Artist: Hecate / Towers At Ries
Title: This Is Not For You
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Relics Of The Eternal City
Hiding to nothing time again: How to explain, let alone review this split. Well the best place to start is the inspiration: The frankly extraordinary weird fiction novel ‘House Of Leaves’ by Mark Z. Danielewski, a tale told in scattered parts, anecdotes and letters about a normal house that developed a stange, impossible and horrifying altered state through a doorway. Or perhaps not. Or definitely is. A novel where the artifact of the book itself, especially if you get the hardback edition, is as important as the words within. A strange object about a lost documentary and correspondence by a most unreliable narrator and tattooist Johnny Truant (yeah this is where they got their name from, fans of the band though I expect you know that). It is quite literally a horrific descent into a never ending abyss that opens up within the confines of a nromal house. Endless stairs and psychological hauntings and… well. It is sometimes what you make of it. But if you make it to the end you will never forget it.
I also read it almost entirely with the Lustmord’s ‘Heresy’ as the soundtrack and that shotgun moment on the album is this tale in a half second of sound
But an album written entirely about it? Well I had to investigate that, especially considering Hecate’s involvement.
So we open up with six passages by Hecate. ‘Ash Tree Lane’ is the beginning of this, and of all things. It is perfect soundtrack music to the unknown – slow, puzzling and distant. Something approaches or something is appearing. Or maybe more, something, some barrier is fading in this place. It has a feeling of encroachment more than anything. ‘1/4” ‘ next is dark, darker, lost and endless murmuring voices doubling and echoing and only occasionally decipherable unless you force yourself to focus entirely upon them. The kind of hypnotic, obsessive that to some will become more and more insane and others more and more comprehensible and I think the latter is far worse a state to attain… ‘5½ Minute Hallway’ is the slow, gradual realisation that the space you are in is not normal, is not what it should be or what it was. The moments to traverse slowly become minutes, the distance longer than it can be and yet it is there and the music stretches out to fill the wrong space perfectly becoming more fragmented and concerning as it goes on.
It is perfectly unsettling, isolating music.
‘Nothing And Nowhere’ I perceive as the moment of cut off, the realisation that you are no longer in the curved and distorted house, but that you have entered another place entirely. It is a frighteningly lonely sound, the voices making it worse. It echoes and seems to stalk you in strange circles. Sounds reach out and then retreat and you flinch but attach to them listen and when you try to return to where you were it has all changed. Here you are truly lost. ‘Exploration #1’ has more purpose somehow, this is deliberate, careful and cautious entering the place. The music has a bubbling sound as though steps cause ripples. There is the sound of the radio, a number station maybe, a contact with the world or a deliberate masquerade. We get strange familiar melodies in a place that should have no connection to the familiar.
The Hecate section ends with ‘ Three Attic Whalestone Institute’. There is almost a sense of if not calm then acceptance and just a hint of a sense of wonder to the music. The the percussion comes in, though not overpowering it is strangely brutal and horrific wrapped up in dark tones and almost voices and unsettling rhythm. It fades and returns even worse, this time it has teeth, a bite to the drumming and the voice is more snarl now, clearly malevolent, relentless, always. It fades but what remains is lost; fragile and sinking into the abyss of the house…
Towers At Ries begin with ‘Known /// Some’. The sound is not jarringly seperate from what has gone before but has its own personality. This begins quiet, like a draught moving slowly through a vast space. I cannot help but think of the endless stairway in the novel, the stairs down and down following the walls and the vast void filling the centre. ‘Call /// Is’ is minimalist. Taps and blips, a hum like some insect I don’t want to see that seems to blossom into something that just tells me is the House itself not something else within it. An echo grows, seeming a space moving towards me rather than the reverse. As though the place is engulfing me and I am not walking into it. It is a strange feeling, disorienting. ‘Air /// Am’ closes Towers At Ries observation on the House Of Leaves. Quiet, dusty in a way that can only lie upon a monolithic place; it is as though we are finally shown the edge of the hint that shows how much a mote we are in this godless eye.
The split closes curiously. A work some little over half an hour in length by and unknown. Noted as ‘Vintage Obscura – The Haunted House Of Song’. Radio show music, crackling 1940s maybe, black and white pictures, that slides into a slow musical description of a vast space. We appear to pass from the House into something cosmic and yet that weird, in this context unsettling radio returns. If you have played the game Control, it worryingly reminds me of that. We are the Threshold Kids now…. A strange and dizzying end to a difficult but richly rewarding work.
If you have read the book, you should most definitely listen to this. If you haven’t, then why not pick up both and feel you mind slowly leak into the crawlspace between what is and what should never be…
Gizmo
♖ ꓵO⅄ ꓤOℲ ꓕON SI SIHꓕ♖ [2026] | Hecate / Towers At Ries
Walking The Liminal Space 