Aaron Dilloway

In Bhoot Ghar: Sounds of the Kathmandu Horror House, Aaron Dilloway transforms a chance encounter with an amusement‑park ghost ride into an extraordinary document of sonic decay. Recorded on a mobile phone during multiple visits to the “Bhoot Ghar” (literally “Haunted House”) inside the Kathmandu Fun Park, the piece reconstructs a real environment almost too surreal to believe—blown PA speakers sputtering with horror samples, mechanical apparitions creaking into motion, and the brilliant dissonance of human laughter cutting through the din. The resulting album is less a composed work than a found situation rendered musical by the intensity of listening. The recordings unfold between entrance and exit: the path soundtrack, recorded from a distorted outdoor loudspeaker, crackles with the overdriven echoes of South Asian horror television themes; inside, motion sensors trigger brief bursts of noise, broken motors, and shrill screams. Each moment is both documentary and hallucination. Dilloway’s perspective—half participant, half observer—turns the frailty of consumer electronics and decaying mechanics into an accidental symphony. What might have been dismissed as amusement‑park kitsch becomes, through his ear, a portrait of entropy and improvisation.

Interspersed throughout are vignettes that expand the experience beyond the haunted house itself: the chaos of bumper cars that “go way too fast,” the rhythmic thrum of a ferris‑wheel belt moments before it breaks, and the cacophony of geese feeding outside while a soccer match blares in the distance. These sonic collisions situate Bhoot Ghar within a lived environment—no studio manipulation, no layering beyond the realities of the place. The blur between fieldwork and performance echoes Dilloway’s lifelong fascination with tape manipulation and acoustic grotesque: the moment everyday noise slips into abstraction. More than a novelty artifact, the album functions as a meditation on perspective itself—what happens when artists relinquish control and simply record the world as it is, trusting that chaos might compose itself. Dilloway has long pursued this boundary, from his early noise work with Wolf Eyes to his later solo cassettes and installations. In Bhoot Ghar, he distills that approach into pure location: sound not as creation but as capture, bearing the heat, static, and overstimulation of life itself.