ALBUM REVIEW: Insect Ark, "Marrow Hymns"

By: Marika Zorzi

Album Type: Full Length

Date Released: 23/02/2018

Label: Profound Lore

With “Marrow Hymns,” Insect Ark create a sound based on profound introspection and the listening experience, an intense journey through themselves. Drones, loops, echoes and layers of sounds engulf, distort and stimulate the listener’s perceptions in an attempt to reawaken a distant, lost awareness. 

“Marrow Hymns” CD//DD//LP track listing:

1). Thelema

2). Arp 9

3). In The Nest

4). Skin Walker

5). Slow Raw

6). Sea Harps

7). Tarnish

8). Windless

9). Daath

The Review:

Combining elements of horror-film soundtracks, psychedelic doom, and atmospheric noise, Insect Arkis comprised of Dana Schechter (bass, lap steel guitar, synthesizers) and Ashley Spungin (drums, synthesizers). Insect Ark’s intensely visual music weaves interludes of fragile beauty with crushing passages of swirling doom, spinning like a backwards fever dream. “Marrow Hymns” is this duo’s new album, one that exceeds all expectations.

Formed in 2011 by Schechter (who has also been part of bands such as Michael Gira’s Angels of Light, Bee and Flower, Zeal & Ardor, Gnaw, and Gifthorse) as a solo project, from its inception Insect Ark has been about creating work that transports, both physically and psychologically. Spungin (Taurus, Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Negative Queen) joined in 2015 to provide support on the “Portal/Well”tour, and over the following year, Insect Ark became something much greater than the sum of its parts. Both women are firmly rooted in unbounded creativity – they are DIYers, multi-instrumentalists, gearheads, and visual artists.

With “Marrow Hymns,” Insect Ark create a sound based on profound introspection and the listening experience, an intense journey through themselves. Drones, loops, echoes and layers of sounds engulf, distort and stimulate the listener’s perceptions in an attempt to reawaken a distant, lost awareness. The songs seduce and glide slowly toward darkness in a continuum interrupted by unexpected changes in direction that unveil a striking sense of melody that reaches compelling, cathartic and totally unsettling peaks of tension.

This record is a wordless song, a hypnotic voice that screams and whispers from a place deep in the furrows, from the bones, from the blood. Defying easy categorization, Insect Ark’s uncommon sound is in part the amalgamation of these two women’s passions: Schechter’s sinister bass lines and unconventional use of lap steel guitar (and her complete omission of electric guitar), and Spungin’s lucid, exacting drumming and synth work with her own hand-built analog noise pedals (Ormus Electronics).

“Marrow Hymns” is a work of rare beauty that conveys sounds and images and finds its supreme expression in songs like “Arp9”, “Skin Walker” and “Sea Harps” in which sounds seem to meet and overlap to take shape in the absurd. Although this is an instrumental album, nobody will miss the vocal element. The sounds speak on their own, immersing the listener in a 45-minute journey. Its nine tracks pursue each other in a sequence of melodies and pauses that is a constant musical quest.

This is an album to be absorbed, played and replayed, interpreted, and loved.

“Marrow Hymns” is available here (USA) and here (Europe)

Band info: Facebook || Bandcamp