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Originally released as an extremely limited CD from Peacock Window, the debut album from ghostdroners Caulbearer is now reissued on limited-edition cassette via our Infernal Machines imprint, released in an edition of two hundred copies in full color packaging.
Haunts is the first release from Caulbearer, a new duo that features visual artist Cody Drasser and which delivers some killer dark kosmische driftnoise on this ten-track album. Haunts drifts in on a bed of vast rumbling synth-drones, flecked with coruscating electronic noises and smears of whirling black drift; you can hear traces of classic 70's cosmic music in here, but you can also detect a much more chaotic and abrasive quality that at times feels closer to the dense psychedelic blast-furnace sounds of C.C.C.C. when Caulbearer decide the crank things up. The album is made up of a series of evocatively titled multi-part epics ("The Absorbing Ghost", "Siege Machines", "Shipwrecked Cathedrals"), each one a sprawling slab of neo-kosmische darkness that drifts in out of the abyssal realms similar to those inhabited by Maeror Tri/Troum, offering a similar approach to heavy subterranean drone-loops and deep-earth thrum.
But then the music moves from glimmering washes of electronic light into deeper, more malevolent dreadscapes, like the second half of "Ghost" where eerie dissonant strings seep into the vast rumbling drift, like stray elements of a Bernard Herrman score and abstract guitar shred surfacing across an ocean of black industrial drift. The duo use a lot of abstract electronic noises and sounds throughout their sprawling dronescapes, crafting ascending waves of ominous orchestral roar and distant metallic whirr, their gleaming synthesizers slowly drifting through the abyss amid fragments of percussion that echo and ripple across the muted rumble of distant deep-earth machinery, surrounded by menacing sounds of reptilian hissing and rattling, smears of vague melody emerging through the crashing waves of murky tectonic drift, gorgeous guitar strum blown through walls of over-modulated distortion that continually build into monstrous roars of noisy, dense sonic power. All throughout this disc, Caulbearer's music evokes images of ancient cityscapes disintegrating as seen in time-lapse, continents being swallowed by vast oceans, mountains crumbling into the earth; at it's darkest, Haunts offers a lush, immersive wash of apocalyptic drone music populated with the distant cries of monstrous chthonic beasts.
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