Just started picking up some of the stuff on the Haute Magie label, beginning with this beautifully presented cassette collection for the Finnish occult doompsych/noise/folk band Bird From The Abyss. We had a limited-edition Cdr from this project here at C-Blast a couple of years ago but it sold out so quickly that it never even made it onto the website. This release however collects everything that the project released, a complete document of this projects exotic and narcotized acid-folk steeped in Lovecraftian dreams and strange doom-laden psychedelia, beautifully presented in a chipboard sleeve with a printed insert sheet and track-listing card. Cloaked in shadows and streaked with veins of droning heaviness, Bird From the Abyss draws from Native American and other aboriginal music, early psychedelia and krautrock, the creepier fringes of British folk (Comus, Forest), and the faintest traces of Sabbath's fuzz-soaked gloom.
The first cassette contains all of the material from the self-released Cd-r I and the Starlight Temple Society Cd-r II. It starts up with a mangled din of opium-den flutes and howling guitar noise, a thick narcotized fog of noise that quickly transforms into the sound of deep distorted guitar drone and acoustic strum, a lush folk-flecked psych colored in black shadows and crepuscular glow. The music is mostly based around acoustic guitar, but as you go deeper into the collection it grows creepier and more hallucinatory, breaking into strange slow-motion acid rock dirges where fried-out Texas blues licks suddenly combine with a Middle Eastern processional, and sinister doom-laden bass lines creep beneath the intoxicating hand drum rhythms and sitar-like scales. Clanking metallic percussion rings out beneath mesmerizing strings, sometimes sounding like a midnight funeral march through some sweltering jungle burial ground. Dreamy flute and the resonant sound of a kettledrum echo across a nocturnal wilderness, the sounds of wildlife appearing all around. Sabbathian bass grooves slither around swells of atmospheric Goblin-esque ambience. Washes of grim, colorless doom-drift and clusters of ritual bells. The crackle of towering bonfires licking at the endless blackness. This is richly evocative music.
The six tracks featured on the second cassette include the ultra-rare III disc and some previously unreleased material. Right off the bat, there's a murkier, more nightmarish tone to the music as the fuzz-thick witch-folk of "Neck Deep In Swampy Mud" drifts along, the delicate strummed strings becoming lost among waves of warped analogue synthesizer. The ominous minor key creep of "Powers Hidden" resembles an acoustic horror movie score backed by subtle grinding industrial noises, but then morphs into a killer twangy graveyard blues jam. The other side has one of the best tracks on the collection, "Interlude From Abandoned Well ", a stunning Western-tinged psych-folk piece that opens up into widescreen, sun-baked prairie vistas; that's followed by the heaviest, "Electric Forest ", a strange electronic dirge with huge blown out bass throbbing beneath chaotic bleeps and squeals, shuddering low-end 8-bit doom lurching through a mass of lysergic effects and rudimentary drum machine rhythms. The song "Horrors Of..." brings out a Black Sabbath-like guitar riff that lays down a doomy disembodied groove through the funeral atmospherics, and closer "Seven Gateways Of Clark Ashton Smith" (a loving homage to the legendary Weird Tales author) honors its namesake with another shambling blues number that focuses on a hypnotic guitar line surrounded by the sounds of bodies being whipped by chains, eldritch horrors lurking in the shadows, and the simple clinking of ritual percussion instruments.
Amazing stuff. Highly recommended to fans of the deathcult psychedelia of Master Musicians Of Bukkake, the melted graveyard hallucinations of Yoga, and the black magic narco-folk rituals of Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Time Moth Eye, Hellvete, and Silvester Anfang. Limited to one hundred twenty-five copies.