★Eighth Tower Records
Hauntology In UK
“Hauntology” is one of those difficult philosophy words that seems designed to exist on the margins of our consciousness. The term originates in the work of the notorious Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and is first mentioned in his book Specters of Marx, which was originally delivered as a series of lectures at the University of California in 1993. In Derrida, the concept of hauntology is very much a political one. But the word "hauntology" has gained the currency it has today…
The Black Stone – Music For Lovecraftian Summonings
Someone claims that H.P. Lovecraft did not like music. He may have suffered from undiagnosed musical anhedonia, a disorder where a person gleans no pleasure from music or sound. The first story that comes to mind when one thinks of music in the “Lovecraft universe” is The Music of Erich Zann (1921). The music in The Music of Erich Zahn, is the kind of frenetic, and frightening music he had always experienced: [...] It would be useless to describe Erich Zann's music on that horrible night. It was…
The Beyond - Music Inspired By The Lucio Fulci Death Trilogy
Lucio Fulci, born in Rome in 1927, remains as controversial in death as he was in life. A gifted craftsman with a sharp tongue and a wicked sense of dark humor, Fulci achieved some measure of notoriety for his gore epics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Abandoning his early career as a med student, Fulci entered the film industry as a screenwriter and assistant director, working alongside such directors as Steno and Riccardo Freda. Fulci quickly established himself as a prolific craftsman adep…
Dust of Human Race
Raffaele Pezzella's Sonologyst made it to these pages a couple of times (Vital Weekly 1225, 1194, 1134 for instance) and here is a new one, with a quote from Ovi on the cover "Wherever you look, there is nothing but the image of death" (well, in Latin), which, perhaps, says something about the darker nature of the music. Maybe it is a sign of grim times, but in his previous work, Sonologyst wasn't a bundle of laughs either. As I noted previously, you could think that Pezzella's is gothic, but it…
Musick From Madness
**200 copies** Musik From Madness is a collection of previously unreleased material, recorded between 1986 and 1990. Schloss Tegal is an American ambient psychogenic sound project duo consisting of Richard Schneider and Mark Burch, that has existed since the 80s, recording conceptual albums that explore extreme and sometimes morbid subjects. The name comes from a castle outside of Berlin that was one of the first psychiatric hospitals. The castle was destroyed and the patients exterminated durin…
Demonology In Dante's Inferno
**200 copies** Dante's Inferno, widely hailed as one of the great classics of Western literature, details Dante's journey through the nine circles of Hell. The voyage begins during Easter week in the year 1300, the descent through Hell starting on Good Friday. After meeting his guide, the eminent Roman poet Virgil, in a mythical dark wood, the two poets begin their descent through a baleful world of doleful shades, horrifying tortures, and unending lamentation. During their journey, Dante and Vi…
Drone Islands - The Lost Maps
**200 copies** "The second volume the Drone Island series, Drone Islands - The Lost Maps, continues Eighth Tower Records' deep explorations into the realm of "droning music". Alongside drone ambient music masters like Troum, Rapoon, Schloss Tegal, Autopsia, and well known dark ambient projects like Alphaxone, Taphephobia, the volume presents experimentalists such Simon Balestrazzi, Trauma Terrestrial, as well extremely interesting young musicians like Gaspar Peralta. Solid realities and new prom…
Incantatios From Ugarit
In process of stocking. **100 copies** "The dark jails of the city of Ugarit are only lit by distant torches that light up the maze of streets, houses and tangled temples. From there too, we hear the awful ritual, incantations and other terrifying spells dedicated to Baal. The new Moloch Conspiracy album sets up atmospheres inspired by different collections of liturgical and religious texts found in the ruins of the city of Ugarit in Syria. The civilization of Ugarit expresses a very strong reli…
Operazione Piovra: The Lead Chronicles
**100 copies** "Mortar Devotions is the new collaboration between Nona Et Decima (Manuele Frau, Nicholas Pucciarelli) and Aleksei Tsernjavski alias Огни. From the Finnish capital, Helsinki, the trio gives life to Operazione Piovra: The Lead Chronicles, a work inspired by the darkest pages of Italian history, in particular the "years of lead" and the war between the mafia and government. The five tracks are conceived as if they were the soundtrack, divided into parts, of a film or a television se…
In Tenebris Ratione Organi
**100 copies** "The organ: in popular association, both the ‘God Instrument’ and the ‘Devil Instrument’, a purveyor of myriad densities and shades of massed tone, elemental fire and inexhaustible air, capable of inspiring wonder, awe, profound mystery and sinister darkness. The essential nature of the organ, as a synthesizer layering sound upon sound, is controlled by an alchemy very similar to that which generates electronic music. The natural hybridization of these phenomena allows one to expl…
Witchcraft & Black Magic In the United Kingdom
**200 copies** "Witchcraft has had a fascinating and turbulent history in the UK. Through periods of persecution and prejudice, it has survived to the present day and many people still practise the tradition now. From the 7th Century onwards, attitudes towards the practise began to change. During the medieval period, fears over so-called ‘black magic’ began to emerge. This referred to the power of witchcraft to bring harm to others. An association was also drawn between witchcraft and the devil.…
Drone Islands - Land Rising
**200 copies** Pitchfork Media and Allmusic journalist Mark Richardson defined drone music thus: "The vanishing-point music created by drone elders Phill Niblock and, especially, LaMonte Young is what happens when a fixation on held tones reaches a tipping point. Timbre is reduced to either a single clear instrument or a sine wave, silence disappears completely, and the base-level interaction between small clusters of "pure" tone becomes the music's content. This kind of work takes what typicall…