Artist: Demonologists
Title: Rakshasa
Type: Album
Label: Aesthetic Death / Liquid Death
If you have a liking for what I like to simply call ‘difficult’ music (noise, ambient weirdshit devoid of traditional structure and other genre tags) you do occaisionally wonder if anyone other than yourself gives a damn. But then you remember that labels like the amazing Aesthetic Death exist, and projects like Demonologists so you’re not alone.
I was only relatively recently introduced to Demonologists via their weird, disturbing collaboration with Ord (see ) but they most definitely along with Haiku Funeral became an outlier band I looked out for. An ‘industrial blackened noise / horror electronics duo from Indiana, USA – intense, unsettling sounds since 2008’
So here is ‘Rakshasa’. If you’re a D&D player you probably read that name and think of a psychotic Tigger, magical lunatics with tiger heads. Or maybe the Kolchak TV episode. But in hindu mythology they are a race of magical, often violent beings. Eaters of human flesh. Destroyers of rituals.
In music…?
We get a slow, creeping opening with slightly wayward, mournful saxophone and the crackle, his and drone of background noise seem to bend the sax out of shape and render it akin to something in pain as a subliminal rhythm pushes through. We get snarls next, a dark undertow dragging you in as spoken word sample rattles and rants and no I have no clue what its from but its a gleeful but malevolent warning. It ploughs through discordant passages, words sampled and resampled and looped into a a cacophony of insanity. Its as though you took your drink, unaware of what had been dropped into it and the night lurches into a distorted soundscape of nightmares.
It is always difficult to review such albums. But I need to because this is where music goes on the outer reaches of listening. Static and interference and bleeps and the schrieks of the analogue airwaves gone haywire, voices and insanity. No verse, no chorus, no conventional ‘music’ but it will, if you open yourself, lead you through a place you may or may not wish to enter. There are moments where the presence of a persistent rhythm and pulsing electronics make you believe there is some order here but it is not one you will be comfortable with accepting perhaps. There is a sense of invasion of the psyche throughout, something forcing its way into your own reality and the intrusion is not benign.
The passages actually short in nature too which is perhaps not what some might expect; rather they add to the cut-up feel of this work, jagged edges and ideas come upon you swiftly or unseen.
Its the intensity and the sense of impending violent carnage just a veil away that gets to me. I spend forty minutes ensnared and cut, left and right, by the voices which snap and bite all the way through this as the architecture of sound offers no way out until, suddenly echoing tunnel like sounds and vocals with a triphammer tempo out of Tetsuo: The Iron Man simply halt.
The attack ceases.
Layered, looped and constructed with psychotic focus, ‘Rakshasa’ is another album by this superb duo that is absolutely worthy of a psychonautical journey. May you beliefs keep you safe.
Gizmo
https://www.facebook.com/demonologists
https://www.aestheticdeath.com/releases.php?mode=singleitem&albumid=6701
Walking The Liminal Space 