathedrals of despair or the sealed caps of rotting cities, preferring to walk naked that chapel of life.

Glass Throat serves a delicately aesthetic package with the design by Rachel Boaz-Scott, an oversized digipak on textured earthen granulated card, sunken and embossed calligraphy arabesques the gatefold, coloured with runes and the limned forms of ravens. Besides this slim loam one can also purchase "The Den", a limited edition box of earth, teeth, feathers, stones… collected and presented as burial for the "Moss & Memory" digipak, and gathered from the rain forests of the Pacific North West, to celebrate Ruhr Hunter’s ten year anniversary. However, one would best check import requirements for shipping of earth around the globe.

NYR