ECHØVEIL RECORDS

UgUrGkuliktavikt & HELLBERG

UgUrGkuliktavikt & HELLBERG reunite once again for a new collaboration, doubling as the nightmarish soundtrack to a short surrealist horror story you may read below, at your full displeasure. Something is scraping. Something has a fever. Neither appears to understand the idea of a door. Enjoy. And Love. And Rot.

The Sleeper of Oknö

This project and album is inspired by a woman who slept for 32 years, Karolina Olsson. The circumstances surrounding her three decades of slumber are mysterious and strange. Nobody knows exactly what happened. Fourteen year old Karolina was out in cold weather, playing alone, when she suffered a head wound. Four days later she had a terrible toothache. Her family attributed all this to the curse of a witch. She was sent to bed. She then slept for 32 years. During this time she was fed two glasses of milk every day while sleeping. She seemed to be decades younger than she really was. Nobody knows what really happened to Karolina Olsson when she was out playing alone. These tracks are composed in a way that means they go on forever. It's as if they were short excerpts of much larger, longer pieces. They are the strange offspring of HNW and death industrial and musique concrète. -The Sleeper of Oknö

Hemwick

Silent Hill. Its dying streets misplaced beneath a poisonous fog. Derelict buildings breathing through broken windows. Empty rooms that somehow remember who suffered inside them. Rust. Dampness. Fluorescent lights trembling themselves toward extinction. Something dragging itself behind a wall. And beneath all of it: the unbearable suspicion that the town knows you. That it has been waiting. A purgatory built not from bricks but from trauma, guilt, repression, depression, unspeakable fears—the soft internal catastrophes we bury deep enough to pretend they have stopped moving. A kind of Lovecraftian Solaris, perhaps, reshaping itself around the wounds of whoever wanders too far inside. Its post-human abominations crawl from this psychic architecture like Francis Bacon figures somehow taught to breathe. With Somehow I feel I'm not supposed to leave this place..., Hemwick does not merely pay tribute to this universe. He extends it. Another condemned corridor has appeared where there wasn't one before. The album is magnificently desolate: feverish, frozen, deconstructed, deeply wrong. Antiquated dark ambient wanders through carbonized death-industrial machinery; grief-stricken drones dissolve into spectral lo-fi electronics; distant metallic convulsions, diseased frequencies and glacial sound-effects emerge and disappear like things glimpsed through fog that perhaps should not be approached. Everything feels abandoned. Everything feels inhabited. A deliciously hideous work of sonic macabre—music for wandering through places that construct themselves from memories you were never supposed to recover. And somewhere, impossibly far behind you, a door has closed. You don't remember opening it. -Sir Kuliktavikt

Ranseur

This record was recorded live with a lo fi mic. No midi, no masters. So this was an attempt to combine the sound I worked out on the last album Cyprian's Gnome with some of the more technical aspects that I had messed with on another record Umber Hulk Song. For the title track I was attempting to fuse this kind of alien dungeon noise with influences from Demilich, Frank Zappa, and Sun Ra. So this involved some really weird and unstable noise generator settings, but I'm all about imperfections. The track Smokeless Fire is of course influenced by Hindustani music, but if you know anything about Indian music you'll know this is not a raga. So I was also influenced by Scottish Piobaireachd bagpipe music here. When I first started listening to it my thought was something like, what if someone mixed this with Indian music in some way shape or form. That might not make a lot sense, and mixing it further with noise oriented dungeon synth might make even less sense. But here we are. -Ranseur

Violet Stargazer

This is only the beginning... -Violet Stargazer

Cosmic Crypt

On Umbriel, beneath the blackened ice of Wunda crater, the Great Old Ones do not die. Their monstrous, deformed, grinning faces remain imprisoned beneath geological eternities of frozen darkness, their impossible anatomies petrified in positions no living organism should be capable of assuming. Motionless forever, we tell ourselves. Dead because they do not move. Harmless because they do not answer. And somewhere beneath kilometres of ancient ice, something remembers how to move. Perhaps this is the only revelation awaiting us beyond the familiar light of our little world: that there was never any dead space at all. That the darkness between celestial bodies is filled with old dreams, frozen gods, incorporeal parasites and memories belonging to things born before memory itself. That every telescope we point toward the heavens is merely another candle carried foolishly into an infinite abandoned corridor. The Universe is an enormous haunted house floating in the abyss we have mistakenly named Reality. And we have barely opened the first door. -Sir Kuliktavikt

Knifework

Knifework’s first transmission is a short, wonderfully diseased little machine: lo-fi old-school EBM circuitry, rusted industrial muscle, propulsive krautrock synth improvisations, minimal techno hypnosis and strange pockets of ambient nowhere-space, all stitched together with the logic of a malfunctioning dream. Synths crawl, pulse, sweat, accelerate. Rhythms appear from behind concrete. Little electronic ghosts flicker between the machinery. Inventive. Addictive. Spooky. Weirdly playful. And terribly, terribly brief. Before you fully understand what kind of place you’ve entered, Nothing is Coming is already gone—leaving only warm circuitry, phantom movement and a suspicious stain on the floor. A truly superb first apparition from Knifework. -Sir Kuliktavikt

Viskos Apathie

Two disorders. Two wounds pretending to be architecture. Paraphilic Sadistic Disorder. Paraphilic Masochistic Disorder. Viskos Apathie erects two slowly crawling monuments of delirious harsh noise wall—vast slabs of diseased electricity, grinding bone-dust through the teeth of a dead machine. The walls breathe. The flesh becomes static. Something enormous decomposes behind the speakers. No climax. No mercy. No exit. Only pressure. -Sir Kuliktavikt