Up From the Underground Dendera Bloodbath's "Xaoate Ep"

This was brought to my attention and I tend to let a lot of my Atliens music go unacknowledged around here because it is rarely dark or dynamic enough for me. This starts off certainly being dark enough. It reminds me of the time I ate a bunch of mushrooms and thought I was on the moon.Funny enough I was playing music in my friends basement when that occurred and this album was recorded in the Basement of Bad Decisions so this leads me to conclude that basements are the portal to the moon. There is a very lunar feel to this. The album is a self professed chaos majick spell, the first ritualistic sounds occur on the second song "Legacy" that throws samples behind the sonic experiments transpiring here. This is an instrumental release, so what I listen to on things like this or the Be the Hammer album I reviewed last week, is how the space is being filled. You can not talk about the music directly using terms like melody or dynamics since that is not really the point of something that has more in common with performance art, though there are times when the sound manipulation can be likened to a project like Negativeland.


The drone has well placed synths layered over one another with a pulse deep within the mix. "Soul Mate" pretty much just drips out of the previous song. The vibrations here are creepier and sound like a dirge that might be played at a funereal on Mars."Triumph" ebbs from the drone of "Soul Mate" . It is more minimal using blips of sampled noise to paint a sparse landscape of a barnyard set in a haunted hell. Give a hundred aliens a typewriter and they might have come up with the intro to "Riches". While this might be an invocation of chaos majick, I feel their are more sub -genius like forces at work, because it takes me back to when I would drop acid and listen to the Church of Sub-genius's hour of slack. There are some sparse synth melodies of sorts set back behind the ghostly murk of shadow filled sounds.

If you are looking for a soundtrack to warm yourself up for the second coming of the X-Files, then here is the soundtrack for you. I am not sure why I keep returning to alien imagery when I listen to this album but my synesthesia keeps bringing me back to neon green, a glowing neon green set against black when I hear this , which are also colors I associate with aliens.  This is very a-sexual music, similar to how I envision aliens without having genitals. Rock music is very genital fixated so this is a palate cleanser from that . I am not sure if these descriptions make sense , but this album is about making sensations and not making sense.