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Spectre Folk, "Requiem for Ming Aralia"
My only exposure to Three Lobed Recordings was the Davenport disc, an absolute oddity of found sound recordings and story telling. Pete Nolan (member of bands like The Magik Markers and The Vanishing Voice) is writing that style of music his own way, with sullen guitars and analog equipment enough to give Lustmord an erection.
Three Lobed
Davenport's record is only related to Nolan's project as Spectre Folk by label; there's nothing shared between the two records other than a sense that each performer was trying to write a narrative. Davenport's story was all over the board, jumping from haunted basements to farm houses and old barns; Spectre Folk's is far more lurid. It's contents are pitch-black, singing with all the tremors a man might feel in the presence of killer or a beast. Requiem for Ming Aralia begins with "Tendrils Floating Fastly," a spectacularly electric affair between an old amplifier, an even older guitar, and the sound of keyboards as heard through the ears of Vangelis at a showing of Dawn of the Dead. The two copulate on disc, mingle their fluids pornographically, all the while clinging to the walls and the ceiling, cast a dark shadow on anything in proximity. The music is, simply, effective; the arrangements on this album are elegant without being too complicated. Very basic principles are applied successfully and produce variance enough to be consistently hypnotic.
The second track, "You Showed Me," takes the same production techniques and affinity for the melancholy, but adds Nolan's vocals. They don't interfere with the music at all, their presence being buried in the mix as though this was all a rough take hurriedly put together. The combination, again, of guitar and synthetic recorder is august, filling up all of the record and pushing its space into far, unknown corners. It would be easy to mistake this as the home recordings of some odd ball that lives out in the middle of nowhere West Virginia - the atmosphere is suitably tense and claustrophobic. "Indianana" is an excellent example of how these kinds of recordings can be frighteningly effective at eliciting an ominous reaction in people. C. Spencer Yeh, of the excellent Burning Star Core project, lends his techniques and perspective to this track. At first it sounds like nothing more than ambient noise being processed, until a modified guitar enters the fray and begins to disturb the gently swirling dust. The rest of the album is chopped up between strange performances like this one and Nolan's vocal work, which is equally odd and out of tune. Some feature drums, some feature mangled vocal parts, and others feature perfectly decipherable lines of melody. It's a grab bag of music, but it sounds so damn good together.
This album captured me from the second I played it, all the ingredients for a truly great album are here. It's dangerous, it pushes itself to the edge and back, occupying places both strange and familiar, unusual and beautiful. Again, I'm baffled by the freak folk or free folk association this album has been given, but it doesn't matter so much when the result is actually worth hearing.
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