Bathetic

HIGH AURA’D – ‘Sanguine Futures’ LP
Sanguine Futures opens with a slow craw; the burden of winter crawling across your back, reaching around your throat — grayed hands with frayed nails grip tight and pull you into an isolated realm of blissful purgatory. You’re only two and a half minutes in and creatures are crawling out of the shadows and your breath is hanging heavy. John Kolodij has crafted an auditory trip into territories that feel untouched, unmoved by human hands, packed with ethereal and earthly blackness; a deep and dense wood, a coal-black night, tarry centers where you find the solitude of 100 year old weeping willows. This is not an album crafted to simply listen and reflect, this is heavy slabs of flesh and blood, moaning, bending, warbling to life, groaning out and sucking you in. Shades of Scelsi and Penderecki collage and wind into spacious suites, built atop a foundation of heavy Köner-styled concrete. It’s beautiful, but there’s a lingering fear of the unknown, and you could lose your leg at the next step. It’s breathtaking and beautiful, but you’re always careful not to trip too far into these skeletal treescapes. There’s deep, rusty veins running to the heart of Sanguine Futures, pumping a dark crimson fluid, driving the machine to keep humming. There’s a clicking film projector casting images onto a sheet of ice. We feel it, it’s thrust into the very energy that motivates us; a feeling of love, of life, of solace, of hope and pain and fear and joy and sorrow. This is a span of sounds and tones and textures, weaved together as a lifeforce. An album this isn’t, an entire affair, spanning our first to dying breaths. Heavy, spacious, frightening, and welcoming; all at once. On Sanguine Futures, Kolodij was aided in arranging by Type Records’ John Twells, who also produced and mixed the record at Seventh Door Studios in Massachusetts. Trumpet by the renown Greg Kelley. James Plotkin mastered. Simon Fowler did the beautiful artwork.

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