Darwinsbitch - Ore

Genre: Drone, Psychedelic
Label: Digitalis Industries

My Space

Buy

Ore, Marielle Jakobsons' first darwinsbitch full-length, presents a remarkably assured exercise in electro-acoustic dronescaping. Using sine oscillators, violin, piano, bells, and other acoustic sounds, Jakobsons, who also plays in the duo Myrmyr (with Agnes Szelag) and Date Palms (with Gregg Kowalsky), stitches seven settings into an uninterrupted, forty-six-minute mass of malignant miasma. The opening piece “Iron Lake” emerges from glutinous fog, the track's stillness reinforced by a phalanx of humming electrical drones and the saw of a violin. It's the latter's presence that gives darwinsbitch's music a character that separates it from that of other sound sculptors. Deploying it judiciously, Jakobsons uses its moaning cry to humanize her desolate and gloom-ridden landscapes. In similar manner, a harmonium occupies the forefront of “Silver Sphere,” gently illuminating its mournful ambiance with crystalline tones before the album plunges into a darker, subterranean zone of nightmarish rumbling (“Flames in Blackened Sky”). Descending deeper, sine tones rub dissonantly against one another in “Raven's Dissipation” while the high-pitched whistle of the violin haunts the background. The exhausted sounds of industrial machinery, bells, and a broken piano dominate the thirteen-minute closer “Shadow Leaves” with the violin theme heard in “Iron Lake” re-appearing to bring the album full circle. Jakobsons shapes the blurry tendrils of the eleven-minute requiem “Iron Lake” and the album's other six pieces with an impressive degree of patience, control, skill, and delicacy. Though understated by design, Ore nevertheless impresses as a tour de force.