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With La Sposa Dello Stagno, the Crucial Blaze series is proud to introduce the incredibly creepy and disturbed music of Yami Kurae. Hailing from Italy but enshrouding themselves heavily in a mix of Japanese graveyard folklore and musique concrete techniques, this sounds like nothing that I've ever released before. The group feature members of the experimental Italian rock group Slumberwood (A Silent Place/Tannen Records), but this is not 'rock', nor any other easily identifiable musical form. Yami Kurae is the sound of Japanese demons slowly plucking away at ancient Tsugaru-jamisen songs on broken shamisen taut with cat-skin and spun silk beneath a blood-red moon. It is the nonsensical utterances of insane ghosts lurking between tombstones. It is a bizarre kind of low-fi dessicated deathfolk drenched in dissonance, dementia and disease.
Across the twelve songs on La Sposa Dello Stagno, the band weaves together nightmare visions of dead spirits, harshly dissonant improvisations, fractured nocturnal folk, haunted chiming melodies, strange demonic gurglings and brain-damaged caterwauling vocals, the sounds rendered through a murky low-fi recording that is then twisted up and damged by sudden bursts of malfunctioning tape noise and other electronic fuckery, the recording sometimes dropping in and out, or warbling as if we're hearing this music being played back on old decomposing tape reels. At times, this descends into horrific noise, such as the bloodcurdling screams and noise on "Yugami Shita" that flow into a howling cacophony of random banging, dissonant zylophone notes and ghastly moaning, or the filthy crypt-rattling cacophony on "Yugami Yami". At others, the band can be deliciously creepy and mesmerizing, like the goblin-folk of ""Il Ballo delle Teste" and the funereal "Qualcosa Sul Freddo". It is far from easy listening, but for those with a taste for weird, creepy improvisational music, the strangest experimental horror movie scores and the most deranged fringes of outsider ghostfolk, this is intoxicating stuff that has a way of crawling in nice and deep beneath your skin. After listening to La Sposa several times in a row, the image that kept creeping into my head in an effort to describe this strange din was that of a strange meeting of Jandek, AMM and Abruptum gathered together to perform a set of ancient Japanese folk songs while gradually becoming more and more ruined on low-grade opium.
Released as part of our ongoing Crucial Blaze series, La Sposa Dello Stagno is presented in a clear library case with full color artwork, and also includes a twenty-eight page saddle-stitched art book filled with strange esoteric symbols and ghoulish artwork of vulvic abysses, stretched withered talons and other bad dreams, and a set of seven full color cards with additional phantasmagoric art. Released in a limited edition of two hundred hand-numbered copies.
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