Tip! 2025 stock Dominick Fernow’s Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement project has always thrived in the liminal spaces between dread and reverence, and Water Witches, a comprehensive box set, crystallizes this ethos into a formidable artifact. Spanning Fernow’s output from 2011 to 2013, the collection is less a retrospective than a sonic grimoire—nine albums remastered by Paul Corley and presented as a kind of “book of spells” for the acousmatic age

Where Fernow’s other aliases often revel in abrasive saturation, RSE is defined by its negative space: humid drones, spectral field recordings, and an uncanny sense of environmental threat. Water Witches trades in the illusion of immersion, pulling the listener into a world where parakeets and tarantula wasps haunt the periphery, and every texture seems to sweat with tropical decay. The music’s temporal pressure is heartrate-slowing, the mood narcotic; it’s a ritual best experienced alone, as if on a mescaline vision quest in the undergrowth, minus the physical sickness but with all the psychic peril

The box set assembles key works—Fallen Leaves Camouflaged Behind Tropical Flowers, Green Amulet Crafts Supernatural Qualities, Jungle Black Magic And Highlands Green Sorcery, and more—each a chapter in Fernow’s ongoing exploration of the rainforest as both physical and metaphysical space. The remastering brings new clarity to the material’s murk, revealing details previously lost in the fog. Yet, Water Witches remains elusive, a collection that rewards deep listening but offers no easy navigation: cross its path with the wrong mindset and you risk being lost among recursive energy channels and unidentified spectres, with few willing to retrieve you from its “devil’s lung of mental mantraps”

In Water Witches, Fernow has created a definitive document of his most quietly radical alter ego—a haunted, humid monument to the power of negative space and the enduring allure of the unknown.