Horned Relic Self : Column Of Shadow

The latest to rise from the crypt over at Library Of The Occult is a curious one. A drone-heavy, haunted Berlin School affair from a project called Horned Relic Self. Not much information about who’s responsible for these haunted sound excursions, but when it’s this good you can forgive a few details missing.

Column Of Shadow sounds like a score to a film you’d find playing at 2am on a Saturday night, on a channel you can only get between the hours of midnight to 5am. Pastoral scenes interspersed with blood rituals, lurid desires, and psychedelic landscapes in burnt, autumnal shades. It’s folk horror, but more accurately cosmic folk horror set in alternate dimensions. Visions of off-world colonies set adrift into a merciless, black unknown; haunted tomes for haunted dreams.

Horned Relic Self’s Column Of Shadow works its way into your brain slowly, with ambient sounds and distant melodies colored in dusk’s long, growing shadows. Slow-building pieces that work to lull you into complacency; gauzy tones and foreboding sounds that work to put you under their spell. Ether-soaked sounds and melancholy moods for the night’s darkest secrets.

9 songs cover the length of Column Of Shadow. Songs like “At The Steps To Stars” and “Voice Touch” hint to everything from Pino Donaggio’s work with Brian De Palma to Colin Stetson’s Color Out Of Space score. Melodies coalesce with drones and a slight touch of melancholy. “Main Theme” is light and sultry with a hint of sadness as its piano melody is accompanied by synth strings. It’s sublime. Title track “Column Of Shadow” is somewhere between ambient soundscape and New Age doom, eliciting visions of darkening skies and questionable contemplation. The synths here have an 80s feel to them; think Charles Bernstein’s iconic work on Nightmare On Elm Street and combine it with death cult rattles and desert doom tent revivals.

These songs, and in this album, work to place you into another time and space. Cosmic vibes mixed with visions of cobblestoned streets and pastoral settings work together to create this psychedelic, anamorphic feel. One angle you’re staring at the sky from some autumnal field, while the other you’re in some alternate realm staring from a rock burning through space at breakneck speed. Dizzying, lulling, and a touch of doom just under the surface. The contemplative beauty of “Bell Tower Solitude” walks hand in hand with the droning, definitive conclusion of “Glance Macabre”.

Horned Relic Self’s Column Of Shadow is a wonderfully dark, atmospheric, and chillingly satisfying album. Perfect for late night listens and autumnal walks through paths not quite bright enough to sway thoughts from the macabre.