Originally formed to provide a live original soundtrack for a screening of E Elias Merhige’s silent horror film Begotten, this underground supergroup comprising members and associates of the Rude Mechanicals, Gnod and Téléplasmiste has evolved into its own continuing thing.
The Begotten‘s debut release is a subtly shifting improvised spectrescape that opens on rattling chains and soft vocalisations, bells chiming a welcoming tocsin that soon becomes subsumed in the wafting drones and ominous scrapings that the quartet construct gradually into a viscous maze of unheimlich uncertainty.
Matters proceed with a particular sense of pace and threatening dread, and while this cassette doesn’t serve as the soundtrack to a particular film, its cinematic associations are strong enough to conjure imagery that is suffused with a chiaroscuro palette of held and released darkness and light. Scrawling reeds gather and reform in breathless huffs and puffs of unsettling rasps that heave with the asthmatic presence of a particularly restless spirit, the textural resonances both spooked and evocative, without descending into obvious spooky cliché. Layered voices mutter in the background, circling and revolving in a miasma of their own echoes, the tongues spoken almost inaudible in the misty tableau that unfolds into the second side’s fated sussurus of softly tinkling electronic blips and scurrying winds. Hints at melody rise from the atonal thickets that The Begotten gather around Jo Fisher Roberts‘s haunted vocal as she seems to seek out the origins of half-glimpsed shapes of words among their meandering intonations. Everything is held in soft, mysterious tension, electrical fractures folding and recursing, opening crepitating fissures as metallic banshee wails rise unsettlingly.There is a feeling of elemental disturbance throughout the tape’s forty-odd minutes running time, though glances at the tumbling digits of the timer bear little relationship to the experienced passage of time as the tape spools from reel to reel of the cassette. This is a recording perhaps best experienced in solitude and low light as the nights draw in and the creaks and groans merge with those of the exterior world… now, what was that noise heard just downstairs? The pipes, a creaking door to the cellar, a waft of words made present by the gaps between window and frame? No, it’s only the wind. Isn’t it?
-Antron S Meister-
