New York/Portland instrumental duo, INSECT ARK have announced details of their upcoming new album, which will be their first for Profound Lore Records. Marrow Hymns will be released internationally on February 23, 2018 on all formats.
Marrow Hymns is INSECT ARK's first release written and recorded as a duo; it is the follow up to 2015's critically acclaimed album, Portal/Well. INSECT ARK's intensely visual music weaves interludes of fragile beauty with crushing passages of swirling doom, wordlessly painting an ominous landscape.
Schechter describes INSECT ARK as being a voice when words fail to articulate emotions or experiences, a visceral form of communication through sonic submersion. The cathartic nature of the music INSECT ARK creates is a document of life's many complex facets - perseverance and presence, chaos and meditation, birth and decay, brutality and delicacy, and of hope in the unknown. The first track to be made available from Marrow Hymns is In The Nest.
Listen to In The Nest here:
[MA GDPR YouTube] Invalid video id.Residing on opposite coasts, the two halves of the INSECT ARK whole - comprised of Dana Schechter (bass, lap steel guitar, synthesizers) and Ashley Spungin (drums, synthesisers) - converged to record the album with engineer Ethan Donaldson at Mozart St Studios in Brooklyn, NY, over the course of eighteen months.
Overdubs and further writing/arrangements were done after Spungin's return to Portland in the isolation of Schechter's home studio. The sense of distance and vast emptiness remained intact in the songs, built out over many long nights. Marrow Hymns' song themes of displacement, loss, and isolation are personal journals of that time period, as both members found themselves simultaneously experiencing existential crises. However, the album also tells a story of strength and determination, made from the marrow of these two women, a song for all things that struggle to survive.
Marrow Hymns track list:
1. Thelema
2. Arp 9
3. In The Nest
4. Skin Walker
5. Slow Ray
6. Sea Harps
7. Tarnish
8. Windless
9. Daath
About INSECT ARK:
Creating a soundtrack to the human psyche's underbelly, INSECT ARK's psychedelic doom weaves a brooding, textural landscape, a starless night spiked with light and ash. The duo braids together delay-drenched lapsteel, drums, distorted bass & synths to create a sonic mural, both uncomfortably intimate and icy cold. For fans of: Earth, Tangerine Dream, Oranssi Pazuzu, Swans.
Formed in late 2011, INSECT ARK began in NYC as the one-woman solo project of bassist/multi-instrumentalist/composer and video artist Dana Schechter (related projects: M. Gira's Angels of Light, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Zeal & Ardor, Gnaw). Portland-based drummer and analog electronics builder Ashley Spungin (related projects: Taurus/Purple Rhinestone Eagle/Negative Queen ) joined in 2015 during the touring for Portal/Well. Both women have roots firmly in making work with no borders ' they are DIY makers, multi-instrumentalists, gearheads, and visual artists.
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