Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be some serious Lovecraft reading going on within Newcastle’s underground music scene at the moment. In addition to Bong’s frequent tributes to the Old Man of Providence, the same city now brings us one Joseph Curwen, a producer of monolithic bedroom eeriness whose recording name could well have been chosen with an eye to the fact that there is ALREADY another Newcastle band performing as Charles Dexter Ward. I’ve not spent a lot of time in Newcastle, but on the basis of this plus the vast amount of good music seemingly germinating there at the moment, the thought of heading up there to rent an unfurnished attic and start cracking the spines on a few paperbacks momentarily seems mighty tempting.

But anyway: Joseph Curwen’s bandcamp self-description of “HP Lovecraft inspired Post-Rave Hauntology Rituals and Radiophonic Occult Synth Horror Soundtracks” clearly pushes enough try-hard buttons to seem instantly suspicious, and may indeed prompt those with less tolerance for these kind of aesthetic clichés than I to do a sick in their mouths and swiftly turn their attention elsewhere. For the remainder who do indeed harbour a bone-level love for some or all of the notions he’s crammed together in that little sentence though, it is difficult to argue with the titanic sonic doorstops that comprise ‘Shunned House’s two digital ‘sides’.

Admittedly, Curwen’s initial methodology, focussing as it does on recording of ‘90s dance music slowed and echoplexed to point of abstract oblivion, sounds so similar to that employed by V/VM / Leyland Kirby’s ‘The Death of Rave’ and Tim Hecker’s ‘Ravedeath 1972’ that it’s tempting to mark this guy down as a mere copyist trying to muscle in on an already thoroughly marginal & tightly delineated aesthetic gimmick. Stick with it though (because admit it, you LIKE this thoroughly marginal & tightly delineated aesthetic gimmick, however snotty the tone of this review), and the sheer weight and breadth of the sound Curwen builds up across 88 solid minutes of foggy cloud chamber nightmare-haze is actually pretty beguiling, moving beyond the tiresome ‘haunted house’ puns of the piece’s initial concept as he builds up seemingly endless layers of sonic detritus into a blinding, maximalist reshaping of his source material into a jerry-rigged cathedral of amplified silence and alien, angelic ghost-vocals that in its heaviest passages recalls nothing so much as the mass guitar epiphanies of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca. Transcendence through fear and alienation would seem to be the game here, at least to a certain extent.

The opening ten minutes or so of the second half is my favourite bit here though - a stunningly malignant piece of work, providing just about the densest and chilliest masterclass in spectral chain-scraping, subliminal attic-creaking and rolling graveyard fogbanks one could ever wish for. Subtle it ain’t, but the cliché is laid on so heavily it’s actually pretty unsettling, like the sound design for a blow-your-mind ultimate horror moment in a ‘Ring’-type movie looped across infinity. Later on of course, the inevitable angelic vocal tones fade in like a beam of light from the heavens for that full, blissed out euphoria/funeral rave-death effect – which is nice and all, but it’s the proper ‘Legend of Hell House’ kinda stuff I like the best.

Basically, if you’ve ever watched that film and wished that Brian Hodgson & Delia Derbyshire would stop pussyfooting around with their ‘electronic treatments’ and just go full on ELP arena tour with the whole thing, ‘Shunned House’ is quite possibly the record you’ve been looking for. Just don’t go rinsing it too enthusiastically when there are other family members around, or you’ll be back in that unfurnished attic with the paperbacks before you know it. Actually, could be a plan…. I wonder how Newcastle rents are looking these days…

Listen and buy from Joseph Curwen via bandcamp.

Labels: best of 2014, Joseph Curwen