Enter The Host

Previously heard on Type with his Perdition Hill Radio album (released almost exactly one year ago), New Mexico's William Fowler Collins returns to the dark side with Enter The Host, a new highly limited cassette that finds him setting down his guitar in favour of shuruti box. Once again, droning murk is the pervading force in Collins' work, but there's a restraint and focus at play here that sets this cassette apart from his feedback strewn full-length. The first side soon fires up a gnarled, sustaining signal that's leant depth as Collins cultivates and nurtures various overtones and contextual atmospherics. There's a penetrative urgency to this piece that - despite being derived from a fairly humble droning signal - has a real sense of energy to it, but it's the more sinister second side that makes the biggest impact, dispersing some grim harmonics across a quarter hour piece. Strands of stagnant tonality ripple slowly up until around halfway, when Collins seems to clean up his act a little, consolidating the piece into a simple, organ-like presence that grinds the tape to a close in a shadowy and stealthily modulating fashion. Limited to just 100 copies. - Boomkat

One of four new Root Strata cassettes we got in this week, William Fowler Collins debut release for the label is easily the darkest of 'em all. Trading in his electric guitar for a wholly different instrument, the shruti box (a hand-pumped acoustic drone instrument), Collins nevertheless manages to create a chillingly holistic composition that surges and delves into otherworldly realms while keeping the filtered feedback and power drones of his previous works intact. We have been huge fans of his work since his first release Western Violence and Brief Sensuality, and fans of his most recent dark desert doom epic Perdition Hill Radio released on Type last year will definitely need to get this. "Part I" has more of a cosmic upward momentum as the sped-up pulsations of the instrument seem to shimmer and float toward the sun. It's not necessarily heavenly as the composition seems to lose all air as it simmers and takes on more heat. On "Part II" however, things take a more earthbound turn. The drones grow thicker and more wooly, ringing with denser tones and urgent almost molten tonal pulses and sawtoothlike sparks of white noise. We can't help but think of Icarus, before and after his fall. A truly doomed epic. Limited to 100 copies. It'll be gone before you know it, so don't hesitate! - Aquarius Records